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In the evaluative phase concerning the practicality of language acquisition, the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) methodology has emerged as the preeminent standard in educational paradigms. Nevertheless, the import of integrating CLT becomes particularly salient within the framework of language adoption as a medium of communication. The application of a communicative approach to the learning and evaluation of English, specifically for young English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students, confronts distinct challenges. These challenges, if not effectively navigated, present a potential hazard to the realization of desired educational outcomes and have the capacity to hinder academic performance. Consequently, this undermines the efficacy of the approach vis-à-vis its envisioned impact. In light of this, the present study endeavors to scrutinize prospective challenges that may exert an adverse influence on communicative language assessment in the context of young EFL learners. Moreover, the study seeks to proffer viable solutions to mitigate these challenges based on empirical findings. The primary objective of this research is to engender awareness regarding the inherent difficulties associated with the implementation of the communicative approach. The research further furnishes actionable and efficacious measures conducive to both EFL education and the overall learning experience of young students. A pivotal aspect for the proficient application of the communicative approach as an assessment technique for young learners lies in the meticulous execution of assessment tasks.

The number of school-aged students with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds is increasing across the United States. This survey identifies strategies school nurses use for communicating to families with limited English proficiency and describes recommendations to improve language needs. The online survey was completed by K-12 school nurses and data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Among the 52 participants, only 23% (n = 12) indicated that resources they were currently using to interpret health information always met their language needs, with the most common resource described as school personnel who can speak the language needed for interpretation. To improve communication, most (73%; n = 38) participants described preferences for in-person resources and estimated that if on-demand interpreter resources were readily available, they would use on-demand resources for approximately 3.6 hours per week. By improving linguistic and cultural competencies among students and families with limited English proficiency, school nurses can improve student health outcomes.

Learning language is learning to communicate in spoken and written form. However, learning to speak can be difficult due to a lack of linguistic resources. The students may encounter problems in communicating ideas and thus, it ends in a communication breakdown. To overcome this problem, some communication strategies like message abandonment and fillers can be used. Furthermore, communication strategies can foster students' engagement in classroom interaction, especially in an English as Lingua Franca (ELF) context. The present study was intended to explore how the communication strategies were performed in the context of ELF and the contribution of strategies to the students' engagement. Using a qualitative descriptive design, the present research investigated students' communication strategies in an international class. The findings revealed that communication strategies were creatively performed in a variety of ways. The strategies were proven to be contributive in fostering engagement by increasing students' self-confidence, boosting their self-respect, and pushing the students to be active during classroom interaction.

This study examined translingual practices in two playdates of a Korean four-year-old boy (Theo) with a Korean boy and an American boy. The boys played a game called "Candy Land." In both playdates, the boys' naturally occurring English and Korean communication strategies were observed and analyzed based on Canagarajah's (2013) four types of negotiation strategies: "envoicing," "recontextualization," "interactional," and "entextualization." They adapted and accommodated translingual practices in communicative situations using strategies such as body language, whispering, codemeshing, and codeswitching. Interviews were conducted with Theo to examine his understanding of his language as a user of Korean and English in the United States. Theo expressed his thoughts about language in metaphor, using his hands, and asserted that he needed English to have a sense of belonging and access to resources in his preschool.

The widespread use of digital technologies has made multimodal composing quite common among students these days. The use of technology to manage students' learning and create their output has been found to increase their engagement, interest, choice and cooperation. This article reports on a qualitative study that explored the experiences and perceptions of four students who participated in a classroom presentation. In particular, the study focused on students' engagement through multimodal composing of presentation slides and on their strategic use of different non-verbal modes. Data sources included classroom observation, interview transcripts and multimodal products. The results reveal that students perceived multimodal composition as motivating and useful for communicating discipline-specific language in a more confident and empowering way. Factors that influenced students' engagement included cooperation, curiosity, control and peer recognition. Knowledge of the different ways in which students can express themselves authentically can help L2 teachers to design pedagogical frameworks that include digital composition skills.

Guided by the framework of internationalization at home (IaH), this study employed a mixed-methods approach investigating the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) among a group of tertiary English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Taiwan, facilitated through the means of telecollaboration. The telecollaboration incorporated 30 EFL learners and 30 learners of Chinese from Australia and New Zealand. Data collection encompassed EFL learners' responses to a self-assessment questionnaire, their reflective essays, alongside instructors' reflective journals. The findings showed that EFL learners held positive perceptions regarding their telecollaboration experience and reported substantial growth in ICC across three dimensions: cognitive, affective and behavioral. In applying various multimodal communication strategies, EFL learners realized and valued cultural similarities and differences. Their reflective accounts exhibited evidence of enhanced linguistic and cultural competences. The telecollaboration enabled them to increase their confidence in utilizing English, hone their digital literacy skills for effective communications, and establish conducive environments for their relational and emotional development with their teammates and instructors. The latter provided indispensable emotion in varying contingent situations. Incorporating the insights drawn from the instructors' reflective journals, the study argues that telecollaboration as a pedagogical practice is the significant essence of effective IaH curriculum design and implementation.

This study reports bilingual international students' communicative strategies to preempt and resolve English as a lingua franca (ELF) miscommunication in an English-medium virtual learning program offered by an international university in times of the global pandemic. Drawing upon 18 hours of Zoom recordings and supplementary ethnographic data, this study follows a spatial orientation [Canagarajah, S. 2018a. "The Unit and Focus of Analysis in Lingua Franca English Interactions: In Search of a Method." "International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism" 21 (7): 805--824. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1474850] to analyze international students' polysemiotic meaning-making practices for virtual communicative effectiveness. Key findings highlight the students' explicitness-raising strategic moves such as indexing and reflexive pointing, repetitive highlighting, visual contrasting mediated by the mouse cursor and screen-based resources while navigating moments of (potential) miscommunication. To remedy and preempt understanding problems, they coordinate and align polysemiotic spatial repertoires across expansive spatiotemporal scales to enhance the clarity of potentially ambiguous referents, communicative topics, and key information. This study advances current understanding of bi/multilinguals' polysemiotic translingual pragmatic ability for communicative success in lingua franca scenarios, and provides implications that help prepare international higher education for effective virtual communication, teaching, and learning in the post-pandemic digital era.

Against the backdrop of internationalisation and growing attention to intercultural experiences in tertiary education, this mixed-methods study examined, in part I, language learning benefits reaped by active participants in intercultural activities. As English is widely used for communication among multilinguals, part II of the study focused specifically on English. We set out to investigate the relationship between individuals' language background (actual and self-perceived English proficiency) and intercultural participation, as well as their views of the formal English language education they received prior to entering universities. The participants (n = 518) recruited from two universities in Hong Kong responded to a questionnaire and 11 of them also attended individual semi-structured interviews. Overall, five categories of benefits emerged from the interview findings, namely psychological benefits, proficiency enhancement, identification of problems, communicative strategies for accommodation, and communicative strategies for expression. A weak positive correlation was found between self-rated English speaking proficiency and participation. The interviewees also commented on the formal English education they received from curricular and environmental perspectives.

English communication skills are now considered a passport-like requirement for students seeking a secure profession with a higher wage. Additionally, English proficiency is considered one of the variables affecting the success of foreign businesses investing in Vietnam and Vietnamese businesses looking to collaborate internationally to develop their brands into new markets abroad. The integration of various linguistic skills demonstrates the value of speaking. The main objective of this study was to investigate the frequency and importance of using direct speaking strategies by non-English-majored students at Dong Nai Technology University. The study involved 90 second-year undergraduate students at Dong Nai Technology University in Bien Hoa city, Dong Nai province. At the time of the study, the participants were 18-19 and had already attained elementary level. This research uses questionnaires and interviews using the SPSS application to analyze the main points relating to the research questions. According to research, direct speaking strategies significantly affect the English speaking skills of Dong Nai Technology University students. At the same time, the difficulties and orientations when learning speaking skills using direct speaking strategies were revealed in the study's conclusion. To maximize direct speaking strategies and advance the field of study, recommendations have been made for non-English-majored students.

This paper is an attempt to deal with language learners' beliefs. Researchers used Elaine Kolker Horwitz's model (1988), Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory, and they applied it to explore the views of Kurdish EFL university students concerning language learning. The study aims to investigate and expose their opinions regarding language learning generally, then English language more precisely. Its significance lies in exploring the beliefs of Kurdish EFL university students about language learning. It mainly answers the question, "what are the beliefs of Kurdish EFL university students about learning English?". The researchers administered a Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) questionnaire to seven universities to achieve this aim. The questionnaire includes several viewpoints regarding the difficulty of language learning, foreign language aptitude, the nature of language learning, learning and communication strategies, and motivation and expectations. They collected and analyzed the questionnaire results and found out that the first category, the difficulty of language learning, has the lowest mean score among the five categories. In contrast, the fifth category, motivation and expectations, has the highest mean score. They ended the study with suitable beneficiary recommendations.

The improvement of the quality of foreign language education is necessary to achieve subject-learning outcomes for the development of graduates' pertinent communication strategies in foreign language communication in various social situations. The research purpose is to develop the communicative strategies (CS) in foreign language (FL) communication in university students with the help of an elaborated communication strategy training technology based on the linguocultural reflection. As main methods of this study a quantitative approach with a survey design were used. The article presents the main provisions of the FL learning process, which determine the effective formation of pertinent communication strategies in students in the FL education at the university. In a 16-week English as a Foreign Language course 197 learners of the experimental groups received CS training within the framework of a training technology designed for the purpose of the present research. Data analysis of pre- and post-test procedures used the following mathematical coefficients: average indicator (AI), efficiency coefficient (CE), absolute growth (G) and growth rate (Y). The findings revealed that participants in experimental groups, where the training technology was used, significantly outperformed the reference group as to the level of development of communication strategies.

Thai undergraduate engineering students seem to have difficulty mastering English oral communication ability. This study investigated the effects of project-based blended learning with communication strategy instruction to develop English oral communication ability of undergraduate engineering students. Four communication strategies, namely asking for clarification, asking for confirmation, circumlocution, and use of fillers and hesitation devices, were taught to 20 undergraduate engineering students inside class. The participants carried out their online tasks and independent project via social platforms (e.g., Facebook, Skype, etc.). Quantitative and qualitative data collection and analyses were conducted. The participants' pretest and posttest scores were compared using the Wilcoxon signed rank test to examine their English oral communication ability development in six aspects (i.e., range, accuracy, fluency, interaction, coherence, and pronunciation) based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) 2017. The findings revealed that changes in English oral communication ability took place after the participants were taught communication strategies, thus indicating that project-based blended learning with communication strategy instruction could be used to promote English oral communication ability of language learners.

This study is aimed at developing students' scientific oral presentation competence and competence in questionand-answer sessions, through the scientific presentation instruction: focus on question-and-answer sessions (SPIQA). The SPIQA contained coping strategies for question-andanswer sessions, communication strategies, impromptu speech strategies, and Socratic questioning techniques. Also, this study explored the students' opinions toward the SPIQA. The participants were 35 high-ability science high school students. The impacts of the SPIQA on scientific oral presentation competence and competence in question-and-answer sessions were assessed through pre- and post-scientific oral presentation tests. The participants' opinions were obtained from students' learning journals, questionnaires, and interviews. Further information was extracted from the questionnaires through examination of teacher notes and journals. The findings show significant improvement in students' scientific oral presentation test scores, implying that a teaching pedagogy made up of a combination of different sets of strategies is effective. Qualitative results indicate that students had positive opinions of the strategies instruction, and that they realized the importance of oral presentation competence and competence in question-and-answer sessions in relation to their future education needs and career goals. In further studies, it is therefore recommended to raise students' awareness of strategy use for solving communication problems.

The present study explores communication strategies used by Iranian advanced EFL learners to overcome communication problems. This study aims to explore EFL learners' awareness of communication strategies. To this end, 17 advanced EFL learners who were willing to participate in the study were selected through snowball sampling. Their awareness of communication strategies was then explored through open-ended interviews and analyzed in line with the coding schemes of grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1991). Iterative data collection and analysis yielded four main categories including explicit, reciprocal, implicit, and reduction strategies. Each of these strategies covers some subcategories. To visualize the findings and explore the degree to which the abstracted strategies reflect the participants' perspective, the transcribed data, along with the emerged strategies were fed to MAXQDA. This study can contribute to effective oral communication by elaborating on the notion of communication strategies and reaching communicative goals. The findings have implications for language learners, language teachers, and materials developers.

In EFL teaching, it has been theorized that intelligibility can be achieved by relative closeness of oral performance to the standard of EFL proficiency. The current study sought to investigate the position of interlanguage performance of EFL college students in terms of intelligibility of the language product (Speaking). Ten students' Mid Semester Tests of the Speaking Class were videotaped as the source of data in the study. They were in the First Semester of the English Department, majoring in English Letters. The oral performance of EFL college students as the research subjects were analyzed employing QDA Miner, a research software for text mining to position the students' points of interlanguage approximation. As it was only a case study with a limited number of subjects, the findings may not represent EFL students in general. It was revealed that only minimum intelligibility had been achieved. The students produced ungrammatical utterances, mispronounced words, limited communication strategies, lack of sentence variations, and most surprisingly with only a narrow scope of vocabulary selection to express their unforgettable memories in monologues. The errors were attributed to the influence of the mother tongue (Indonesian or Javanese in particular) within the interlanguage boundary of English and Indonesian. Room for improvement is still ahead as they are heading for the next seven semesters in the English Department. The study, pedagogically, concludes that, in teaching EFL, considerably sufficient proportions of teaching pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, should be given throughout the process of learning for the students to achieve the standard of EFL proficiency.

Translation is closely related to languages, linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, culture etc. and because of these relations, there are also a lot of theories which give importance either to source language or target language. Linguistic and other features of the source and target texts have been examined for years. But translator is an important element with an important role in translation process as well, and the influence of translators' personality traits on their translation has been emphasized. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to investigate whether there are relations between translators' personality characters and their translation strategy preferences. The BFI Test (Big Five-Factor Inventory) is administered to 28 English Translation and Interpreting students at Cappadocia University to determine the personality traits of the participants. Then they are asked to choose one of the suggested translations in accordance with the translation model. The data are analyzed through SPSS (v. 22). The findings indicate that there are significant relationships between personality traits of participants and their use of translation strategies. According to results, agreeableness personality trait has a significant relationship with borrowing strategy, openness and neuroticism have significant relationships with modulation strategy, and conscientiousness has a significant relationship with adaptation strategy. Only extraversion does not correlate significantly with any of the strategies.

Communication strategies (CS) have been generally used to overcome oral communication problems in delivering the intended messages. While studies on CS mostly involved simulated communication contexts, the current study deviates from the past studies on CS by identifying the types of CS employed by candidates of real job interviews and examining the effectiveness of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach adopted in Malaysian schools in English language teaching. The data were collected from observations made on oral interactions between candidates and the panelists of academic staff recruitment interviews at one public university in the east coast of Malaysia. The recorded oral data were imported into NVivo software (version 12) before the use of CS by the candidates were categorised based on CS taxonomies proposed by Dörnyei and Scott, and Clennell. The results revealed that the candidates employed various types of CS with fillers and self-repetitions being the most frequently employed strategies while the two least employed strategies were asking for clarification and guessing. While the results showed extensive use of CS in the interactions, the high frequency use of fillers as a time-gaining strategy might reflect that the speakers lacked competency in conveying their messages. Additionally, too much use of fillers might not be favoured by the interlocutors since the strategy could occur unpredictably. The findings indicate that CLT approach has not been effective in enhancing English language competency among L2 learners. Considering this, intervention measures to improve the current situation by looking at the root problems in the implementation of CLT are needed if the government decides to retain this teaching approach in Malaysian schools.

This study investigates the conflict between the demand for communicative English language skills in employment and education and the lack of effective resources to develop such skills in Bangladesh. It offers a discursive analysis of vital issues in implementing effective communicative language teaching (CLT) by surveying 216 teachers about their views on the current English curriculum, their classroom practices, and the barriers they encountered in teaching. A significant gap was revealed between participants' understanding of curriculum expectations and their actual practice. An extended qualitative investigation followed and it was found that there is a demand for acquiring English language competency both within the country and for the purposes of trade, work, and study overseas. Unfortunately, teachers face a shortage in training courses in CLT. Furthermore, implementation of the curriculum in classrooms is affected by the availability of resources for creating communicative and real-life English language contexts, qualifications, knowledge, and experience of teachers, and especially, by the way learning is examined. The study concludes that a full range of inhibiting factors needs to be addressed to improve English language teaching (ELT). It further recommends the development of local and thorough theorisations of ELT rather than undue reliance on overseas trends and experts.

This qualitative research study delves into elementary school teachers' beliefs and the potential contribution of reverse mentoring to improve English language teaching for children. The purpose was to explore how elementary in-service teachers' beliefs could be transformed after participating in a reverse mentoring experience. A group of in-service teachers from two public elementary schools and a group of student-teachers from Universidad de Córdoba (Colombia) were the research participants. Data were gathered through a questionnaire, interviews, and classroom observations. Findings showed that reverse mentoring played an important role in transforming in-service teachers' beliefs about teaching English to children regarding the difficulties of language learning, communicative strategies, motivation and expectations, foreign language aptitude, and the nature of language learning.

Regardless of varied lingua-cultural ideologies enriching the theories of communicative competence (CC), the four CC dimensions (e.g., linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse, and communication strategies (CSs)) still become the main cores of English speaking (ES) classrooms. Of the four dimensions, CSs seem to be the most technical which deserve to be persistently studied. Hence, this study aimed to probe into ES lecturers' performances of CSs, their efforts to improve students' CC, and the impacts of their efforts on students' learning according to students' perspectives. Two ES lecturers and 10 students at a university in Indonesia were purposively selected to be the participants. They were observed and interviewed according to the study's purposes. This study uncovered various CSs performed by ES lecturers according to several contexts, such as to understand spoken texts, to understand spoken recorded texts, and to overcome temporary communication difficulties. Various ES lecturers' efforts were also revealed according to their functions to improve each dimension of CC. Most students perceived the lecturers' efforts positively due to the impacts on their motivation, self-efficacy, collaborative skills, and metacognition. However, few students echoed negative perceptions about a lecturer's native-speakerism-endorsed effort due to lingua-cultural issues. Implication, limitation, and recommendation are discussed.

The speaking strategy use of students is perceived to be successful in L2 learning and competent English users. The aim of this study was to pinpoint the influence of gender differences on students' speaking strategies use. It also intended to identify the influence of study duration on students' speaking strategies use to learn speaking skill at Wolaita Sodo University, Ethiopia. The participants of the current study were 70 (34 female and 36 male) English major students in the Academic Year of 2020. A descriptive comparison design was utilized for this study. The data were collected from the targeted population using a questionnaire and interview whether gender and study duration influence students' speaking strategies use or not. The results denoted that there were significant relationships between females and males in employing speaking strategies to learn speaking skill. Gender has no an influence on students' speaking strategies use to exercise oral communication. However, the finding denoted that there was statistically a significant difference between second year and third year EFL students in using speaking strategies to promote their speaking proficiency. Study duration has an influence on students' speaking strategies use to train oral communication. Therefore, this study recommends learners should use appropriate speaking strategies based on their interest to promote their speaking proficiency; they must be trained and supported to employ different strategies develop their oral communication skills.

Drawing on Conversation Analysis, this paper investigates how an English native speaker interviewer utilizes clarification requests as a form of recipient design during an interview to resolve problems of non-understanding. This data is contrasted with interviews between English language learners at a private university in Taiwan. The findings reveal that learners resolve these problems of misunderstanding through ignoring requests for clarification. It is argued that this represents a lost opportunity to further participation in L2 discourse and hence a forsaken opportunity for L2 language learning. This data illustrates that discourse markers and displays of epistemic status (Heritage, 2012) aid in achieving intersubjectivity and displaying alignment between speakers, furthering language use and participation. This paper investigates how understanding the way in which clarification requests are formulated in interviews between native speakers of English can be utilized to teach EFL learners how to negotiate clarification requests during spoken interaction. This paper adopts the position that pedagogy can be informed by findings generated through Conversation Analytic methods when comparing examples of authentic usage and L2 learner data and that particular discourse patterns should be taught to EFL students through CA-informed classroom tasks and teaching materials related to clarification requests.

Research on communication strategies (CSs) has been drawing much attention in the area of psycholinguistics and applied linguistics. This study examined if triggering instruction can accelerate the cognitive aspects of CSs transference from L1 to L2. In the first part of the experiment, all participants, twenty-one Japanese university students, looked at pictures and were asked to say anything that came to their mind in English. In the second part, half of them (an experimental group) were instructed to begin the task by saying likes and dislikes of the picture. The other half (a control group) did not receive such an instruction. Participants also answered a questionnaire asking about self-evaluation of the task performance in order to examine their affective and cognitive state. Their utterances were classified as either objective descriptions of what was shown in the picture or subjective expressions of what they imagined or felt. The results of the experimental group clearly demonstrated the effect of instructional intervention; subjective expression increased and objective description decreased, and also their anxiety decreased from the first part of the experiment to the second. These findings suggest that more attention should be paid to the cognitive aspects of CSs such as change of viewpoint from objective to subjective, which we may call 'self-expression switching,' and its transference from L1.

Mentored online intercultural interaction offers foreign language learners the opportunity to develop different competences, including intercultural, linguistic, and digital competence (O'Dowd, 2021). Such virtual exchange (VE) projects typically involve computer-mediated communication via, for example, Zoom. However, the use of high-immersion virtual reality (VR) for synchronous online collaboration in VE projects has received little attention. This study investigated the effect of VR on students' levels of presence and engagement, on students' communication and on students' views on using VR for intercultural encounters compared to traditional videoconferencing tools. Twenty-seven university students from the Netherlands and Germany utilised VR to carry out intercultural learning tasks using English as a lingua franca during a four-week implementation period. Participants responded to pre- and post-intervention questionnaires, completed reflection journals, audio- or video-recorded their VR meetings and participated in interviews. Results showed that the levels of presence and engagement and preferences of social VR compared to videoconferencing for intercultural encounters depended on students individually. A VR immersion experience and comfortability scale was created based on the data which showed mixed experiences. VR influenced participants' interactions, topics of conversation and communication strategies when they explored their spaces together. The results showed that students' attitudes towards VR and their subjective experience of VR seem to play an important role in the VE-VR setting. VR provided a safe space for many participants. Positive attitudes towards communicating in the VR environment are highly correlated with positive attitudes towards meeting students from other countries in VR. Implications for language education are provided.

This study examines the frequency and the functions of code switching in informal conversations among Jordanian pilots, who have created their own jargon. It also explores the most frequent English expressions that the pilots switch to in their informal Arabic discourse. The conversations of eight Jordanian pilots aged between thirty and fifty-five were tape-recorded in three separate informal natural settings. The data were used for the purpose of finding out what the pragmatic and communicative functions are that the pilots' code switching serves, and to investigate the most frequent expressions used in their conversations. The results showed that eight main conversational functions can be identified in their code-switching routines, namely: to compensate for the lack of exact equivalents in Arabic, to avoid interruption to the communication when not knowing the Arabic equivalent, to replace long and technical terminology in Arabic with acronyms in English (acronyms are not common in Arabic), to use aviation titles and ranks, to quote/ directly report phrases of speakers, to say the numbers, to refer to names of companies, places, documents, and organizations, and to insert some English formulaic expressions. The findings also showed that the most frequent terms and expressions used in code switching amongst Jordanian pilots are more related to the aviation register than to common-core vocabulary.

In this study, we examined the use of compliments, self-praise, and self-denigration, as exchanged among nonnative English users. This was part of participation in an online cross-cultural exchange project (Ibunka 2019), which involved learners from six countries (Algeria, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and the Netherlands). The aim of the study was two-fold: first, to contribute to the burgeoning research on the three speech acts in online settings; second, to unravel how the project participants -- as nonnative users -- managed to build and sustain rapport/comity via these social acts, despite their assumed linguistic deficiency. The study's data were extracted from a corpus of 2055 posts and comments ([approximately equal to] 368654 words) and analysed in terms of: distribution (1105, 301, and 361 tokens were identified, respectively), topics (core vs. peripheral), sequential organisation (vertical vs. horizontal), and rapport/comity building potential. The findings were extensively discussed in light of the existing literature, especially relative to social networking sites. Some of these findings are of a particular interest to English language teachers, namely: using linguistic proficiency and incompetence as topics for the three speech acts and the latter deployment as metacomments and message openers/closers as well as for the management of relational work.

Through the lens of English as an International Language (EIL), this study investigates experience and linguistic challenges university students and tour guides in Thailand have when hosting foreign visitors, and how those challenges can be addressed in classroom activities. A questionnaire was distributed to 113 university students and 70 tour guides. Additionally, interviews with seven students and two tour guides were employed for data triangulation. It was found that the participants most frequently took visitors to historical places and had problems with specialized vocabulary and Thai culture-specific words. Visitors' accent also hindered the success in hosting visitors. A two-hour session incorporating EIL tenets of communication strategies and inter-cultural sensitivity that addressed vocabulary problems was implemented with 26 students. This study is hoped to provide insights into real experience and commonly found linguistic problems for visitor hosts. This can lead to informed decision of English for Tourism course designers and teachers.

This study explores the status quo of speaking strategies used by Chinese High School Students of International Department by using both questionnaire and interview. The participants were 90 second-year Chinese High School Students of International Department, and then the data were analyzed by SPSS 18.0. The study yields certain results. First, Chinese High School Students of International Department employ English speaking strategies at a medium level in general. Second, there are differences between higher achievers and lower achievers in the use of speaking strategies. Third, students' use of speaking strategies is significantly correlated with students' English proficiency. Pedagogical implications for teachers and students are discussed in the end.

There are many non-native English language teachers communicating with each other on a daily basis in English. The communicative strategies of non-native English language teachers can be easily identified. This study investigated the communicative strategies used by Thai and Filipino teachers. This research focused on the teacher's interaction, the framework of communicative strategies of ASEAN English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) speaker, and the lack of studies in communicative strategies. In addition, the study aimed to investigate the significant relationship and communicative strategies between intercultural teaching personnel. The population sample consisted of Thai and Filipinos teachers who provide classroom instruction in English. The research tools used to collect data included a questionnaire, observations during two pair speaking tasks, and a Jigsaw task. A stimulated recall interview was performed after the tasks. All conversations and interactions were recorded and then transcribed. The results revealed that as listeners, "Listen to the message" was ranked the highest among the communicative strategies used by both the Thai and Filipino teachers. "Non-verbal language" was ranked the highest for the Thai teachers; while, "Persuasion" was most frequently used by the Filipino teachers. A Chi-square test showed that there was a statistically significant relationship between communicative strategies used by the Thai and Filipino teachers. Based on the findings of the study, communicative strategies identified in this study should be incorporated into English curriculums and English language teaching in Thailand. Educators, teachers, and non-native English learners should adopt these communicative strategies to promote mutual understandings in the ELF context.

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the ways in which experts in foreign affairs project their scholarly identities on panel presentations. While previous research has focused on the ways in which researchers in various disciplines assert their scholarly identities in written discourse and in conference presentations, no study has focused on how experts in foreign affairs build credibility when speaking on panel presentations. From a qualitative analysis of 30 panel presentations held at the Brookings Institution, the findings reveal the extensive array of rhetorical strategies panelists in foreign affairs use which appear to build credibility. The study also draws attention to the syntactic, lexical, and register choices the panelists make. Based on these findings, the study offers pedagogical recommendations to help learners make the identity shift from a student to a scholar and become competent members of their discourse communities.

This study aimed to investigate how initiating acts affect refusal strategies realization. The subjects were 45 English Education Program students of Universitas Muhammadiyah Palembang. The study used Discourse Completion Task (DCT) which consisted of 12 situations covering four initiating acts; suggestion, request, offer, and invitations, and the classification of refusal strategy by Beebe et al was also used to categorize refusal strategies realized. The results showed that initiating acts were not insensitive towards the use of direct strategy. However, it has an impact on the realization of indirect strategies and adjuncts. It was also found that both initiating acts and the social status of interlocutors play an important role in producing refusal utterances. Hence, it is highly suggested to introduce initiating acts and social status factors to EFL learners so that they would be able to produce an appropriate refusal depending on the context.

Metadiscourse, a linguistic means that is used in the production and organization of ideas, is vital in achieving successful communication. In language studies, metadiscourse in writing and speaking have been disparately investigated, where the former received more attention than the latter. Thus, the present study analyzes metadiscourse in the speech production of 57 Korean L2 learners purposively chosen relative to their language proficiency. The current results suggest two significant findings. First, the quantitative analysis of metadiscourse "frequency" reveals the interactional category's superiority over the interactive metadiscourse, which implies that the Korean L2 learners are more interested in interacting with the listeners than organizing discourse and asserting their role as speakers. Secondly, the quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that the "logical connectives," "relational markers," "hedges," and "personal markers" are metadiscourse features that significantly predict Korean L2 speakers' speech proficiency. Except for "personal markers," these proficiency indicators reveal a clear-cut divergence regarding the levels of lexical sophistication and lexical expansion among the proficiency groups using a vocabulary profiler. The present study proves that speech proficiency in the Korean context depends on the employment of metadiscourse in frequency and diversity. Possible future applications and directions relevant to the present study are also provided.

Many scholars have investigated metadiscourse use in academic settings, but they have mostly explored written data, such as academic essays and research articles. However, spoken discourses like student presentations are rarely explored. Extant studies tend to focus on metadiscourse investigation in either native or non-native English learners' writing or speaking respectively. We argue that a comparative investigation of non-native English learners' speaking and writing permits understanding their lexical choices for making their discourse coherent. This study examines written and spoken metadiscourse markers of Indonesian EFL students, highlighting potential similarity and or differences as well as their distinctive features. In doing so, we refer to Hyland's (1998, 2004) metadiscourse markers: the interactive and interactional taxonomy. This attempt is necessary given that writing or speaking is a social practice where speakers or writers' need to provide audiences with a "channel" to understand the message. Hyland's taxonomy of metadiscourse markers enables us to shed important light on "social engagement" among speakers, writers, and audiences in the respective context. In terms of research method, we employed a quantitative approach. The data were gathered from eight student presentations and seventy writing tasks in an Academic Writing class. The findings demonstrate that interactive markers are used more frequently than interactional devices in both spoken (1616) and written discourse (278). The interactional markers, on the other hand, are reported to happen only 855 times in spoken and 133 times in written discourses. It also echoes Indonesian EFL students' communicative strategic preference that tends to connect and highlight the arguments in lieu of displaying participants' involvement.

The research study intends to determine the effectiveness of authentic digital storytelling as an alternative strategy to improve speaking in EFL classes at the university level. The research follows a quantitative paradigm, and a survey was first administered to capture participants' perceptions of the everyday speaking activities employed in classes. Most of the participants acknowledged the importance of authentic communicative strategies to improve oral skills; however, in practice, both teachers and students believed that the strategies used in class are not authentic and communicative at all. Based on the survey results, authentic digital storytelling was introduced to determine if it improves students' oral skills, specifically speaking. A pretest and posttest activity was applied using a rubric that assessed the student's sense of organization, quality of language used, mode of delivery, supporting material used, and the central message's quality to determine the effectiveness of using digital storytelling as a communicative strategy. The significant findings show that authentic digital storytelling significantly improved students' speaking skills; however, its implementation required teachers' willingness to apply novel communicative strategies inside and outside the classroom.

In a context in which opportunities for oral interaction are limited (English as a foreign language courses at a Saudi tertiary institution), we carried out an action research project evaluating the introduction of computer-mediated spoken language tasks with a group of intermediate learners. Although the students were confronted with multiple challenges ranging from unfamiliarity with educational technology, through recurrent bandwidth issues, to their own limited linguistic repertoires, they showed themselves able to participate in discussion with increasing facility and levels of responsibility for conversation management. In this paper, we focus on the communication strategies (CS) which they deployed to achieve this. While CSs were not the subject of explicit instruction, the students showed themselves able to draw on their repertoires and on the strategies implicitly modelled by their instructor over the six weeks of speaking activities using the SpeakApps platform. We examine what these strategies were: change in CSs over time; CS use in different conversational configurations (teacher-led group discussion; student-led group discussion and peer-peer pair discussion); impacts of the audio-only nature of discussion on CS choice. The paper points to promising directions for future practice and research.

This study investigates the communication strategy (CS) use of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in videoconferencing (VC), virtual world (VW), and face-to-face environments. The study was conducted with 30 senior Turkish undergraduate EFL students. The data were collected via video and audio recordings of three opinion-exchange tasks, a background and post-task questionnaire, and an interview that includes a retrospective think-aloud protocol. The participants worked in groups of five to complete the opinion-exchange tasks in each of the three environments. The findings indicated that the participants made use of a wide range of CSs, and although some of the CSs differed, mostly the same types were employed in all the environments. However, the results revealed that the frequency of CSs showed variance among environments, with the highest number in the VC environment and the lowest in the VW. It was possible to establish a connection between the differences in the frequency and the types of strategy use with the distinctive features of the environments, the proficiency level of the participants, and the type of the tasks that was utilized. Additively, 10 new strategy types were discovered.

This study explored the language practices of a small group of international Chinese students in an anglophone Higher Education context where English was the medium of instruction. The context was the first year of an early childhood education course at an Australian university. Building on findings from research in conversation analysis on language alternation and medium of interaction, the analyses sought to unveil the students' classroom verbal and nonverbal practices as they switched between Mandarin and English. Findings show that students' preferred medium was monolingual: English for discussing taskwork and Mandarin for resolving disagreement or confusion, establishing understanding, and selecting a speaker. Alternation to Mandarin was accompanied by whispering and the embodied actions of 'hiding' behind the laptop while co-occurring laughter was used to signal a language switch or to index trouble or a delicate situation. These findings suggest that language choice was not simply a practice for restoring the preferred medium. Rather the students continued to speak Mandarin until the interactional motivation for its use was completed, which legitimized the use of their shared language. The paper ends with recommendations to inform pedagogy that is sensitive to the linguistic needs of international students in Higher Education in anglophone contexts.

This study aimed at the analysis of syntactic errors in translation done by both bilingual and monolingual EFL learners. Research on the subject of the study implied that there might be differences between monolinguals and bilingual learners of foreign languages. The gaps of studies on differences between monolinguals and bilingual's translations from Persian into English language presumed as research question of the study. Through a quantitative and experimental analysis, the researcher collected data from two universities of IAU of South Tehran (monolingual) and Jihad University of Kermanshah (bilingual) using students majoring in translation studies. The OPT test was applied to specify eligible students for the study and then a Persian literary text was offered to students to measure their syntactic errors as introduced by Keshavarz's (1996) model of error analysis. From 100 participants 36 monolinguals and 24 bilinguals were eligible for the study whose translations were scored by the two raters. The results of the study indicated that there is a significant difference between the scores of monolingual and bilingual translators. In addition, the rate of literal errors and approximation was more than other errors that were reported as the result of language learning strategies and communicative strategies. However, new studies are suggested to investigate the types of errors made by monolinguals and bilinguals and graduate students with advanced level of language learning.

Numerous studies have attested to the consensus-orientation and cooperative nature of English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions. However, limited attention has been given to moments of disagreements in ELF communication, with most of the little existing work focusing on disagreements in ELF academic or informal contexts. Consequently, little is known about how ELF users display disagreement in real-life business contexts. For this reason, this study examined disagreement expressions in five ELF business meetings drawn from the VOICE corpus to understand the nature of disagreement in ELF interactions. Following the identification of disagreement instances, the study used Stalpers's (1995) framework to investigate whether the disagreement was accompanied by a mitigation strategy that reduces its impact. It was found that the examined ELF business speakers express their disagreement in both mitigated and unmitigated forms with a marked preference for using mitigated expressions, indicating that the appropriate linguistic choice for expressing disagreements in a between-company business meeting is a mitigated disagreement form. Another main finding is the frequent use of disagreement utterances, suggesting that ELF speakers do not merely seek consensus, but they also raise objections and state their different opinions. One implication of these findings is that ELF encounters might not be as consensus-seeking and mutually supportive as suggested in previous works. Taken together, the findings of the present study extended the existing body of work on ELF disagreement and, in general, added further to our understanding of ELF interaction.

Code-switching is related to the shift between the first and second languages done by the speakers in conversational contexts. Based on the theories of code-switching, second language learners frequently apply their first language when communicating with others to deliver the messages clearly, maintain group solidarity, and avoid unintended misunderstandings. This paper investigated some factors influencing the use of code-switching in foreign/second language learning processes. Data were collected through a classroom survey and interviews with 12 English Education Master's Program students of Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta. Qualitative content analysis was applied to obtain clearer interpretations. The results showed the lecturers and students utilized code-switching more sensibly in the second language classroom context. Further, code-switching will be better to be implemented in informal social interactions rather than foreign/second language classroom settings since it will hamper EFL learners' success in attaining more fruitful target language competencies.

Since its inception, pragmatic competence has been studied vastly; the majority of these studies, however, have examined pragmatic production, and pragmatic comprehension is chiefly under-researched. This lack of adequate research also stands true for the underlying pragmatic comprehension processes and strategies. Therefore, the present investigation aimed to find out L2 pragmatic comprehension strategies used by 40 (F=20, M=20) Iranian EFL learners and to discover whether there would be any differences between interlanguage pragmatic comprehension strategies used by male and female learners. Participants, selected based on stratified random sampling, were chosen on the basis of their performance on a paper-based TOEFL out of the initial sample of 90 students. Three data collection instruments were employed: a validated pragmatic test (Tajeddin & Ahmadi Safa, 2010), concurrent verbal think-aloud protocols, and retrospective verbal think-aloud protocols. Data analysis revealed three classes of pragmatic comprehension strategies. First, socio-pragmatic strategies that included politeness, formality, indirectness, and distance/power influences. Second, lexico-pragmatic strategies which were more frequent than grammatical strategies in the second category. Third, the cognitive strategies that comprised both top-down and bottom-up processing strategies in L2 pragmatic comprehension. Furthermore, it was found that gender did not play any significant role in the use of pragmatic comprehension strategies. Study findings suggest that explicit teaching of pragmatic comprehension strategies helps learners promote their L2 pragmatic comprehension.

The present study aims to identify the factors that can potentially affect code switching in a college classroom in Malaysia. The participants were twenty bilingual international students enrolled in an English course in Malaysia. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with the participating students. The findings of the study indicated that the main factor behind code switching among the students was incompetence in the second language. Other factors that could account for code switching were maintaining privacy, the ease of speaking in the first language compared to speaking in English, avoiding misunderstanding, and unfamiliarity with similar words in English. Therefore, code switching was found to be an effective strategy used by the students to make their intended meaning explicit and to transmit some knowledge to other students in classroom interactions. This study provides some implications for English teaching community including language learners, teachers, and curriculum developers.

The ubiquity of smartphones and the growing popularity of smart speakers have given rise to cloud-based, intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), such as Siri and Google Assistant. However, little is known about the use of IPAs for Autonomous Second Language Learning (ASLL). Thus, the aims of this study were twofold: to assess Japanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' perceptions towards IPAs, also known as virtual assistants, for ASLL, and to better understand learner behavior of these technologies. A total of 14 Japanese university students were given smart speakers and interacted with a companion IPA, Amazon Alexa, over a two-month period in their homes. Moreover, the participants completed a survey consisting of Likert-scale items and open-ended questions to obtain their views of the IPA for ASLL. While the results indicated that the students had mostly favorable views of Alexa for L2 learning, many of them did not actively engage with the virtual assistant during the data collection period. Furthermore, students tended to give up when faced with communication difficulties with the IPA. These findings highlight the potential of IPAs for ASLL and underscore the gap between what students say, and what they actually do, with language learning technology.

Laughter is a common feature found in daily conversations as an element showing amusement. However, laughter can also appear in serious talk such as business meetings (Murata, 2007; Markaki, et al., 2010). This paper scrutinizes laughter use between Thai and Burmese participants in a business meeting held in Yangon, Myanmar, and examines laughter functions and factors stimulating laughter to occur. The business meeting data was collected using the ethnographic method - a participant observation, extensive field notes, interviews and audio recordings. The data were analyzed based on the framework of laughter adapted from Hayakawa (2003) and Murata & Hori (2007); the findings reveal that laughter was used as a communication strategy and occurred in the meeting both in a relaxed atmosphere and in a serious discussion with different intentions - to have fun, to make fun of work, to ease the tension and to threaten other interlocutors.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the most commonly used L2 learning strategies, especially those of communicative type, of undergraduate students and how these strategies are related to their language performance. Additionally, this study also aims to examine the effect of gender on the type of strategies they use and how this fact affects learning. We make a comparative study of the use of L2 learning strategies by Spanish undergraduates and by those coming from the Erasmus+ program and from the Republic of Korea. In terms of data collection, two instruments have been used, a self-made profile questionnaire and the SILL inventory (Oxford, 1990), in order to evaluate students' use of L2 learning strategies, data on the similarities and differences in the use and level of frequency of use of strategies employed by our students. Furthermore, the emerging profile of the data analysis obtained has been described and we have made an assessment by comparing our data with that of previous research. In addition, we also find that gender is a significant factor among all students regardless their nationalities. We discover that the female students make a greater use and with more frequency of all type of learning strategies, especially those of communicative type, with special relevance in the socio-affective strategies. In our conclusion, we point out that training in learning strategies for second language acquisition can help learners learn better by increasing their awareness of L2 learning strategies, and by increasing the number of strategies they use. Moreover, knowing the L2 learning strategies used by our students becomes a guarantee of success when designing teaching methodologies aimed at achieving significant learning results.

This study aims to explore the use of politeness strategies which occur in EFL classroom interactions in a senior high school. This study applied a descriptive qualitative research design to explore the politeness strategies used by the teacher and the students in their interactions. The participants in this study were an English teacher and 30 students. The data in this study were in the form of utterances which contain politeness strategies. The data were taken from a 90-minutes English lesson which was video-recorded. The findings showed there were a total of 13 excerpts containing three politeness strategies: positive politeness strategy, negative politeness strategy, and bald-on-record strategy. The interactions were dominated by the teacher. Moreover, the politeness strategies which occurred in the classroom interactions were influenced by some factors such as age difference, institutional position, power, and social distance.

The internationalization of Anglophone universities could allow English-dominant students to benefit from experience with English speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds, but US students have often complained of difficulty communicating with such instructors, especially International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Research has largely focused on helping ITAs assimilate linguistically and culturally, although many applied linguists suggest that ITAs' students would also benefit from training in skills for communication across linguistic difference, through attention to their language attitudes, familiarity with diverse Englishes, and communication strategies. We report on an intervention designed to address all three, here focusing on students' willingness to engage in collaborative communication strategies. The intervention, conducted in a computer science department and reaching over 300 first-year students from varied linguistic backgrounds, included an online and an in-class component, each lasting about an hour. This brief intervention resulted in small but significant gains in domestic undergraduates' (n = 174) stated intention to engage in collaborative behavior with their ITAs, although our detailed examination of qualitative responses suggests important areas for continued improvement of the intervention. We discuss the potential for such interventions to facilitate institutional and cultural change, encouraging the recognition of the shared responsibility for successful communication.

This study aimed to investigate the dynamic patterns of two concepts of silence explicated as a communication strategy and impediment in a task-based instruction. A novel approach, Retrodictive Qualitative Modeling (RQM) tied in a Dynamic System Theory (DST), was utilized to identify learners' archetypes, to highlight the dynamic patterns underlying their silence, and to unveil the factors affecting the two concepts as dynamic signatures. Of eighteen learners of English department, we took three participants relying on their salient archetypes. Those participants were nominated based on the Focus Group Discussion (FGD) encompassing three lecturers. Furthermore, a stimulated recall interview was carried out on the three participants to get overarching factors affecting their silence. The results revealed twofold: (1) the participants' dynamic patterns of classroom trajectory explicating the variability of elements underlying the learners' silence vary across the learners' archetypes, (2) signature dynamics modeled manifest and distinguish the two concepts of silence. The implication of this study entails the EFL lecturers to have a background knowledge in distinguishing the two concepts of silence that encompass dynamic and fluctuative signature dynamics of motivation, cognition, English proficiency, positive and negative emotions interacting with the classroom contexts. Likewise, further study might provide more overarching factors underlying those two concepts of silence to provide a finer-grained result delineating such concepts.