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This study investigates how different form-focused instruction (FFI) timing impacts English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' grammar development. A total of 169 Chinese middle school learners were assigned to four conditions randomly: control, before-isolated FFI, integrated FFI, and after-isolated FFI. The three experimental groups received treatments which combined form and meaning with the English passive voice as the teaching target, but learners' attention was drawn to the passive voice with different timing. The before-isolated and after-isolated groups received the treatment before and after communicative activities, respectively. For the integrated FFI group, intervention occurred during communicative activities. A picture writing test and a written error correction test were employed to measure students' performance. The results indicated that the three experimental groups manifested significant improvement. Before-isolated FFI produced the best immediate and delayed effects, and integrated FFI produced better immediate effect than after-isolated FFI, while after-isolated FFI produced better delayed effect than integrated FFI. The findings indicated that pedagogical sequences in FFI are important, and teachers might need to guide adolescent learners to focus on form explicitly before communicative activities.

The affective turn in the second language (L2) acquisition literature has witnessed a shift from the periphery to a clear focus on emotions. Nevertheless, this shift tends to examine emotion separately from cognition. Vygotsky's "perezhivanie" provides a theoretical lens to explore the inextricable interconnectedness of emotion and cognition in a dialectical and nonreductionist way. This article investigates the concept of "perezhivanie" in two Chinese learners of L2 Japanese and its relevance for their language development. Data mainly collected through interviews and narrative journals were thematically analyzed. The study demonstrates how cognition and emotion dialectically foreground one another (i.e., one gains an upper hand over the other), thus shaping each learner's unique "perezhivanie" as they undertook to learn Japanese. The study showed that the two students had their own purposes for learning Japanese and that affect functioned as both facilitator and inhibitor of the learning processes. Interestingly, this study does not support the notion that negative affect results in a lack of development and that positive affect always leads to development. It also emphasizes that negative and positive affect constitute a dialectical process.

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems have been increasingly incorporated in L2 writing instruction. However, how the instructional use of AWE influences learners' writing has remained inconclusive partly due to variations in heterogeneous learners. Underpinned by a sociocultural theory, this classroom-based study was to understand how English learners of different proficiency levels differed in their written products measured by complexity, accuracy and fluency, multiple revisions, and the perceived usefulness after 15-week instructional use of AWE. The results showed that disparity in writing accuracy of learners with different proficiency levels greatly reduced after the mandatory use of AWE feedback, but syntactic complexity and fluency remained unchanged. Meanwhile, perceived usefulness of AWE feedback was contingent on language proficiency. Limitations and pedagogical implications were also discussed.

Globalization and internationalization in higher education have promoted the worldwide popularity of English-medium instruction (EMI) programs. The successful implementation of EMI programs calls for content-language integration, which requires EMI teachers' language awareness. Yet, empirical studies investigating EMI teachers' language awareness still remains scarce. This study aimed to explore the development of language awareness through a Chinese EMI teacher's 10-month team teaching with an English teacher. With data mainly gathered from semi-structured retrospective interviews and video-recorded classroom observation, the study found that the EMI teacher experienced noticeable changes in language awareness and pedagogical practice. This study also yielded some important implications for EMI teacher education.

This study contributes to the limited research on teacher agency in task-based language teaching. Conceptualising agency through the lens of activity theory, the study investigated how two EFL teachers enacted their agency in TBLT implementation at a Chinese university and what factors mediated the enactment of their agency. Data collected by means of classroom observation, interviews and course documents were triangulated to provide a descriptive synthesis of teacher participants' experiences with task-based language teaching. The analysis of the data revealed that these two teachers demonstrated agency through teaching as adaptation and teaching as learning to overcome the contradictions in the instructional activity system. They engaged with both proactive and reactive agency. A number of mediational factors were found to account for their agency. The study highlights the crucial role of teachers' shared beliefs on the value of TBLT and curriculum reform and institutional support in influencing teachers' adoption of task-supported language teaching.

Student Engagement in the Language Classroom Edited by Phil Hiver, Ali H. Al-Hoorie, and Sarah Mercer. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2021. 320 pp. Paper, $59.95. As positive psychology has shed new [...]

Live video-streamed teaching platforms are widely used in language teaching. However, how students perceive these platforms has scarcely been investigated. By adopting the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study investigated Chinese secondary school students' perceptions of the platforms (i.e., Tencent meeting, Tencent classroom and Dingtalk) being adopted in English as a foreign language (EFL) class. Gender and age differences were also investigated. Data were collected from 602 students; the results showed the following: (1) The acceptance level of all the participants was high for the five variables in TAM, i.e., perceived ease of use (PEU), perceived usefulness (PU), attitude (ATT), computer self-efficacy (CSE) and behavioral intention to use (BI), but with significant individual differences. There existed no gender differences, while age differences existed between junior high school students and those from senior high school. (2) The five variables were correlated with each other significantly. In addition, CSE, PEU, PU and ATT can predict BI in parallel. (3) The relationship between CSE and BI was mediated by PEU, PU and ATT. Also, PU had the strongest mediating effect, with PEU and ATT exerting slightly lower effects. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed at the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This laboratory-based research investigated how 40 university EFL learners responded to their peers' linguistic errors and made their moment-to-moment decisions of whether or not to provide corrective feedback (CF) to their peers' errors in task-based peer interaction. Data from the transcripts of videotaped pair interaction and audio-taped stimulated recall interviews were utilized and analysed to report the findings. Results showed that learners did not provide CF to their partners frequently and of the three CF strategies, they favoured recast over prompts and explicit correction. Furthermore, more morphosyntactic errors than lexical and phonological errors were provided CF. More importantly, results revealed that learners' CF decision-making was mediated by six categories of factors: provider-related factors (e.g. providers' lack of knowledge), receiver-related factors (e.g. receivers' showing signs of seeking help), task-related factors (e.g. the time of story happening), error-related factors (e.g. salience of errors), and interpersonal factors (e.g. peer relationship). Implications are discussed especially regarding the important role of teachers in raising learners' language awareness in peer interaction.

EXTENDING LANGUAGE MOTIVATION RESEARCH AND PUSHING IT FORWARD Contemporary Language Motivation Theory: 60 Years Since Gardner and Lambert (1959) Edited by Ali H. Al-Hoorie and Peter D. Madntyre. Bristol: Multilingual [...]

This study is aimed to identify the effects of task complexity on first language (L1) use and the functions it may serve when two groups of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) work on collaborative tasks. Twenty-four pairs of Chinese EFL learners from two universities were assigned to a lower-proficiency and a higher-proficiency group, each with twelve pairs. Each group completed two collaborative tasks of different cognitive complexity. The results showed that task complexity had an appreciable impact on the use of L1 and its functions. It is also found that the impact of task complexity was dependent on learners' English proficiency. Specifically, the higher-proficiency group employed more L1 to perform complex tasks than they did in the simple versions of the tasks. These learners also devoted significantly more L1 turns to fulfill the functions of metacognitive and grammar talk to complete the complex tasks. These trends did not hold for the lower-proficiency group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated the developmental trajectories of written language of two Chinese EFL learners in terms of complexity over one semester and explored the relationship between syntactic complexity and lexical complexity under the framework of Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). The data were processed using dynamic analyses (min-max graphs, moving correlations and Change-point analysis) to visualize the developmental process and variability of each subsystem of complexity with 4 measures (mean length of T-unit, mean length of clause, clauses per T-unit and VocD) and interactions between different subsystems. The results showed, first, that different subsystems of written language complexity developed dynamically and nonlinearly with different degrees of variability, and varied in the two participants. Second, interactions existed between syntactic complexity and lexical complexity, which shaped as competitors for Jenny but as connected growers for Helen. The results further deepened the understanding of the development in learners' written complexity, providing significant implications for EFL writing teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English language education has always been accorded paramount importance in China since the mid-1980s. In order to improve English teaching quality, China has initiated several rounds of English curriculum reform at various levels against the backdrop of the unprecedented spread of English as a lingua franca. Drawing upon the texts of the national curriculum documents and the relevant research literature, this paper examines the evolution of the College English curriculum for non-English majors in Chinese higher institutions over the past three decades. It reviews a number of what we see as the most important trends relating to the College English curriculum development, together with some discussion of particularly controversial issues arising from this process. We base the paper's findings on a three-part theoretical framework consisting of social development, students' needs and knowledge development to identify the factors which provide the impetus for change in the College English curricula.

This study developed a comprehensive and domain-specific scale for foreign language classroom engagement (FLCE) and examined the effect of classroom engagement on foreign language achievement. A mixed-methods approach was adopted to gather a broad range of data, including an open-ended questionnaire at the early stage of engagement scale development, the scale itself for pilot study as well as a large-scale survey, and an open-ended questionnaire after the survey to gain further information. A total of 1929 college EFL students across China participated in the large-scale survey. The results revealed that the measurement of FLCE at two levels, one based on the learning context/mode (i.e. individual-based or interaction-based) and the other pertaining to engagement type (i.e. cognitive, behavioral, or emotional), proved to be feasible. While perceiving a moderate level of overall engagement, the students reported significantly higher levels of interaction-based conventional behavioral engagement and individual-based behavioral engagement among the extracted eight facets. Structural equation modelling using English achievement as measured by national proficiency test scores as the dependent variable and the eight engagement dimensions as the independent variables showed an acceptable fit. Among the eight dimensions, only individual-based cognitive engagement significantly predicted the test scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Form-focused instruction occupies an important position in China's secondary schools. However, middle school English teaching has been criticized for the sustainability of form-focused instruction. The new English Curriculum Standards for China's secondary English teaching suggest that grammar teaching should be integrated into communicative activities, but no precise guidance is provided on how to integrate grammar into communicative activities. This study investigates teachers' beliefs and practices about form-focused instruction, as well as the factors influencing their beliefs and practices, in the context of China's secondary schools. Data were collected through 33 classroom observations and interviews with 3 teachers with different levels of experience. The findings reveal that, overall, the teachers preferred form-focused instruction, focus on forms and explicit teaching. The teachers with more teaching experience adopted communicative approaches of form-focused instruction, integrating form and meaning at different times inductively. The teacher with fewer teaching years adopted traditional, isolated, and deductive methods of grammar teaching. The differences between the teachers were found to be influenced by various factors, including teaching and research activities, curriculum standards, examinations, and learning experience. The teachers' beliefs and practices and the gaps and connections between theoretical domains and classroom practices were discussed and implications were provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]