Speech Acts in Elementary School English Instruction: Textbook Analysis and Teacher Perceptions

The acquisition of the English prepositions poses a big challenge to the primary learners who study English as a foreign language. The main purpose of this study is to examine the primary students’ understanding of prepositions and their abilities to use prepositions correctly. Moreover, this research also aims to determine the causes of the difficulties elementary students face while learning English prepositions. Firstly, for this purpose, the study analyzes the types and meanings of English prepositions, which are presented in the elementary English textbooks. For the English textbooks used for the third, fourth, fifth and sixth grades, the study examines an elementary English teachers’ guide published by three publishers (i.e., Chunjae Education INC, YBM and Daekyo) and used most commonly by the elementary schools in Gyungnam province. Secondly, 200 primary students were tested using a preposition test which was written based on the elementary English textbooks.

Lateral thinking is a unique form of thinking proposed by Edward De Bono. He believes that innovation is the ability to see the changes as an opportunity not as a threat. It results in the generation of new ideas and breaking out of the concept prisons of old ideas. This type of thinking decides the outcome of one's speaking and the job of lateral thinking is to enable the brain to find multiple possibilities or perceptions. The attitude of the present set of tertiary learners, lack of confidence and positive approach, their habits hinder their brain to intake, create and present the information in the demanding context. The major reasons for their inability are the cultural and psychological background of the learners. Developing lateral thinking skills of the tertiary level learners may pave the way to keep a constructive mind to acquire new language competencies. 'Think out of the box' is the crucial motto of the language teachers these days. De Bono's concept of Lateral thinking would enable the language teachers to break a new ground in inculcating speaking skills for the learners of English as a second language. The present study proposes Design , one of the lateral thinking techniques of Bono and its effectiveness as a tool that can be adapted by the language teachers to enrich the communicative competence of the tertiary level learners of English as a second language. The criteria for speaking activity are assessed based on stage III of Canadian Language Benchmark for assessing speaking skills.

While English has been the primary foreign language to learn in junior high schools and high schools in Japan, it was introduced to elementary schools as an ”optional activity” in 2002. According to the Japanese Ministry of Education, ”MEXT,” about 97.1 percent of elementary schools throughout Japan engaged in some kind of ”English activity” with an average of 15.9 hours per year (for 6th graders) in 2007. Although these figures may indicate an increase in interest in teaching English at elementary school level, additional data suggest serious concerns among elementary school teachers. One of the main sources of the concerns is the fact that most English activities are taught by homeroom teachers who do not hold any formal teaching credentials in English. However, the MEXT has announced that English will become a ”mandatory activity,” not an academic subject. in elementary schools in 2011, which may trigger more problematic situations. This paper addresses the issues related to the implementation of elementary school English in Japan from the following perspectives: (1) Role and relevance of English in an Asian context, (2) Importance of coherent education from elementary to tertiary level, (3) Brief history and current status of elementary school English in Japan, (4) Professional competencies for elementary school English: pedagogical competency and English ability. Although English is recognized as the most widely used language of international communication, there has been no consensus of opinion about the purpose and goal of English education at elementary school level yet in Japan. In principle, teacher training and induction will not be offered to elementary homeroom teachers. In addition, the requirements for teachers of elementary school English have not yet been clarified by the MEXT. Main findings of the survey with 600 elementary school teachers, conducted in 2006 and 2007, and suggestions for designing of elementary school curriculum, teaching materials, and teacher education will also be discussed for further research.

This study examined Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' ability to establish textual cohesion in English through appropriate selection of reference forms and reference management strategies in their written narrative discourse. It employed both quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore how the language-specific reference choices and strategies in their first language (L1) may be evident in their second language (L2) discourse production. Participants were Korean adult EFL learners and American native English speakers (NES) in college. Findings from the quantitative analysis of the written narratives showed that the specifically Korean referential strategies of heavily relying on nominals were not evident in the Korean EFL learners' English narrative discourse. However, a closer look at the data with a qualitative approach revealed that the Korean EFL learners' referential strategies were very different from those of the NES. More specifically, the qualitative analysis revealed that, unlike the NES who alternated the use of noun phrases and pronouns strategically to achieve certain discourse effects, the Korean participants did not display such sophisticated use of reference forms within an extended L2 discourse. The findings are attributed to the L1-specific reference management conventions and to the L2 learners' lack of practice and competence in referential strategies at the discourse level.

Gender differences are pivotal in EFL (English as A Foreign Language) classroom. The aims of this anthropological linguistic study are to figure out the extent of female and male learners’ differences in EFL classroom, the factors which affect the gender differences in the EFL learners’ language use, and the effects that learners’ gender differences in language use bring to the EFL classroom. Having been designed as a conceptual study, several research findings were scrutinized to answer the research questions. It can be wrapped up that both male and female are distinctive in using English as an international language due to the reasons in communication. Further, it was revealed that multiple factors affect gender differences in using language within the EFL classes; such as: classroom environment, cultural, and social impacts. Finally, the findings definitely convey positive impacts towards the future EFL teaching and learning process.

EFL(English as a Foreign Language) learners tend to choose translation strategies in their English learning process. This study aims to examine the potential relationship between English language proficiency and EFL learners’ use of translation strategies, displaying the differences in the use of translation strategies between students at higher level of English language proficiency and those at lower level of English language proficiency. An ITLS questionnaire (The Inventory for Translation as a Learning Strategy) designed by Liao Posen (Liao, 2002：159-161)was distributed to 190 students in Southwest Jiaotong University who had taken the national English language proficiency assessment—CET-4(College English Test Band 4). Based on Independent Sample T-test, the results show that significant differences were found between the proficient EFL learners and the limited English proficient learners in some of the uses of translation strategies, and lower achievers were more likely to adopt translation strategies in English learning. According to Pearson Correlation Analysis and Multiple Regression Analysis, this research also found out that the use of translation to enhance English-language abilities was negatively correlated with English language proficiency and could best predict the negative performance of English language proficiency assessment. Implications for the role of translation strategies in EFL learning are discussed.

Foreign languages are often learnt in formal and disembodied environments which may limit the emotional resonance of their vocabulary and their pragmatic usage in real‐life communication. In a context of English as a foreign language (EFL), this study examines whether elaborative processing as a teaching strategy leads to changes in the affective evaluation of English words and thus enhances the acquisition of emotional vocabulary. A pre‐test/post‐test design was employed in order to assess the effect of this type of instruction. A group of 35 Spanish EFL students participated in two training sessions, with generative processing exercises that involved multiple modalities (visual and spoken language, body expression, and gestures) at production and comprehension domains and that focused on 36 English words (12 positive, 12 negative, and 12 neutral). Another set of 36 non‐trained words was carefully selected and matched to trained words across several psycholinguistic variables. Crucially, stimuli selection was based on their high emotional discrepancy between English native speakers and Spanish EFL learners, as observed in our normative study. The students rated the full set of 72 words in two emotional dimensions (valence and arousal) before and after the instruction. Results revealed the enhancement of the negative emotional connotations for negative trained words in EFL and an alignment with the affective responses reported by English native speakers. These findings confirm the effectiveness of this elaborative processing approach for the teaching of emotional vocabulary in formal contexts of EFL. The stronger impact of this instruction on negative emotional language suggests its attenuation in additional languages and underscores the importance of addressing this type of language in EFL instruction.

Speech act is a functional unit in the form of an act which helps humans understand or accomplish things with words in communication. This research was aimed to find out and analyse the types of speech acts which were performed by teachers and students in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. The researcher employed the speech act theory from Cruse (2000) to analyse and interpret the research results. Qualitative research was applied in this research due to the data source was from the teaching and learning activities in naturalistic environments in English classrooms. The subjects of this research were teachers and students in REAL Equivalent English classrooms. The results showed that there were three types of speech acts found in the interactions between the teachers and students, namely locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act. Locutionary act was performed when teachers and students uttered expressions with no certain intentions. Illocutionary act, on the other hand, was performed when the expressions contained certain intentions to listeners. Perlocutionary act was performed when the listeners showed responses and acted as feedback to the speakers’ utterances. By conducting this research, the researcher hopes that it can give more insights to readers regarding to the study of speech act theory in pragmatics field. Keywords: English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Classrooms, Speech Acts, REAL Equivalent English, Teachers and Students.

<p>People will not only use language for sharing message but also due to do an action. Through language, people will ask, promise, refuse, greet, invite, thank, and so on. The purpose of this research is to identify the speech acts preference used by Indonesian and Filipino non – native speakers of English via Facebook Messenger. Besides, to identify the similar or different of speech acts preference they used.</p><p> The source of data are utterances of conversation in Facebook Messenger. The researcher applies documentation and an observation (reading the book and internet as the references) in collecting the data. After collecting the data, the researcher analyzes the data by focusing the speech acts theory. In order to support the evidence of the result, the researcher needs to describe and compare the high context-cultures and low context-cultures by Hall (1976) and also cultural dimension of Indonesia and Philippines by Hofstede.</p>The result of the analysis shows that the most speech acts preference used by Indonesian and Filipino non - native speakers of English is direct speech act. Similar and different types of speech acts are found. The similar speech act preferences are found in declarations and representatives. The different speech acts preferences are found in expressives, directives, commissives, direct, and indirect speech acts. The result of this research also shows that the communication of Indonesian and Filipino are included into low contex-cultures. It is contrary with the theory of Hall and Hofstede which shows that Indonesia and Philippines factually should be high context-cultures.

2015 개정 교육과정이 적용된 초·중등 영어교과서의 읽기 지문 연계성 분석

The article presents a mixed-methods study that examines how undergraduate students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) sustain their practices of learning English during the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022–2023. In total, 33 undergraduate EFL students (henceforth – participants) took part in the study. In order to gain insight into their sustainable learning practices, the participants were requested to write a short reflective essay titled “My Thoughts on How I Learn English during the War”. The participants were instructed to write their essays in English within a one-week timeframe. Seeking to identify and classify a range of sustainable practices related to the ways the participants learnt English during the Russo-Ukrainian war, their reflective essays were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The analysis of the participants’ essays revealed the following learning practices that, according to the participants, helped them to sustain their EFL learning trajectory in the wartime EFL contexts: (i) participation in online EFL courses, (ii) communication with the native speakers of English on social networking sites (e.g., Instagram), and (iii) the combination of EFL learning activities offered at the participants’ university. The findings are discussed in detail further in the article through the lens of sustainable multilingualism development. Specifically, we argue that the development of multilingualism in the time of crises is feasible and sustainable, especially if it is coupled with an EFL learner’s inner psychological factors that are further facilitated by the external support offered by the digital learning environments that are (i) institutionalised and systematic, and (ii) extra-mural and unstructured (in other words, digitally wild).

This study aims to explore the gender differences in the majors' of students who experienced English language learning anxiety at a University of Technology in Taiwan. The participants were 245 randomly selected students at this university in Taiwan. A questionnaire about English language learning anxiety was adopted as data collection. The results show that students attributed the cause of anxiety to the fear of speaking, the fear of exam consequences, a lack of both learning motivation and self-confidence, as well as the teacher's influence. Also, the finding of this study indicates that male students have stronger feelings of English learning anxiety than female students, and non-English majors have stronger feelings of English learning anxiety than English majors. The findings of this study suggest that EFL teachers in Taiwan should strive towards making classrooms more relaxing with a less formal atmosphere, and move away from the exam paradigm.

This study explores the development of middle school students' speaking skills in English as a foreign language (EFL), by exposure to a new teaching method, the Outdoor Practice of Speaking (OPOS) method. The speaking skills were practiced through speech activities and implemented outdoors and in public. This method was tested as a mixed-method case study via an intervention program to explore its effect on speech anxiety and speech competence in EFL. Study participants were 65 Israeli 14-year-old middle school girls from two different state-religious schools in the north of Israel: 32 students in the intervention group and 33 in the control group. The findings illustrate a significant difference (p < .01) in students' performance in all categories of speech (vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and coherence), as well as a significant improvement in score distribution. This improvement indicates the effectiveness of the OPOS method, and the desirability of practicing EFL speaking outside the classroom. OPOS offers EFL teachers worldwide a new method for enhancing students’ learning skills which can help them cope with their EFL anxiety and improve their spoken production. It can also be applied to older students with appropriate modifications.

Developing adequate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) academic writing skills is of paramount importance for students’ success in higher education in Oman. The traditional teaching approaches adopted in writing courses often lead to students’ disengagement, however. Although several studies have examined students and teachers’ perceptions of flipped instruction in various EFL courses, no study has examined the impact of flipping on students’ engagement in writing courses. This practice-based research project, where the instructor was the researcher, explored the impact of flipped teaching on 57 General Foundation Program (GFP) EFL learners’ behavioural, cognitive, emotional and agentic engagement in academic writing in a higher education institution in Oman, and the variations that exist in students’ engagement according to gender, age, English language proficiency and technology skills. The study adopted a mixed-methods design and used a student engagement questionnaire, focus group interviews and participant observations to collect data. Descriptive and inferential statistics and deductive and inductive analytical procedures were used to analyse the quantitative and qualitative data respectively. The study presents new practicable knowledge about the implementation and implications of flipped instruction for Omani EFL students’ engagement in academic writing at the GFP level. It proposes flipping as an instructional approach which helps to address GFP students’ lack of 4 behavioural, cognitive, emotional and agentic engagement in writing courses in the Omani context. Behaviourally, students in the flipped classroom experience increased effort, improved concentration levels, persistence, communication and collaboration, and amelioration in their attitude to class attendance. It is reasonable to conclude that learners undergo cognitive growth and develop self-regulatory strategies and meta-cognitive awareness. At the level of emotional engagement, learners initially experience negative emotions such as anger and frustration, and then more positive emotions such as contentment and increased interest in the subject as they adapt to the flipped teaching-learning model. Flipping also seems to influence students’ autonomy and ability to ask questions and express opinions. It appears, however, that this approach does not influence students’ capacity to contribute to their own learning resources and activities. This study makes a valuable contribution to knowledge about students’ engagement in EFL writing courses. It revealed that a strong positive correlation exists between students’ behavioural, cognitive and emotional engagement, and that a positive correlation exists between students’ technology skills and linguistic proficiency and several aspects of their engagement. The study demonstrated, however, that no correlation exists between gender and age and students’ engagement in the flipped classroom. Furthermore, this practice-based research indicated that although flipped instruction helps to address the problem of students’ disengagement in writing courses in our context, factors such as students’ linguistic proficiency and technology skills should be taken into consideration before implementing this instructional approach in the current setting.

This study investigated the differences in linguistic complexity between different types of English users, including native speakers (NS), English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, and English as a second language (ESL) learners in terms of Kolmogorov complexity. Furthermore, we explored how first language backgrounds affect linguistic complexity. Our dataset contains 2272 argumentative essays produced by English NSs and upper‐intermediate learners from four ESL and six EFL countries/regions. Results showed that significant differences existed between the writings of NS, EFL, and ESL regarding overall and syntactic complexity. Specifically, the rank of overall complexity (NS > ESL > EFL) indicates that learners from countries/regions with higher exposure to English tend to produce overall more complex writings. Concerning syntactic complexity, EFL learners produce the most complex writings, while NS produces the least complex, indicating that essays written by EFL learners contain the most fixed word order patterns. In contrast, no significant difference was detected in morphological complexity among the NS, ESL, and EFL groups, suggesting that native and upper‐intermediate non‐NSs exhibit a similar range of morphological forms in their writings. Additionally, our results showed a larger effect of first language backgrounds over English speaker types on linguistic complexity, thus informing teachers to implement targeted writing instructions for learners from different countries.