Despite the rapid expansion of English-as-a-medium-of-instruction (EMI) programs in higher education, EMI teacher education is still in its infancy. This viewpoint paper analyses what language specialists can do and become in EMI teacher education in university settings. Specifically, the paper argues that language specialists can take on a new role as EMI teacher educators and contribute to EMI teaching and teacher development in different ways, including: (1) initiating classroom change through awareness raising; (2) integrating content and language in specific disciplines through collaboration; (3) attending to EMI teachers’ social and affective needs; and (4) advocating the professional status of EMI teachers. The paper also proposes a tentative framework on EMI teacher educator identity, which can serve as a frame of reference for language specialists who are interested in embarking on a new professional path as EMI teacher educators.

Despite a growing focus on positive psychology in recent years, negative emotions have not ceased to play a crucial role in learning additional languages in the classroom. This paper reports a study that investigated one such negative emotion – boredom – as experienced by 115 advanced learners of English. They were asked to write a descriptive paragraph about boredom that they experienced during English classes. Qualitative analysis resulted in the identification of five broad categories of factors responsible for student boredom – namely, language tasks, the teacher, modes of class organization, class components and others. On that basis, some boredom-coping solutions are offered.

The aim of this qualitative study is to examine the funds of knowledge that a group of teacher educators drew on as means of professional development and quality provision. The study was carried out with 13 teacher educators working at a pre-service English language teacher education (ELTE) programme in Argentina. Data were collected between 2014 and 2019 by means of interviews and an arts-based form instrument called significant circle. Findings show that the teacher educators deployed a wide range of individual-based as well as community-based funds of knowledge to enhance their knowledge of English language teaching and evidence-based practice. Based on the findings, a taxonomy is proposed to understand teacher educators’ funds of knowledge.

This article reviews research findings involving visual input in speech processing in the form of facial cues and co-speech gestures for second-language (L2) learners, and provides pedagogical implications for the teaching of listening and speaking. It traces the foundations of auditory–visual speech research and explores the role of a speaker’s facial cues in L2 perception training and of gestural cues in listening comprehension. There is a strong role for pedagogy to maximize the salience of multimodal cues for L2 learners. Visible articulatory gestures that precede the acoustic signal and the preparation phase of a hand gesture that precedes the acoustic onset of a word provide a priming effect on perceivers’ attention to signal upcoming information and facilitate processing, and visible gestures that co-occur with speech aid ongoing processing and comprehension. L2 learners benefit from an awareness of these visual cues and exposure to input.

This project analyzes teacher behavior using a corpus of 110 hours of recorded instruction in order to document the realities of second-language pronunciation instruction. Teachers of six intact classes were recorded during a seven-week oral communication course. Four classes implemented a focus on pronunciation that was integrated into the syllabus in one of two ways: form-focused (only) instruction (‘explicit’), or form-focused and communicative at the same time (‘communicative’). The other two did not have a specific focus on pronunciation (‘NSP’) and serve as the baseline. Our goal was to establish how much more time was spent on pronunciation when integrated compared to the NSP baseline, and to document how teachers implement various pedagogical choices while doing so. Our findings show that in the NSP groups, pronunciation instruction happened for a very short time and was mostly reactive. In comparison, the proportion of time with a pronunciation focus was 10 times greater in the integrated groups, where pronunciation-related episodes covered a quarter to a third of class time. Furthermore, a large portion of the integrated instruction was pre-planned, unlike in the NSP groups. The analysis of how this time was spent in the integrated groups further shows that aside from a core number of dedicated pronunciation lessons, a pronunciation focus was achieved by integrating activities with the course materials in variable ways and to varying degrees. This dataset shows that integrating pronunciation into existing syllabi is possible and does not happen at the expense of the other course goals. Therefore, integration appears to be a successful approach from a pronunciation instruction standpoint since the time accumulated also led to measurable improvements in comprehensibility after seven weeks for the observed students. We outline an integration model to help guide instructors towards implementing integrated pronunciation instruction even in courses without explicit pronunciation goals.

After 20 years of study since researchers of second language teacher education have increasingly emphasized the importance of investigating L2 teachers’ mental lives, the research of language teacher identity has been flowering and providing intriguing insights to deepen the field’s understanding of how L2 teachers develop and learn to become teachers. While a sociocultural perspective of language teacher education speaks to the situated nature of teacher learning and language teacher identity development, this perspective has generated a growing body of literature that highlights the role of socialization in language teacher identity formation. Reviewing the important ideas and findings in the existing research, this article begins with a summary of theoretical conceptualizations of language teacher identity, and then examines the status quo of contemporaneous language teacher identity research. Next, it discusses the socialization process in language teacher identity development, and ends with further research directions for future studies.

Shadowing, a practice of repeating what one hears as simultaneously and accurately as possible, has been researched in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) field for years. The research findings have shown that shadowing contributes to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ bottom-up listening skills, which leads to their overall listening comprehension skills. However, the accumulated research findings have not uncovered what aspects of bottom-up skills shadowing precisely contributes to. Thus, this study attempts to examine the aspects of bottom-up skills to which shadowing contributes and proposes a new shadowing procedure to compensate for the limitation of the current shadowing procedure. To this end, a preliminary study and a primary study were conducted. In the preliminary study, the bottom-up skill development through shadowing practice was precisely examined, using a 112-item bottom-up listening test. Thirty-six Japanese university students participated in the experiment and engaged in shadowing practice in eight lessons for a month. The result showed that shadowing practice was effective for developing the skill of identifying prominence in a speech, and word recognition skills but not effective for enhancing phonemic discrimination skills. In the primary study, to overcome the limitation of the shadowing procedure, a new shadowing procedure including three components of attention to output, corrective feedback, and explicit instruction was proposed. Twelve Japanese university students participated and engaged in the new shadowing procedure for three months. Their progress was assessed by a 32-item phonemic discrimination test, and the result showed that the new output-based shadowing procedure with explicit instruction and corrective feedback improved phonemic discrimination skills for intermediate level Japanese EFL learners.

The international role of English has made it the most taught foreign language in the world. As a result, standard native varieties have thrived as models within the field of English language teaching, particularly Standard British English and Standard American English, and alongside, the cultures associated with them. Although the majority of English language learners are part of Kachru’s Expanding Circle, teaching materials have continued to focus on native speaker models, neglecting many of the times other examples of successful communication among non-native speakers. Bearing this in mind, it is critical that teaching materials take on a more ELF-aware perspective, where intercultural communicative competence and intercultural awareness are fomented. In view of this, a comparative analysis was conducted between coursebooks in Portugal and Turkey. A locally published (LP) and an internationally published (IP) coursebook of the first year of secondary education from each country was analyzed. The aim of this analysis was twofold: to identify the similarities and differences between (1) Portuguese and Turkish EFL coursebooks and (2) LP and IP coursebooks in Portugal and Turkey, as far as an ELF-aware approach is concerned. After comparing the coursebooks and verifying that much can still be done for a more ELF-aware pedagogy, various implications are put forth for the sake of a more critical approach towards materials development.

Events caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have required second language (L2) educators to move away from face-to-face (F2F) lessons and adopt online teaching. Educators have utilized a range of online synchronous meeting tools (SMTs) to facilitate student learning. One of the popular, immersive and easy-to-use SMTs these days is Zoom. It includes several features, such as annotation tools, polls, breakout rooms and video and screen sharing. These functions facilitate communicative language learning through the use of authentic language instruction in interactive synchronous classes.