This study examines the use of religious narratives, specifically the story of "Ibrahim, the Father of Prophets," from the bilingual collection Nabi & Rasul Allah (2018), to cultivate critical thinking among young English language learners in Indonesia. This study explores how the morals and language of a story can foster critical thinking in young students. Employing Fairclough's model of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the transitivity framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the research investigates the critical thinking skills embedded in the English version of the Ibrahim story. The analysis includes a discourse-based examination of the story’s strategies and social practices, supplemented by interviews with English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in Indonesian religious elementary school. This integrated approach highlights the role of critical thinking in selecting appropriate learning materials and emphasizes socio-cultural contributions of religious narratives to material development and instructional design in ELT to young learners. The paper concludes that integrating moral values into English teaching does not negate the necessity of fostering critical thinking. Teachers can use critical thinking to select stories that enhance students' moral understanding and linguistic proficiency. This research contributes to ongoing discussions on the use of storytelling in education and provides insights into effective pedagogical strategies for incorporating critical thinking into ELT for young learners.

This study explores how learners of Japanese as a foreign language in Indonesia comprehend and use Japanese politeness. Many linguists mentioned that socio-pragmatic skills can be developed in a classroom. This skill is essential for L2 learners to master communication in L2, such as how to build and express turn-taking, eye contact and give attention to the interlocutors. Therefore, this study aims to prove whether Indonesian learners of Japanese could use appropriate socio-pragmatic skills, focusing on Japanese politeness in a conversation setting. The subjects are 120 students from two universities whose level of Japanese skills is on the A2-B1 CERF level. We use the role-play method and set a one-on-one conversation/interview setting. Our findings demonstrate that most Indonesian students had difficulty comprehending the concept of ‘Tachiba’, meaning the place where one stands in a Japanese conversation. Most student participants could not yet grasp the social and interaction level. However, in some cases, Japanese politeness in context meaning is found.

The present study investigated the nature of learning challenges inherent in studying Readings in Business through the English medium instruction (EMI) and the coping strategies business English learners use to overcome those learning challenges. The study adopted a quantitative approach and collected the data through an online questionnaire. The findings revealed that business English learners face challenges related to the language used in the textbook, and some may find the textbook's language more difficult to comprehend. Further, the findings revealed that business English learners in the context of language proficiency-based challenges face challenges that affect their comprehension of textbook content, ability to answer tests effectively, exam scores, and participation in classroom discussions. Furthermore, the findings revealed that business English learners have mixed perceptions regarding instructor-based challenges. Finally, in terms of coping strategies, the findings revealed that business English learners adopted a variety of coping strategies, such as using Google Translate to translate the paragraphs, using their native language to inquire and ask questions, creating a glossary to memorize new words, using bilingual dictionaries and translation tools, and seeking help from classmates and instructors. The study provides a number of implications and recommendations for further studies.

Language ability develops greatly during preschool age. Triggered by the high curiosity that goes hand in hand with the exposures to others around them, preschool-aged children show great efforts to create a collection of vocabulary to help them learn and use language in real contexts. This research aims to identify the thematic contents of preschool-aged children’s utterances and explain the categories of these thematic contents to shape their understanding of the surrounding world. To answer these objectives, both qualitative and quantitative data were used. The qualitative data were the utterances of preschool-aged children when participating in conversations, while the quantitative data were the frequency of occurrence of each thematic content, which is used to support the qualitative interpretation. The data were collected during classroom sessions in two preschools in Yogyakarta, Indonesia for a one-week period. The participants were 29 preschool-aged children, whose age ranges from 3 to 5 years old. Audiovisual recordings, field notes, datasheets, and ELAN 5.5. and FLEx 8 software were the instruments for data collection and analysis. The results show that there are two main thematic contents expressed by these preschool-aged children, i.e., objects and people. These thematic contents can be detailed into 9 categories of objects and 4 categories of people. These support the overall interpretation revealing the picture of the world as perceived by the children. In general, through the thematic contents of their utterances, preschool-aged children try to build a complete understanding of the world they live in and these thematic contents also serve as the media for understanding the stance of their peers and teachers in a conversation.Keywords: preschool-aged children; thematic contents; utterances

With the lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions had to make swift educational decisions such as emergency blended synchronous education without thoroughly scrutinizing its effects. This study explores the experiences of a group of seven EFL teachers of a blended learning model during the pandemic in Northern Cyprus higher education. The study adopted a qualitative design by interviewing seven teachers on their experiences during the pandemic, particularly focusing on a blended instructional mode of education over the fall academic semester in 2020. The study results reveal that the study participants employed various strategies to cope with the challenges ascribed to the blended mode of delivery. The study's findings offer some implications for second language teachers and the use of technology in second language education. Keywords: EFL teachers, challenges, emergency blended synchronous education, blended education

In a couple of years, massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) previous works reported various informal digital learning of English (IDLE) activities within and around video games that could enhance student-gamer vocabulary outcomes; receptive and productive language skills; and language socialization. The lack of multidisciplinary literature reviews between IDLE and language policy (LP) gives this study to open discussion on both areas. The urgency of this study is the high adoption of IDLE framework without considering LP where the reason for student’s engagement from MMORPG activities can be explained. This study aims to portray IDLE practitioner's activities in MMORPG from language management, beliefs, and practices. Following the long-term process, the data were generated from auto-ethnography and photo-elicitation that were taken from in-game and out-of-game activities. This article found three major findings. First, the management of MMORPG provoked gamers to communicate as a part of the game mission, and the guild could potentially develop top-down and bottom-up LP. Second, the value of language in the community played role in the decision-making language use from the negotiation process. Third, English and Mandarin dominated language practices from different interlocutors in various forms such as language in MMORPG’s context, code mixing, and abbreviation from multilingual sides giving various reading texts in contexts. The high status of English is still dominated by out-of-game language practices. There are two major implications in theory and praxis that would be discussed in this study.Keywords: Auto-ethnography, IDLE, language policy, MMORPG, and multilingual environment

The communicative function of text can be obtained through the multimodal analysis of the text which contains the interaction and integration of two or more semiotic resources, graphics and text. This study investigated the structure of the titles and graphics of the title pages along with the situation of the content of native and non-native title pages of English novels of modern age. 20 title pages including 10 modern native and non-native English novels are randomly selected from the Google search engine. Multimodal analysis including Jeffries (2016) model to analyse the structure of the text of the title pages, Davy (2013) model to analyse the graphical features of the title pages and Bernstein (2003) to investigate the situational features presented in the title pages of the novels have been followed. A bench mark technique was used to identify the graphics of title pages, structure of the title phrases and situation presented in the title pages. The results generated from qualitative analysis indicated that mostly the native authors observed all of the features mentioned by the great linguists, stylitions and graphic experts while selecting the design of title pages whereas, non-native authors and publisher have not kept these features in mind while selecting the contents of title page of their composition. It causes lack of readership as the readers cannot extract maximum information from the title page. The study has opened new dimensions to the new researchers and it also beneficial for the authors and publisher in the selection of the title pages.Key words: Semiotics, Graphics, Situation, Text, Title-page

This paper examines how character development is analyzed through attitude, genre’s stages, and phases in children's stories. Relying on ten children's stories purposively selected from two children's storybooks, the results show that all ten stories are written as narratives with a number of absences of attitude, stages, and phases of the narrative genre. most stories succeed to fulfill the obligatory stages of narrative: orientation, complication, evaluation, and resolution, even others add the optional stage, coda. However, a number of stories fail to satisfy the presence of evaluation. in addition, all stories do not exploit attitude in every phase of every stage of the narrative. Even, a number of stories miss exploiting Attitude in a number of prominent phases such as introducing the character in orientation, development, and peak of the conflict in complication, and plan and act in resolution. Besides, all ten stories do not explore all types of attitude and their sub-classifications, in which each type will contribute to the holistic description of the character. Thus, although all stories can be considered to develop character along the obligatory stages of the narrative genre, they still fail to build a more complex character development through positive-negative-positive evaluation through stages and phases of the stories.Keywords: character development; genre; stages; phases; attitude

The research had two objectives; 1) to explore teachers’ belief about the use of full English during learning activities, and 2) to determine the factors that affected the use of full English in teaching English to teach English to young learners. Embedded mixed method was used in this study. The quantitative data were gained by distributing 1 set of closed-response questionnaire item to 38 teachers of English who teach English at elementary schools in Palembang, a capital city of South Sumatera Province, Indonesia. Meanwhile, the qualitative data were gained from one-to-one in depth interview to 15 teachers of English who were willing to be interviewed. Students’ responses to each questionnaire item were analyzed by using descriptive statistics analysis by Employing SPSS program. Meanwhile, the qualitative data gained from the interview were analyzed by using thematic analysis. It was revealed from the study that first, teachers shared positive belief about the use of full English while teaching English in the class. Secondly, there are five factors that affected the use of full English during learning activities; 1) The English Proficiency of the teachers; 2) School Policy; 3) The homogeneous level of students’ language performance 4) Teacher’s classroom management skills and 5) Students’ attitude toward English.

Speaking is one of the important skills to master. The importance of learning speaking skills helps people to share their ideas, agreement or disagreement, compliment, and so on to others. Some students feel a lack of practice in learning English because they don't have enough support, including those in Taiwan. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to investigate how Taiwanese teachers apply CLL in speaking activities and the students' responses towards speaking activities which implement CLL at an elementary school in Taiwan. Data for this qualitative study were gathered from semi-structured interviews and reflective journals. The participants were one Taiwanese English teacher and 32 elementary school students. Data from the semi-structured interview were recorded, then transcribed. After that, themes were drawn based on the transcribed interviews. Based on the data, it was found that the Taiwanese English teacher applied CLL to teach the English language. Some activities such as group discussion and Think-Pair-Share were done. These activities were found useful because students could gain more vocabulary, a fun atmosphere created inside the classroom, and better fluency and pronunciation.