The primary purpose of this study was to identify what were Taiwanese University English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ perceptions about learning communication strategies. This study collected qualitative data about students’ beliefs and attitudes as they learned communication strategies. The research question guiding the study was: What are Taiwanese University EFL learners’ perceptions about learning five communication strategies? Twenty-four university students were trained for 10 weeks to use strategies in Faerch and Kasper’s (1983a) taxonomy, and seven volunteers were interviewed. None of the students majored in English but were enrolled in a required Basic English course in a Freshman English Non-Majors’ (FENM) program in Agriculture College at Tunghai University. In the middle and at the end of the training period, participants were interviewed and videotaped for 90 minutes. The results were as follows: 1) In the reduction set of communication strategies, seven volunteers tended to admit that “topic avoidance” (1.) was applicable; however, they disagreed about “keeping silence” because of their concern about politeness. 2) Students had mixed views about “message abandonment” (2.) that ranged from a neutral position to appropriate and inappropriate usages. 3) In the meaning replacement strategy (3.), most of the students believed that it was convenient to have access to getting to know their interlocutor’s intended meaning. 4) In the second achievement set, four students perceived it was useful, but three students provided their vague attitudes with various suggestions for usage. For the interlanguage strategy (4.), six students noticed it offered a function of enhancing their comprehensibility in English communication, and one student had a neutral attitude. The data revealed students had sufficient and complex perceptions about “word-coinage.” 5) In the cooperation strategy (5.), six students believed it assisted them to achieve the purpose of learning, but two of seven students believed it was losing face when appealing for help. 6) The constant method of analysis revealed eight themes associated with topic avoidance (1.), message abandonment (2.), meaning replacement (3.), interlanguage (4.), and cooperation (5.) strategies, were mentioned by seven participants. They were comprehension, politeness, intentionality, native language, face-saving (losing-face), interlanguage system, time-saving, and keywords.

As initial training of EFL teachers in Jordan becomes increasingly school-based, developing a model for the effective mentor is fast becoming a pivotal one in teacher education. The study explored the way in which the training programme is viewed by the mentors in terms of attitudes and pedagogical instruction practised during training with respect to lesson planning, lesson presentation and using teaching methods effectively. The study, also, conducted limited fieldwork in England where it investigated the mentoring process, the training of mentors and the teaching of foreign languages in order to provide some important lessons and strategies for future mentor training in Jordan in light of considering recent advances in foreign language teaching methodologies when training student teachers in schools. The main subjects of the study were a sample of mentors, student teachers, teachers and a tutor in both Jordan as well as from a very limited sample in England. The study employed both quantitative and qualitative research methods so that the men to ring process of language teachers can be presented both analytically and descriptively. Questionnaires, open questions, observations and interviews were used to obtain the perceptions of the participants of the study. There was also documentary analysis of related literature and documents. From the analysis of the data, the results of investigating the role of mentors in Jordan as well as in England showed various patterns of attitudes, models, and performance. The findings of the study highlighted that EFL mentors in Jordan seem to hold negative attitudes towards their mentees and consequently they appear not to understand the complexity of their roles as mentors. The findings showed that such negative attitudes proved to be principal barrier to essential changes needed to improve the quality of mentoring in Jordanian schools. Moreover, the study described the practices of the mentors in Jordan as unapproachable and unsupportive. The study also described the teaching of the mentors as 'traditional' in the sense that they assert student teachers' stick to the lesson plan, advocating 'talk and chalk' approaches into teaching, and establishing discipline first and foremost. The findings also pointed out that EFL mentors in Jordan tend to perceive their mentees as not being knowledgeable enough, in general, in key language skills to cope with teaching in the classroom, and in the skill of speaking, in particular. Most importantly, the study revealed that EFL mentors in Jordan tend to adopt the apprenticeship model where student teachers merely copy their mentors. Although the study tried to uncover ways of 'how to mentor' EFL student teachers in Jordan later on it questioned the subject knowledge of the mentors and doubted 'what they can mentor'. On the other hand, the reference study in England reported that mentors seem to have positive attitudes towards the mentoring process where they are keen on developing the skills and competencies of their student teacher systematically. The study highlighted the mechanism of mentor training in England as integrating theoretical as well as practical aspects through workshops and modules. The results of the study indicated that the methodology of modem foreign language teaching in England is in the main commllnicative. Foreign language teachers (FL) emphasised using variolls techniques to clarify the rneaning of vocablliary items. In respect to key skills like reading and listening, the findings stressed the importance of comprehension. As to grammatical structures, the findings indicated that FL teachers encourage the pupils to learn how to use appropriate grammatical sentences in real life situations, or through interaction, and how to infer the rules of grammar from contexts and examples. In the light of the findings of this study, recommendations have been made for the improvement of the mentoring process in Jordan.

With the increasing demand for English language proficiency in today’s global environment, comes a need for trained English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) teachers. Many countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are establishing bachelor and master degree programs in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of other Languages (TESOL). The majority of students in these programs are nonnative speakers of English. While these new graduates should be able to fill the growing demands for English teachers in tertiary and non-tertiary institutions within the UAE, they and other experienced nonnative English speaking teachers (NNEST) are often not hired. Most often this is due to a nonnative speaker bias, the view that only native English speaking teachers are better suited to teach English. This bias extends particularly to the teaching of oral and aural skills. There is a belief that accented English is difficult for students to comprehend especially in academic listening which implies that nonnative teacher accent can hinder ESL/EFL student listening success. However, current research has not provided empirical evidence to verify or disprove this opinion. Current research on nonnative speakers and listening comprehension has been based on teacher and student self-perceptions and attitudes towards nonnative speaking teachers (Butler, 2007; Flowerdew, 1994; Friedrich 2000; Huang, 2004; Major et al., 2002; McKenzie, 2008; Moussu, 2002). However, there is little quantitative data to support if and how these attitudes and perceptions may or may not correlate to EFL student listening performance. This thesis will attempt to resolve this deficiency. Another issue this thesis will undertake which has not been examined widely is the effect of nonnative speaker accent on academic listening. Various studies have been conducted on student difficulty in comprehending academic lectures from native and nonnative speakers (Ferris & Tagg, 1996; Flowerdew & Miller, 2005; Huang, 2004; Lynch, 1994; Powers, 1985; Richards, 1983; Vogely, 1995). Yet, currently, the literature is sparse on the influence of nonnative speaker accent as a factor, or effect, in the listening comprehension of L2 students’ understanding of academic lectures. Further, existing research in NNESTs is also missing empirical or quantitative evidence which proves or disproves the prevailing theory that native inner circle English accents are significantly better for EFL student academic listening comprehension. Thus, another goal of this thesis is to provide evidence to disprove this assumption. Finally, this research will provide qualitative data to understand how students view accent as it relates to their academic achievement and prospective careers. This thesis will propose new empirical data relating to nonnative speaker accent and listening comprehension in ESL/EFL. It will provide evidence that there is no significant effect of accent on academic listening test scores for EFL students enrolled in a university foundations program at UAE University. In this research, six EFL professionals (from China, Egypt and the USA) and 108 EFL students participated in the study. The female students were between 18-20 years old, from the UAE, and studying at the Under Graduate Requirements Unit at UAE University in Al Ain, UAE. All students responded to a pre-test questionnaire in a Likert scale format. A week later, the students listened to one recording, took a corresponding exam, and answered a post-test survey. Two to three days later, 18 randomly selected students were interviewed. The interviews consisted of open-ended questions. The data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Analysis of the quantitative data shows that the majority of participants considered native speakers of English easier to understand, specifically in terms of pronunciation and understandability, but had no opinion as to whether a non-native speaker was easier to understand than a native speaker. As per the listening test scores, there were no significant differences between the six groups of students who had listened to six different speaker accents. Analysis of the interviews shows that students have no bias against nonnative English teachers. In fact, several students favored Arab nonnative English speaking teachers to translate vocabulary and complex ideas from English to Arabic. These students also demonstrated an unrealistic grasp of their need to understand the varieties of English they will encounter in their future workplaces.

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This study presents a multi-faceted analysis of EFL learners’ voices in a Thai context, aimed at testing a hypothesis that the discourse of foreign, western-compiled textbooks project identities disconnected from EFL learners’ lived experiences, adversely affecting their meaning-making during discursive practices. I employ a multi-modal, multi-case study for data collection: 1) the use of two sets of materials in mini-course action research with two groups of learners — one group using published materials selected from New Headway Elementary Course (Soars & Soars, 2000) and the other using modified, parallel ‘Third Space’ materials; 2) audio- and video-recordings of classroom interactions and their transcriptions; 3) post-lesson and post-course questionnaires; 4) semi-structured interviews; and 5) video-based stimulated recall interviews. Drawing from Bakhtinian-Vygotskian sociocultural theories, I show through a microscopic analysis of learners’ interactions and utterances how dialogic relations between Other-discourse and Self-discourse shape learners’ meaning construction during their appropriation of mediating discourse for activities such as role-play. A macroscopic analysis of learners’ attitudinal voices based on the questionnaires and interviews is then provided for triangulation. The findings are 1) both groups have marked potential to infuse their contextual meanings into the Other-discourse of their materials for Self-representation; 2) ‘Third Space’ materials have more potential to enrich linguistic resources and opportunities for learners’ meaning-making and scaffolded learning than ‘Headway’ materials; 3) the majority of participants prefer the coexistence of voices and meanings between their culture and Other cultures as the mediating discourse for speaking activities, rather than the conventional models. The study thus supports the use of a dialogic framework for inclusion of cultural voices and representations in EFL materials design, and also offers other implications for pedagogy and future research.

This study investigated the effectiveness of explicit pragmatic instruction on the acquisition of requests by college-level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Taiwan. The researcher applied quantitative and qualitative approaches to determine first whether the use of explicit pragmatic instruction had a positive effect on EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. Second, the relative effectiveness of presenting pragmatics through two delivery systems—face-to-face, in-class activities and computer-mediated communication (CMC) via e-mail and WebCT—was compared. One hundred and eighteen Taiwanese undergraduate students who made up three intact classes in an “English for Tourism” course completed the entire study. The three groups were: (1) the control group, in which students received no explicit instruction on pragmatics but received instructor-led lessons from the textbook’s teacher’s manual, (2) the experimental/Teacher Instruction (TI) group, in which students learned pragmatics in a face-to-face classroom setting with explicit instruction on pragmatics, and (3) the experimental/CMC group, in which students learned pragmatics explicitly through e-mail and WebCT discussions with their partners at Texas A&M University. There were 40 Taiwanese students in the control group, 36 Taiwanese students in the experimental/Teacher Instruction group and 42 Taiwanese students in the experimental/CMC group. Treatment types (Control/TI/CMC) were randomly assigned to the intact classes. The results showed that explicit pragmatic instruction had a positive impact on the EFL learners in both the Teacher Instruction and CMC groups. Learners who received explicit pragmatic instruction performed better on the Discourse Completion Task posttest than those who did not. The findings also indicated that technology can be a valuable tool for delivering pragmatics instruction.

With the spread of English as an international language, near native-like accuracy is no longer regarded as a necessary goal for the pronunciation class. This Report discusses the current status and goals of pronunciation instruction in ESL and EFL contexts. Second, it reviews research findings supporting the new focus on intelligibility, and examines instructors’ pedagogical challenges and opinions on how to teach English pronunciation. Third, it evaluates Korean textbooks currently used to teach English pronunciation in Korea and discusses how instructional materials and resources can enhance oral proficiency in EFL contexts. Lastly, it presents a list of pedagogical implications and suggests a best practices approach to English pronunciation instruction in EFL contexts. / text

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