English Language Teaching Educational Journal

Political resistance in Sheep Village: The politics of metaphors and their pedagogical implications

2025-12-26T09:43:03+00:00

This study presents a critical discourse analysis of the Sheep Village children's trilogy and examines its pedagogical potential for the language education of Hong Kong children living in exile. Drawing on metaphor analysis, the study analyses how recurring figures such as the sheep, wolves, shepherd, and village allegorically represent collective agency, totalitarian power, moral leadership, and communal belonging in the context of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. The findings show that the texts construct resistance not through individual heroism but through ethical awareness, shared responsibility, and the preservation of cultural memory, offering young readers a narrative framework for understanding injustice and political power. Building on these findings, the article proposes pedagogical principles adapted from Critical English for Academic Purposes (CEAP) to support the integration of literary texts into language education. It argues that metaphor-rich narratives such as Sheep Village can be used to develop linguistic competence, emotional literacy, and critical civic awareness among children in exile communities, positioning children’s literature as a bridge between language learning, identity formation, and sociopolitical consciousness in host societies.

Voices behind the front desk: A triangular lens on English competence in hospitality education

2025-11-27T05:51:17+00:00

The hospitality industry, as a linguistically and culturally charged domain, demands communication that extends beyond grammatical correctness toward adaptive, service-oriented performance. This study investigates the state of English competence among vocational hospitality students in Yogyakarta by integrating perspectives from three key stakeholders i.e., students, lecturers, and industry practitioners. The research adopts a mixed-methods design to uncover the alignment and dissonance between classroom instruction, communicative readiness, and workplace expectations. Quantitative data from 86 student respondents reveal that over 80% face persistent challenges in spontaneous English interaction, citing limited vocabulary, hesitation, and low confidence. Complementary qualitative insights from focus group discussions with five lecturers and interviews with twelve hotel professionals illustrate that English proficiency in hospitality is increasingly perceived as a form of professional capital: a synthesis of linguistic agility, intercultural empathy, and emotional intelligence. The findings highlight the inadequacy of conventional, grammar-driven ESP pedagogy and advocate for a transformative, partnership-based learning model that embeds authentic industry participation, simulation-driven practice, and performance-based evaluation. The study contributes to ongoing discussions in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) by reframing communicative competence as a professional, affective, and intercultural construct rather than a linguistic artifact. It argues that recontextualizing English learning through design thinking and work-integrated learning principles can foster communicative resilience, industry alignment, and global employability among vocational graduates.

Dissecting logical statements in EFL undergraduate thesis abstracts: Gaining insight through cohesive and coherent mechanisms

2025-09-10T04:31:46+00:00

A well-structured composition must be both coherent and cohesive, enabling arguments to flow logically and ensuring clarity for readers. Yet, this critical aspect of academic writing is often overlooked, particularly in the thesis abstracts of EFL college students. Thus, this study investigates how cohesive and coherent mechanisms are employed to construct logical arguments in student-written thesis abstracts. By applying qualitative content analysis, the research examined patterns of cohesive ties and their contribution to overall textual coherence. The data employed for this research were ten theses abstracts accessed publicly from the universities’ official repositories. The findings indicate that cohesive devices play a crucial role in shaping coherence, with greater cohesion typically resulting in stronger logical connections within the text. Transition markers, which establish semantic links between clauses and sentences, emerged as the most influential indicators of coherence. These markers guided readers through the arguments and ensured a more unified presentation of ideas. The results suggest that the effective use of cohesive and coherent strategies not only improves the clarity of thesis abstracts but also enhances their academic quality. This highlights the pedagogical need to integrate explicit instruction on cohesion and coherence into EFL writing courses. By fostering students’ awareness and mastery of these devices, educators can support the development of more precise, persuasive, and professional academic writing. Ultimately, improving these skills can raise the standard of student theses and contribute to higher levels of scholarly communication.

Assessing materials development: An expert evaluation of instructional materials developed by pre-service English teachers

2025-11-28T06:45:24+00:00

The ability of pre-service English teachers to create high-quality, contextually appropriate instructional materials is a critical component of effective pedagogy. This study provides a quantitative and analytical assessment of their proficiency in instructional design. By evaluating 28 material packages developed by pre-service teachers, this study identifies their strengths and remaining challenges in implementing modern pedagogical principles. A panel of ten subject experts evaluated the materials using a validated rubric assessing curriculum alignment, relevance, higher-order thinking skills (HOTS), and 21st-century skills. The results revealed variation in design competencies, with pre-service teachers performing best in foundational areas such as curriculum alignment (mean score 7.875) and pedagogy (mean scores for Suitability and 21st-century skills were 7.679 and 7.357, respectively). However, the study also found challenges in applying advanced pedagogical concepts, such as HOTS, Industry 4.0, and Society 5.0, with mean scores of 7.000, 7.000, and 6.964, respectively. These findings suggest an area for further strengthening in teacher education programs, particularly in supporting the integration of complex, abstract concepts like HOTS and contemporary pedagogical frameworks. Without sufficient preparation in these areas, pre-service teachers may find it challenging to apply these concepts effectively in their instructional practice.

Automated writing evaluation tools in Business English Writing: An experimental study among Indonesian undergraduates

2025-11-26T10:47:43+00:00

Business English writing competence is increasingly critical for Indonesian university graduates navigating global professional environments, yet many students continue to experience persistent difficulties with grammar, coherence, and professional register. Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) tools such as Grammarly and Grammark provide immediate, data-driven feedback that may support writing development beyond surface-level error correction (Barrot, 2021; Calma et al., 2022). This quasi-experimental study examined whether AWE integration in a Business English writing course improved Indonesian undergraduates' perceived usefulness, ease of use, motivation, self-regulated learning (SRL), and writing self-efficacy (WSE), relative to conventional instructor feedback. Sixty undergraduate students were randomly assigned to an AWE group (n = 30) or a control group (n = 30). A validated 38-item Likert questionnaire and open-ended reflective prompts were administered post-intervention. Three key findings emerged: (1) AWE significantly enhanced perceived usefulness (d = 2.92) and ease of use (d = 2.74); (2) motivation, self-regulated learning, and writing self-efficacy increased substantially in the AWE group; and (3) students unanimously recommended a hybrid AWE–teacher feedback model to address AWE's limitations in higher-order writing development (Thi & Nikolov, 2022). These findings suggest that AWE integration holds considerable promise for Indonesian EFL Business English instruction, particularly when systematically complemented by expert human feedback.

Google Gemini-assisted writing and lexical appropriateness in EFL Paragraph Writing: Evidence of stability across tasks

2026-02-23T09:50:42+00:00

This study examined the influence of Google Gemini, a generative artificial-intelligence (AI) tool, on the lexical appropriateness of Indonesian EFL students’ paragraph writing. Drawing on theories of lexical richness and appropriateness, the study employed an exploratory quasi-experimental design involving three writing conditions: a baseline task, an AI-assisted revision task, and a delayed post-test without AI support. Fourteen second-year English Language Teaching students (A2–B1 CEFR) participated in the study. Lexical appropriateness was measured using Type-Token Ratio (TTR) and Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (MTLD), and the data were analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVA to examine differences across tasks. The results revealed no statistically significant differences in lexical diversity across the three conditions, suggesting that short-term interaction with Google Gemini did not lead to measurable improvement in lexical appropriateness. Qualitative observations further indicated that limited vocabulary depth and low metalinguistic awareness constrained students’ ability to evaluate and apply AI-generated lexical suggestions. These findings suggest that lexical appropriateness is reflective, and instruction-dependent process, and that AI tools such as Google Gemini function more as a potential scaffolding partner rather than autonomous enhancers of lexical development.

From beliefs to practices: University English lecturers’ digital technology integration in a regional Vietnamese context

2026-02-23T09:53:25+00:00

Digital technology integration has become a central feature of English language teaching (ELT) in higher education, yet how lecturers translate positive beliefs into classroom practices remains uneven, especially in underrepresented regional settings. This qualitative study examines how university English lecturers in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, a socio-economically diverse region where national digital transformation agendas are mediated by local infrastructural and pedagogical constraints, move from beliefs to practices in integrating digital technologies into ELT. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 purposively selected lecturers and analyzed thematically through an inductive-deductive approach. The findings reveal broad endorsement of technology’s pedagogical value alongside marked variation in instructional and assessment enactments. Lecturers’ adoption patterns are best understood along a continuum from high adopters to emerging and minimal users, shaped by pedagogical orientation, perceived usefulness and ease of use, assessment literacy, and contextual and institutional conditions. The study sharpens teacher cognition research by showing that the belief-practice relationship is non-linear and mediated, and by conceptualizing technology adoption as a continuum rather than a fixed typology in a regional ELT context in higher education. Implications are discussed for professional development, institutional support, and sustainable digital transformation in ELT.

Rhetorical structure and metadiscourse markers of local and international agriculture research abstracts

2026-02-23T09:45:25+00:00

Educational mandates promoting a research culture among educators and students emphasize the importance of high-quality research publications. A critical component of this is writing effective research abstracts, a key requirement for journal acceptance. This comparative genre-based study aimed to analyze the macrostructure and linguistic features of 40 local agricultural research abstracts from a state university journal and 40 international abstracts from reputable journals covering 2011-2024. Using Hyland’s (2000, 2004, 2005) frameworks, the rhetorical structures, metadiscourse patterns, and communicative functions of the corpora were analyzed. Both local and international abstracts commonly employed moves like Purpose, Method, and Product. Local abstracts considered the Introduction and Conclusion moves as optional, while these moves were conventional in international abstracts. Typical patterns for local abstracts were PMPrC and PMPr, while most international abstracts followed Hyland's IPMPrC framework. Both sets used metadiscourse markers, but international abstracts employed them more frequently, favoring boosters over hedges to emphasize certainty and validation. These findings highlight the importance of adhering to international academic writing norms to enhance research visibility and impact, with implications for teaching academic writing and research.

The role of evaluative nouns in shaping modern English movie discourse: An axiological and morphological analysis

2026-03-19T09:59:45+00:00

Evaluative language has been widely examined, but evaluative nouns in cinematic discourse remain insufficiently studied. This study addresses this gap by systematically analyzing evaluative nouns in English movie dialogue. A sample of 176 lexemes with explicit evaluative marking was selected from authoritative dictionaries and analyzed using The Movie Corpus with a frequency threshold of ≥10 occurrences. The study combines lexicographic analysis with corpus-based methods to identify recurrent patterns and contextual usage. The findings reveal a strong quantitative asymmetry between negative and positive evaluative nouns (84 vs. 8), indicating a linguistic tendency to mark deviations in cinematic language. Morphologically, evaluative meanings are primarily realized through suffixation, with -y/-ie, -ling, -er, and -o demonstrating high productivity in the dataset. These suffixes exhibit functional ambivalence, encoding both pejorative and meliorative meanings depending on context. The results show that evaluative nouns function as recurrent elements in cinematic dialogue, contributing to character construction and interactional dynamics. This study contributes to evaluative morphology and discourse analysis by integrating lexicographic and corpus-based approaches. The findings may inform research in film studies, translation, and applied linguistics.

Task-based essay writing material: Integrating global Englishes into English language teaching

2026-03-18T09:30:03+00:00

This study explores how essay writing material integrating task-based approach and Global Englishes (GE) in English Language Teaching (ELT). Native-speaker norms and prescriptive standards are often emphasized in traditional writing pedagogy especially in higher education contexts, neglecting learners’ multilingual repertoires and the role of English as a global lingua franca. Due to this gap, Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) framework was used to design materials to scaffold academic writing skills and to justify students’ multilingual repertoires. Employing a qualitative case study, this study shows how TBLT and diverse English varieties can be integrated into essay writing tasks using data from needs analysis, classroom observations, and student feedback. This study involved our lecturers and fifty-three undergraduate students in an essay writing course, who share similar backgrounds and regularly use multiple languages. The findings show that (1) students participated more actively in writing tasks, (2) they demonstrated greater critical awareness of multilingual English use in their reflections and essays, and (3) they expressed increased confidence in using their own linguistic resources. The module also addresses the limitations of monolingual writing conventions in the Indonesian higher education context. Overall, the study shows that TBLT is an effective approach for integrating GE into writing classrooms. Aligning academic pedagogy with the sociolinguistic diversities of GE was the implication for material developers, teachers, and institutions.

AI-based English module needs analysis for Indonesian content creator

2025-11-28T03:23:36+00:00

The rapid growth of Indonesia’s digital economy has increased the importance of English proficiency for digital content creators. However, many digital content creators still lack the specific language skills required for global communication in this field. This study aims to identify the English language needs of digital content creators and to inform the development of an AI-based English module. A mixed-method design was employed, involving a questionnaire completed by 69 undergraduate students and interview with one English lecturer at the Collage of Multimedia (MMTC), Yogyakarta. The findings indicate that students perceive their English proficiency as moderate, with significant needs in productive skills, particularly pronunciation, speaking, and grammar for digital content task such as scripting and captioning. Students also demonstrate positive attitudes toward AI-assisted learning, especially for feedback and personalized practice, although concerns about over-reliance and ethical use remain. These results highlight the importance of integrating AI tools with authentic content creation tasks while maintaining pedagogical guidance and ethical awareness.

Exploring English teachers’ barriers in integrating moderation values amid curriculum changes

2026-03-20T02:57:11+00:00

The moderation value integration is sensitive for religion-based educational institutions, mainly for madrasahs, in Surakarta in preventing the social conflicts among different ethnics, races, and religions. The last five-times changes of the national curriculum at high schools, since 2004, have brought about schools and teachers’ barriers in integrating the moderation values to their English teaching and learning process. This paper explores the English teachers’ barriers in integrating the moderation values in their teaching and learning activities amid the curriculum changes. The data were taken qualitatively using interviews and observations to English teachers and headmasters of the two best madrasahs, MAN 1 and MAN 2, in Surakarta. The triangulated data were analyzed using Analytic Induction into eight kinds of teachers’ barriers. The findings show that the teachers have four areas of barriers: a) low moderation value literacy and no manuals; b) past failure experiences; c) moderation integration as a new habit; d) learning English and moderation value achievement imbalances. They have no barrier in four areas: a) the expertise shift; b) the school power relations; c) the interpersonal relationships; d) the human resource replacement. This research helps the schools and teachers in identifying and solving the eight areas of barriers in implementing new change of curriculum, mainly in integrating the moderation values. These findings imply that school and teachers’ readiness and creativity are basic in integrating moderation values amid the curriculum changes.

The mondegreen effect in L2 speech perception: An investigation of phonological ambiguity and cognitive expectation in the speeches of Indonesian university students

2026-03-18T09:33:30+00:00

This study investigates the Mondegreen effect in second language (L2) listening by examining how phonological ambiguity and cognitive expectation interact to shape auditory misperception among Indonesian university-level EFL learners. While prior research has often treated L2 listening difficulties as either phonological decoding problems or failures of top-down processing, this study offers an integrated account by analyzing misperceptions across multiple linguistic levels. Data were collected from 165 Indonesian undergraduate students through a listening transcription task involving 12 naturally produced English utterances characterized by connected speech, prosodic variation, and phonological reduction. A total of 1,980 responses were analyzed and categorized into word, phrase, clause, and sentence-level misperceptions. The findings show that 39.9% of responses involved misperception, with sentence-level reinterpretations emerging as the most frequent pattern, followed by word-level substitutions and lower rates at clause and phrase levels. The analysis demonstrates that auditory misperception is systematically triggered by reduced and ambiguous speech signals, which obscure segmentation and activate competing lexical candidates. Crucially, listeners do not merely fail to decode input but actively reconstruct meaning, often relying on top-down expectations that override bottom-up acoustic cues. This study contributes to L2 speech perception research by reframing Mondegreens as evidence of dynamic meaning construction rather than perceptual error. It also highlights the interaction between phonological processing and cognitive expectation in real-time listening. Pedagogically, the findings suggest the need for greater emphasis on prosodic training, segmentation awareness, and metacognitive strategies to enhance learners’ perceptual resilience in authentic listening contexts.

Effects of Kahoot!-mediated vocabulary instruction on vocabulary gains and learner attitudes: A mixed-methods study in a Vietnamese public high school

2025-12-11T04:33:48+00:00

This study examined the hypothesis of whether Kahoot!-mediated instruction could enhance the learning of English vocabulary in Grade 11 students and whether students had a positive perception of the platform in a Vietnamese high school setting. The research addressed a practical issue that has been used in numerous EFL classrooms in Lam Dong Province: the students were expected to achieve the curriculum and proficiency requirements, and yet, many remained unable to remember and apply vocabulary correctly in class and test results. The mixed-methods design was used during eight weeks and included 62 students (11th grade) in an experimental group (n = 27) and a control group (n = 35). Vocabulary pre-tests and post-tests, and a Likert-scale attitude questionnaire were used to gather quantitative data, and semi-structured interviews with the chosen students of the experimental group were used to collect qualitative data. Experimental group was vocabulary training using Kahoot! and the control group used standard vocabulary training. The results revealed that a definite improvement was observed in the experimental group between pre-test and post-test compared to the control group where a definite change in the weak and average bands could be seen to fairly good and good bands. The attitude outcomes were also good: students evaluated Kahoot! to be fun and helpful in practice and as effective in learning new words. The data of interviews also indicated that Kahoot! encouraged paying attention, playing, competition, fun, and the practice of vocabulary. The paper claims that Kahoot! is not just a motivational tool; when it is incorporated into the systematic lessons of the curriculum, it can be used to facilitate the process of vocabulary learning and to provide the environment of a more interactive learning experience. The article provides context-related data of a Vietnamese secondary-school context and explains how gamified platforms could be organized towards pedagogical objectives, instead of being used as a form of entertainment.

A thematic analysis of preservice teachers’ peer feedback in teacher education

2026-03-20T02:42:20+00:00

Peer feedback plays a key role as a way of encouraging reflective practice and professional learning in teacher education, but there is less understanding about how preservice teachers assess the instructional quality influenced by evaluative orientations. In this qualitative research, the researcher seeks to know the themes of peer feedback given by preservice English teachers after instructional activities. Thematic analysis was applied to the peers’ evaluative comments to determine common criteria that were used to construct the teaching effectiveness. There were three themes: (1) the focus on the relevance of the topic to the learners, (2) the importance of interactions and discussion-based activities, and (3) the lack of interest in linguistic scaffolding and pedagogical rigor. These findings show that peer feedback primarily indicates adherence to the principles of communicative language teaching, particularly learner-centeredness and interaction but does not pay sufficient attention to linguistic rigor and learning outcomes. Through the lenses of second language acquisition and teacher education, the findings imply that even though preservice teachers show conceptual approval of communicative pedagogy, they need more assistance in the creation of evaluative literacy that relates the engagement-based practices to the process of language learning and teaching. This study adds to existing literature on peer feedback in teacher education by pointing out the necessity of systematic instructions in peer evaluation practices.