Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
135,800
result(s) for
"Language Teachers"
Sort by:
The Effect of Perception of Teacher Characteristics on Spanish EFL Learners' Anxiety and Enjoyment
The present study explores the relationship between Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) and Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) and a number of teacher-centered variables within the Spanish classroom context. Participants were 210 former and current learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) from all over Spain who filled out an online questionnaire with Likert scale items. A moderate negative relationship emerged between FLE and FLCA. Participants who had an L1 English speaker as a teacher reported more FLE and less FLCA than those with a foreign language user of English. Teacher characteristics predicted close to 20% of variance in FLE but only 8% of variance in FLCA. The strongest positive predictor of FLE was a teacher's friendliness while a teacher's foreign accent was a weaker negative predictor. Teacher-centered variables predicted much less variance for FLCA. Participants experienced more FLCA with younger teachers, very strict teachers, and teachers who did not use the foreign language much in class. The findings confirm earlier research that FLE seems to be more dependent on the teachers' pedagogical skills than FLCA.
Journal Article
Unpacking Chinese EFL Students’ Academic Engagement and Psychological Well-Being: The Roles of Language Teachers’ Affective Scaffolding
Over the past decade, there has appeared a surge of research interest in language learners’ academic engagement and psychological well-being as important factors in improving the quality of education. However, research on the roles of English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ affective scaffolding in enhancing the academic engagement and psychological well-being of their students is relatively scant. Inspired by this gap, the current study aimed to investigate the impact of Chinese EFL teachers’ affective scaffolding on their learners’ academic engagement and psychological well-being. To this end, a total number of 1968 Chinese EFL learners participated in this questionnaire survey. The results of the study showed that EFL teachers’ affective scaffolding positively and significantly predicted students’ academic engagement and psychological well-being. More specifically, it was found that teachers’ affective scaffolding explained about 73% and 65% of variances in EFL students’ academic engagement and psychological well-being. Moreover, it was found that psychological well-being and academic engagement were positively correlated and predicted 56% of each other’s variances. In accordance with these findings, educators are recommended to build up a harmonious teacher-student relationship to foster students’ psych-emotional development.
Journal Article
To resist it or to embrace it? Examining ChatGPT’s potential to support teacher feedback in EFL writing
ChatGPT, the newest pre-trained large language model, has recently attracted unprecedented worldwide attention. Its exceptional performance in understanding human language and completing a variety of tasks in a conversational way has led to heated discussions about its implications for and use in education. This exploratory study represents one of the first attempts to examine the possible role of ChatGPT in facilitating the teaching and learning of writing English as a Foreign Language (EFL). We examined ChatGPT’s potential to support EFL teachers’ feedback on students’ writing. To reach this goal, we first investigated ChatGPT’s performance in generating feedback on EFL students’ argumentative writing. Fifty English argumentative essays composed by Chinese undergraduate students were collected and used as feedback targets. ChatGPT and five Chinese EFL teachers offered feedback on the content, organisation, and language aspects of the essays. We compared ChatGPT- and teacher-generated feedback in terms of their amount and type. The results showed that ChatGPT produced a significantly larger amount of feedback than teachers and that compared with teacher feedback, which mainly focused on content-related and language-related issues, ChatGPT distributed its attention relatively equally among the three feedback foci (i.e., content, organisation, and language). Our results also indicated that ChatGPT and teachers displayed tendencies towards using different feedback types when evaluating different aspects of students’ writing. Additionally, we examined EFL teachers’ perceptions of using ChatGPT-generated feedback to support their own feedback. The five teachers reported both positive and negative perceptions of the features of ChatGPT feedback and the relation between ChatGPT and teacher feedback. To foster EFL students’ writing skills, we suggest that teachers collaborate with ChatGPT in generating feedback on student writing.
Journal Article
Tracing the Signature Dynamics of Language Teacher Immunity: A Retrodictive Qualitative Modeling Study
This article describes a validation study using Retrodictive Qualitative Modeling, a framework for conducting research from a dynamic and situated perspective, to establish an empirical foundation for a new phenomenological construct—language teacher immunity. Focus groups (N= 44) conducted with second language (L2) practitioners and teacher educators and a cluster analysis of questionnaire data with a larger sample (N= 293) of K-12 language teachers were used to identify and corroborate typical archetypes across the spectrum of language teacher immunity outcomes. Serial in-depth interviews were then conducted with representative respondents from each archetype (N = 18) to trace developmental trajectories and investigate how these profiles manifested phenomenologically in teachers' motivated thought and instructional practices. Results indicate that teacher immunity is associated with practitioners' psychological, emotional, and cognitive functioning in the social setting of the L2 classroom. These findings contribute to the field's understanding of how language teachers sustain their adaptivity, openness to change, psychological well-being, and their sense of purpose and investment in students' learning. Thus, teacher immunity has the potential to bridge individual and situative concerns in second language teacher education and the psychology of language teaching and learning.
Journal Article
Reflections on task-based language teaching
\"This book discusses whether task-based language teaching is appropriate for all learners in all instructional contexts. Chapters cover both research and pedagogy and draw on the author's experience of working with teachers to suggest ways of addressing the problems they often face with task-based language teaching\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Introduction: Identity, Transdisciplinarity, and the Good Language Teacher
What constitutes a \"good teacher\" and \"good teaching\" has come under much scrutiny in an age of globalization, transnationalism, and increased demands for accountability. It is against this evolving landscape and the pathbreaking work of the Douglas Fir Group (DFG, 2016) that this special issue engages the following two broad questions: (a) In what ways is language teaching \"identity work\"? and (b) To what extent does a transdisciplinary approach to language learning and teaching offer insight into language teacher identity? We begin this Introduction with a discussion on identity research in second language acquisition and applied linguistics, and then address innovations in language teacher identity research, exploring how this work has been advanced methodologically through narratives, discourse analysis, and an ethical consideration of research practices. We then consider how the transdisciplinary framework of the DFG, and its focus on macro, meso, and micro dimensions of language learning at the ideological, institutional, and classroom levels, respectively, might contribute to our understanding of language teacher identity. In the final section, we argue that the host of complementary theories adopted by the six contributors supports the view that a transdisciplinary approach to language teacher identity is both productive and desirable. Further, the contributors advance the language teacher identity research agenda by taking into consideration (a) how teacher identity intersects with the multilingual (Higgins and Ponte) and translingual (Zheng) realities of contemporary classrooms, (b) the investment of teachers in developing the semiotic repertoires of learners (Stranger-Johannessen and Norton) and a socially inclusive learning environment (Barkhuizen), and (c) the emotions (Wolff and De Costa) and ethical practices (Miller, Morgan, and Medina) of teachers. Central to all articles in this special issue is the need to recognize the rich linguistic and personal histories that language teachers bring into the classroom in order to promote effective language learning.
Journal Article