Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 39, Issue 3, 2016

The teaching of writing in English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) has been a challenging task for many teachers due to its multifaceted nature. This paper is a reflection on ESL/EFL writing teaching in three countries, namely China, Singapore, and New Zealand, with particular reference to professionalizing ESL/EFL writing and ESL/EFL writing-teacher education. It first addresses issues facing EFL writing and writing-teacher education that relate to the offering of English at various levels in China. It then moves on to elaborate on how western pedagogical practices have been implemented in Singapore, especially that of a genre-based pedagogy. Nestled in the context of globalization, I focus on New Zealand, positing that globalization has exacerbated the challenge in teaching ESL writing because of large numbers of students who are seeking higher education in western countries in English as the medium of instruction, and yet their first language is not English. I conclude the paper with recommendations that professionalizing L2 writing (even in school settings) is a mission for all those who are in this enterprise. Proper teacher preparation programs for training L2 writing teachers should be in place in order for this to happen. China needs to critically appraise, and learn from, successful experiences such as Singapore and many institutions in the USA and Canada. New Zealand is yet to formalize ESOL writing teacher preparation programs, where English-as-an-L2 writing-teacher education for primary and secondary schools is still not a priority in most teacher-education institutions.

Teacher assessment literacy (AL) is a concern for both educational assessment and teacher education research. As part of teacher AL, teacher competency of assessment planning has remained underexplored. To address this gap, this study explored how a group of 20 contest-winning university English teachers in China planned for assessment through qualitative analyses of their lesson plans and follow-up teacher interviews. The findings show that: (1) lesson plans include assessment-related components such as teaching objectives, student background, instruction-embedded assessment, and after-class assessment tasks; (2) their assessment planning is characterized by a clear understanding of learning goals, but an absence of rubrics and exemplars for performance assessments, over-reliance on groups as target of assessment, and inconsistencies between learning objectives and assessment tasks; and (3) their assessment planning was mainly intuitive and instruction-oriented. This paper concludes with a working model of assessment planning, and discusses a future research agenda for assessment planning.

Australian research on immigrant languages has paid little attention to interactional approaches to language alternation as identity construction, and sites other than the family and the mainstream school. We argue for the need of studies that take into account a wider range of sites, in particular ‘community’ sites, and adopt fine-grained approaches through micro-level data, to provide more linguistic evidence and support for findings identified using other strategies. Drawing on micro-sociolinguistic research conducted in Australia in the ethnic media and the community languages schools, we show how in these ‘in-between’ sites ( Tsolidis & Kostogriz, 2008 ) language choice is often a matter of negotiation, and the issues of language use and identity tend to be foregrounded. We also address the questions of why these sites have been less researched and the value of findings from them in terms of language and identity research in multilingual contexts.

Within applied linguistics, understanding of motivation and cognition has benefitted from substantial attention for decades, but the attention received by language learner emotions has not been comparable until recently when interest in emotions and the role they can play in language learning has increased. Emotions are at the core of human experience, so a greater understanding of their impact on language learners is critical. In particular, the role and impact of positive emotions on learners and their learning experience has been overlooked in favour of a focus on issues of confidence and anxiety. One particular positive emotion that has a meaningful connection with the learning experience is that of pride. Drawing on qualitative interview data from tertiary English language learners in Australian universities, this article singles out pride as a means of confirming the critical role of positive emotions in language learning. The interviews revealed that pride had a significant impact on the experiences of learners. It was also discovered that within the notion of pride there exists a degree of dimensionality. Pride is felt in communicative contexts whereas a feeling of ‘non-pride’ can occur in learning contexts. The article also presents implications arising from the study concerning the place of emotions in language teaching and learning.