Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Online First

The paper presents the results of a study that aimed to investigate fluctuations in the levels of boredom in the virtual world of Second Life (SL) and factors accounting for such changes as reported by a single student of English philology. The participant took part in 15 sessions over the period of one summer semester. The learner was free to explore the virtual world in question, and she self-directed her own learning there. Using data collected by means of a set of research instruments (i.e., a background questionnaire, the Learning Style Survey, a session log, and a semi-structured interview), the study found that the student’s experience of boredom was subject to some changes both in single sessions and from one visit to another. These fluctuations in boredom levels were affected by such factors as meeting the same interlocutors, scarcity of conversation topics, monotonous conversations, group chats or visits that the student perceived as not being beneficial for her language development.

Transplanting non-Western religions to Western nations results in first-generation migrant attempts to transmit faith in vastly different contexts. Especially as adolescents, second-generation migrants tackle mediating their personal religious beliefs in a society with diverse religions and ideologies as well as negotiating membership of their ethnoreligious community. This paper draws from an ethnography in a Tamil Hindu temple in Australia. I present Sri Lankan teenage migrants’ discourse from their faith classroom to elucidate processes of belief positioning. In working out their emergent, and provisional, faith identities, the students deploy mainly Tamil and English linguistic features in their belief narratives. Flexible languaging complements their “syncretic acts” – the practice of drawing on diverse ideologies and experiences (outside the boundaries of a particular religion) to form personalized beliefs. Translanguaging thus facilitates the expression of circumspect, nuanced, and non-traditional interpretations of their heritage religion. Understanding such processes of belief positioning can help societies and institutions to work towards migrant youth inclusion.

Since the introduction of Indonesian in the 1950s, the nature and extent of programs for studying the language in Australian schools has varied significantly. A decade on from the national report on the state of Indonesian language education in Australian schools that indicated a substantial decline in provision ( Kohler & Mahnken, 2010 ), it is timely to take stock and consider how Indonesian is faring and why. This paper reports on a mixed methods study exploring the state and nature of Indonesian language provision in government schools in Australia. The findings indicate that while some decline continues overall, patterns of provision vary, particularly at different levels of schooling. The findings highlight the need for a nuanced understanding of the confluence of factors impacting on Indonesian (including contending ideologies), none of which adequately capture the intrinsic value and distinctiveness of studying Indonesian in the Australian context.

International education constitutes a key industry in Australia and international students represent a third of university students at Australian universities. This paper examines the media representation of international students in terms of their English language proficiency. The study applies Critical Discourse Analysis to the multimodal data of an episode of a current affairs TV program, Four Corners, and social media comments made to the episode. Using Social Actor Analysis, the study finds that the responsibility for declining standards at universities is assigned to international students through representations of their language use as problematic. This is supported by the visual representation of international students as different. By systematically mapping out the English-as-a-problem discourse, the paper finds that the media representation of language proficiency and language learning is simplistic and naïve and the social media discussion reinforces this. This further contributes to the discursive exclusion of international students.

This study explored the affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement of 18 Iranian EFL learners with oral corrective feedback on lexical stress errors. The data were collected using questionnaires, pretests, posttests, and interviews. The questionnaire responses showed that the participants held various perceptions about direct feedback. Additionally, the pretest and posttest results indicated that the learners with positive perceptions about direct feedback had significant lexical stress accuracy gains. Also, the students who viewed direct feedback favorably showed positive affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement with it. These learners, for instance, frequently reviewed the provided feedback and used cognitive resources when utilizing it. In contrast, the students with negative perceptions about direct feedback showed negative engagement with it. The findings suggest that learners’ affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement can determine the working of feedback. Also, students’ perceptions seem to filter the feedback they receive, thereby helping shape how they engage with feedback.

This article reports on two quasi-experimental studies that investigated the possible development and transfer of audience awareness in novice EFL writers as they engaged in online writing tasks through a Social Networking Service (SNS). Japanese students from two universities were asked to write, read, and comment on other students’ writing once a week. The two studies were arranged sequentially so as to capture in an exploratory but jointly illuminating manner whether and how the “elusive” ( Hyland, 2005 ) construct of “sense of audience” can develop and transfer across genres. The results of both studies suggest that the SNS environment can help L2 writers develop audience awareness and transfer that awareness across genres when two conditions are met: (1) the genre of the SNS tasks should be perceived as similar to that for which transfer was expected; and (2) the students did not develop a sense of audience in previous writing instruction.