EFL Reformed Curriculum in Vietnam: An Understanding of Teachers’ Cognitions and Classroom Practices

Second/foreign language (L2) education reforms have triggered increasing research investigating the effectiveness of and teachers’ cognitions and practices concerning the reformed curricula. This study extends this line of enquiry by employing a sociological perspective, an undertaking that little prior research has demonstrated in L2 teacher cognition literature, to explore teachers’ understanding, knowledge and beliefs about and their actual implementation of a reformed English language curriculum (i.e. task-supported language teaching) in Vietnam. The participants were six experienced English-as-a-foreign-language teachers at a secondary school. The data comprised in-depth semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, lesson plans and classroom observations. The findings showed that the teachers made use of their existing deep-rooted knowledge and beliefs about language teaching and learning to enact the reformed curriculum in their own ways, illustrating a focus-on-forms approach. The study drew on Bernstein's notion of pedagogic discourse to shed light on the teachers’ rationales for their own ways of practice. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

Teaching English Grammar in an Indonesian Junior High School

English grammar has a pivotal position in language learning. It is also considered the basis of a series of language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). However, although previous studies focused on teaching English grammar either from a traditional or functional view, where English as L1 and L2 across various educational levels, scarce studies have emphasized teaching English Grammar in the Indonesian EFL context, particularly in Junior High School. Hence, this study aimed at filling such a void, namely teaching English grammar in an Indonesian junior high school. In an attempt for collecting the data, this study interviewed a participant in one of the junior high schools in Tasikmalaya, West Java, Indonesia. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun Clarke, 2006). The findings of this study revealed that the teacher use focus on forms and focus on form in teaching English grammar. Those focus on forms involve (1) Deductive English Teaching Grammar, (2) Score-Oriented English Language Learning Activities, and (3) Accuracy-Oriented English Language Learning Activities. Another approach is focus on form include (1) Task-Based Sentence Making and (2) Contextual Teaching of English Grammar. By knowing these teaching techniques, the teachers are expected to be able to implement those teaching techniques of teaching English grammar to junior high school students more effectively.

READING UNDERSTANDING OF PRAYER WORSHIP AMONG MALAY MUSLIM NUSANTARA COMMUNITY: PROPOSED MODULE

Awareness Malay Muslim community in worship today is greatly increased. Education in the mosque for the public in the city as well as in the villages and hamlets is more advanced and extensive, covering all areas such as ‘aqidah, fiqh, morality, and so on. But in studying the basic sciences, the Malay Muslim culture still tied to the correct reading only, where they emphasize reading, implementing (fi'li), and keep the traditions, without focusing on the question of which maximum understanding and the self-values of such worship. The recitation of ibadah such as the recitation of prayers, supplications, and others is very much demanded to appreciate its meaning because it is one of the ‘obligatory ibadah in Islam. Understanding this reading is an important factor in obtaining the value of khusyu 'in worship. Then this article will focus on forms of worship into Malay Islamic culture that demands changes for the better and positive impact on the lives of individuals, families. society in a country. The author took a field research method to assess the needs of the community and the form of modules that need to be absorbed to them in understanding the daily worship conducted. The study showed that they are very excited with the proposed module and the results of the sample implementation test greatly affect the reading comprehension 'worship and can achieve the value of khusyu 'in performing worship.

La signoria rurale nell’Italia del tardo medioevo. 3 L’azione politica locale

Rural lordship is one of the classic medieval themes of recent decades, but its specific developments of the late Middle Ages have long been neglected by research, especially engaged in considering other processes in these centuries, such as the construction of regional states, the economic dynamics, the urban riots. This volume, as part of a large research project coordinated by Sandro Carocci, intends to help fill this gap by offering a wide sample of cases, relating to very different areas of the Italian peninsula. Local realities are investigated here from a very specific perspective, that is, in their strictly political dimension: while taking into account the broad contexts (economic, settlement and social) in which the rural lordships are located, the main questions of this volume focus on forms of the lordly domain and its relations with the subjects, with the regional states and with the other lordly powers.

EFL Students’ Beliefs about How They Learn Grammar Best

Learner beliefs about how they learn a language best play a vital role in the instructional process and the role of grammar instruction has been a much-debated topic in the research and practice of EFL instruction. This study explores learner beliefs about how they best learn grammar focusing on four construct pairs: meaning-focused versus form-focused instruction, focus on form versus focus on forms, explicit versus implicit instruction, and inductive versus deductive grammar instruction. Data were collected through a survey from 927 preparatory year and undergraduate students at an English-medium university in an English as a foreign language (EFL) setting. Results showed that regardless of year of study, students showed a preference for having grammar included as part of their lessons and course books, and although focus on form was reported to be the least preferred method of instruction, when given a choice between implicit versus explicit grammar instruction, all groups preferred explicit instruction.

A Strong Judiciary as a Crisis for Democracy: A ‘Law and Development’ Study from Pakistan

By the late 1990s, international financial institutions prescribed a ‘good governance’ paradigm that sought to empower the judiciary to curb ‘state capture’ by the corrupt political elites of developing countries. Good governance was supposed to act as a midwife to economic development, providing the ‘rule of law’ for the free market reforms of structural adjustment programs that had hitherto failed to provide much success. This article examines the implementation of ‘good governance’ in Pakistan, arguing that empowering the judiciary served to weaken an already weak legislature. The tangible issues of popular political representation and economic redistribution were displaced by the discourses on the control of corruption and the rule of law. Based on this experience, the article encourages a shift in law and developmental theorizing to focus on forms of legislature and democratic rule and a redefined role for the ‘civil society’ within this.

THE RETRIEVABILITY OF L2 ENGLISH MULTIWORD ITEMS IN A CONTEXT OF STRONGLY FORM-FOCUSED EXPOSURE

Although retrieval of lexical forms is a prerequisite for language production, research of L2 vocabulary learning has focused much more on meanings and form-meaning mappings than on development of detailed, accessible mental representations of forms. This is particularly true with respect to multi-word items (MWIs). We report an experimental study involving a variety of intra-lexical, usage-based, and interlingual co-determinants of L2 vocabulary learnability pertaining to MWIs. Each learner (N = 60) encountered a randomly allocated set of 26 two-word MWIs (Nsets = 4) semi-randomly drawn from a larger pool of MWIs. Learners were asked to remember either the 13 MWIs showing the form variable assonance (e.g., change shape) or the 13 nonassonant control MWIs (e.g., sound good). Posttests of form recall revealed a large, durable effect of the focusing task in combination with forewarning of testing. Except when MWI concreteness (a semantic variable) was high, assonance had a positive effect on retrievability in recall tests given after delays of 15 minutes and one week. There was a consistent effect of the semi-semantic variable Mutual Information. Even in the context of a strong focus on forms, form variables are not the only variables that matter.

ISOLATED AND INTEGRATED GRAMMAR TEACHING IN TERTIARY EFL CONTEXT: INDONESIAN TEACHERS’ BELIEFS

While there are a lot of debates surrounding isolated and integrated grammar teaching, there is still limited research on their uses in EFL settings with larger class sizes and different learning environments. To fill in this gap, this case study investigates teachers’ beliefs toward isolated grammar teaching (Focus on Forms/FoFs) and integrated grammar teaching (largely a version of Focus on Form/FonF) in the context of EFL tertiary language study in Indonesia. The data were obtained by conducting semi-structured interviews with 10 Indonesian teachers of a private university’s English language program. In general, the teachers tended to value one of the approaches for different aspects, but there was less consensus on their effectiveness to promote students’ ability to apply grammar in context. In spite of this, most considered the approaches to complement each other. Nevertheless, over half of the participants indicated that isolated grammar teaching should assume a primary role in their context for practical reasons. Drawing on mostly teachers' experience in grammar teaching, this small-scale research offers more crucial insights into how isolated and integrated grammar teaching like FonFs and FonF are viewed at a more practical level amidst controversies on how to best teach grammar.