The qualitative study presented in this paper aimed to collect beliefs about learning and teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) from individual representatives of the generation frequently referred to as the millennials. The participants were 47 pre-service EFL trainee teachers from four socio-cultural contexts: Finnish, Israeli, Polish, and Spanish. Their voices have been considered because beliefs are dynamically related to actions and soon the millennial EFL teachers may implement them in the course of their teaching. The contextual approach, followed in this research, provided opportunities for discussing similarities and differences in the beliefs of Finnish, Israeli, Polish, and Spanish pre-service teachers. The identified similarities lead to outlining a tentative picture of a universal, future, post-pandemic EFL classroom.

Learners’ beliefs on language learning and perceived self-efficacy are important to the success of their second/foreign language (SL/FL) learning. To reveal the general profiles of and relationship between Chinese students’ beliefs about English learning and self-efficacy, the present study examined beliefs about English learning and self-efficacy held by Chinese university EFL (English as a FL) learners at differing English proficiency levels. A total of 1,698 students from a top university in Beijing answered a battery of questionnaires. The results revealed a general overview of the students’ beliefs about the nature of language learning and the roles of teachers, feedback and learning strategies, and self-efficacy. Another major finding was that participants at different English proficiency levels differed significantly from one another in beliefs about language learning and self-efficacy.

Research on compassion has received increasing attention over the past decades (Seppälä et al., 2017). However, empirical studies focusing on the role of compassion for teachers still remain sparse to date. This paper reports on a study designed to investigate the wellbeing of 21 language teachers across the globe during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. In particular, the study sought out to examine the ways in which compassion and self-compassion contributed to the wellbeing of language teachers during this time. Data were generated through in-depth, semi-structured individual online interviews and were analyzed from
a Grounded Theory perspective (Charmaz, 2006). Findings revealed that acts of compassion in the workplace and in the private lives of the teachers played a crucial role in shaping our participants’ wellbeing during this time of crisis. Furthermore, self-compassion emerged as an important factor influencing the wellbeing of teachers during the pandemic crisis. Indeed, compassion and self-compassion served as core elements in their teaching and appeared to affect their relationships with their students, colleagues, and headteachers. In the absence of compassion, the stressful and challenging situation they were already experiencing was exacerbated. These findings imply the potential benefits of compassion and self-compassion training for teachers, administrators, and policymakers to support and promote wellbeing in the educational workplace.

Discovering the new variants of coronavirus by the end of 2020 pushed many countries to continue suspending universities and schools. A complete change to online learning seemed the only available option to continue education given the detection of new coronavirus variants. Such a long time of using online learning can display how teachers experience this hard time of the pandemic. The researchers performed this study to explore EFL teachers’ perceptions of online learning in a Saudi university during this period. They aimed to have a closer look at EFL teachers’ perceptions of the sudden shift into online learning. They focused on the teachers’ benefits, drawbacks, and suggestions. They used a questionnaire and interviews to collect qualitative data to answer research questions. Results showed five benefits and two drawbacks of using online learning to teach English in that Saudi university. The benefits are being a good and useful option for teaching during the coronavirus pandemic, motivation of teachers, ease of access and use, interacting between teachers and students, and being less teacher-centered. The drawbacks are disruption by poor Internet and technical issues and cheating by students on assessments. The participants provided some suggestions to improve the benefits and overcome the drawbacks.

Metacognition is a complex construct widely investigated in SLA studies, also those that focus on reading skills and reading comprehension. Ample research points to metacognition as a strong predictor in developing foreign language reading skills, thus promoting metacognitive strategies in FL education is highly recommended. This paper presents a report on a study in which Polish FL learners kept a diary for a period of one month and wrote comments in reference to the reading classes in which they participated. The data obtained from the students’ narrations allowed to examine the learners’ metacognitive beliefs defined in the study as knowledge about cognition, consisting of three components: person knowledge, task knowledge, and strategy knowledge (Flavell, 1981). The diary data were analyzed in a global narrative way, which enabled the researcher to examine a complex character and a dynamic nature of metacognition in relation to the reading lessons. The findings underline a double role that learner diaries played in this study: as a research tool useful in investigating learners’ metacognition and an effective task that seemed to facilitate the learners’ reflection skills.

Many studies have so far tried to examine the relationship between listening strategies and listening comprehension. However, it seems that none of them have focused on the effect of the test method on the findings. The present study has investigated the issue by having 55 English language learners respond to pictorial and non-pictorial listening test items with different response formats. The listening section of the Preliminary English Test (PET) and a 36-item listening strategies questionnaire were administered in the first session and after a week’s interval, the participants took a modified version of PET listening. The data were
collected in a language laboratory. Several correlation and regression tests were run to investigate the relationships between listening comprehension as measured by the original and modified PET listening tests and metacognitive, cognitive and socio-affective listening strategies. The results showed that L2 learners’ use of metacognitive listening strategies is the strongest predictor of listening performance. In addition, the findings indicated that the relationship between the use of listening strategies and listening performance is mediated
by the kind of test method which is used for measuring L2 listening. Directions for future research and implications for practice are presented.

High phonotactic probabilities are known to exert a facilitative effect on word learning in children and adults in their first language. The present study was designed to investigate the role of phonotactic probabilities when learning a foreign language. Focusing on Austrian and Korean learners of English, we investigated two hypotheses related to phonotactic frequency effects: (1) High-frequency segments have more deeply entrenched phonetic representations, with more automatized pronunciation patterns, rendering phonetic learning of homophonous segments more difficult; (2) High-frequency segments are associated with higher phonetic variability in the first language, which can facilitate phonetic learning in a foreign language. Additionally, the locus of phoneme/ bigram frequency effects was analyzed in relation to left-branching and right-branching syllable structure in German and Korean. We found that proximity to English voice-onset time is correlated with phoneme and bigram frequencies in the first language, but results varied by learner group. Sub-syllabic segmentation of the first language was also shown to be an influential factor. Our study is grounded in research on frequency effects and combines its central premise with phonetic learning in a foreign
language. The results show a tight relationship between first language statistical probabilities and phonetic learning in a foreign language.

Learner-centered approaches to learning and teaching alongside education for sustainable development (ESD) emphasize the education of engaged and active global citizens (UNESCO, 2017). The development of students’ reflective skills and metacognitive strategies is the center of this study that aims at investigating the learner language of a group of adult learners at an upper-intermediate level. It sets out to investigate to what extent learners are able to notice and correct their errors after reflecting on their spoken production. Moreover, it seeks to examine the students’ perception of their self-reflection and their attitude towards using speaking tasks for grammar learning. Comparative error analysis showed that the participants were able to amend 34.6% of total errors. These were made mainly in noun phrases (30% of total errors in Task 1 and 31% in Task 3) and verb phrases (40% of total errors in both tasks). Although no general conclusions could be drawn, the results seem to suggest that after critical, evidence-based reflection, the participants were able to notice and correct some errors, namely, in determination and the use of the past simple. The results of the survey analysis showed that all participants reported on an improved awareness of the gaps in their interlanguage, and all of them considered speaking tasks beneficial to grammar development. The study indicates that carefully planned, repeated speaking tasks might be helpful for learners’ language processing, consolidation of their grammatical knowledge and the improvement of their reflection skills and metacognitive strategies.

The article focuses on the explicit teaching of language used to express agreement and disagreement in the popular English language coursebooks English File and Navigate. It reviews the current research on teaching various aspects of polite language and politeness-sensitive speech acts and analyses and compares the explicitly taught phrases of agreement and disagreement in the two selected coursebook series, as well as the methods of their presentation and the amount of background theoretical information provided to students and teachers to facilitate their proper usage. Differences were identified not in the inventories and language representation of the explicitly taught phrases, but mainly in the background support available for students and teachers on their usage.

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