Journal of Critical Applied Linguistics Studies
Volume:1 Issue: 1, Jun 2022

There is a growing body of literature on online teaching documenting inequality of access and quality concerns experienced by students and their parents in pre-pandemic time. COVID-19 pandemic forced students to experience these issues more acutely and affectively, which calls for in-depth studies on the effects and consequences of online teaching in terms of access and quality since COVID-19 pandemic. Studies capturing the learners’ struggle with inequality of access to and education quality of online teaching during COVID-19 are still rare. This study explores learners’ experiences of online teaching introduced by universities in Bangladesh in time of COVID-19, and finds students tangled in a Sisyphean struggle with access and quality learning. Insights from the study may shed light on the issues to be considered for online teaching in post-pandemic contexts.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in studying how ambiguous sentences are processed in different languages. However, far too little attention has been paid to studying the processing of Persian ambiguous sentences. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to study the processing of transformational ambiguous sentences in Persian in which the main verb refers to either of the preceding noun phrases. The main objective is to find out the attachment preference of Persian speakers when reading such sentences. The presented sentences to the participants were semantically consistent with either high or low attachment resolution. That is, the main verb was referring to either the first noun phrase (NP1) or the second noun phrase (NP2). To investigate the nature of this process, an on-line technique was used. Employing Rapid Serial Visual Processing (RSVP) technique, the reaction times and grammatically judgment of 72 Persian native speakers (37 male and 35 female) who were randomly selected were recorded and analyzed. The results of accuracy of judgments and reaction times indicated that Persian speakers use high attachment strategy for this type of ambiguity. The findings of this study are compatible with the results of previous offline studies on parsing preference of native Persian speakers. It also added that Persian speakers use purely structure-based parsing strategies rather than constrained-based models of sentence processing.

As a cornerstone of any effective education system, classroom justice is a neglected area of research in second/foreign language (L2) education. The current conceptual review paper was written with the prospect of familiarizing L2 teachers, practitioners, and researchers with the main tenets of classroom justice and their applications in L2 learning and teaching. To this aim, by drawing on the social psychology theories of justice, this study unfolded how the concept of organizational justice found its way into the instructional context by being renamed as classroom justice. Then the extant empirical studies on classroom justice were critically reviewed, and the gaps and limitations in the existing literature were explicated. Subsequently, the significance of theorizing and empirically testing the concept of classroom justice in L2 education research was foregrounded by taking into account the social and relational nature of L2 learning and teaching, which places the teachers’ enactment of justice as a primary concern for both L2 teachers and students. Afterward, some theoretical and pedagogical implications were recommended to inform L2 researchers, teachers, students, teacher educators, materials developers, teacher recruiters, and administrators among other L2 educational stakeholders. The paper terminated with some new avenues for future research for interested L2 researchers.

This study aims to explore United States-based English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher candidates' self-assessed success of teaching grammar and cultural competency, focusing specifically on Turkish culture. This study will examine these themes through data collected during a six-week virtual cultural exchange with undergraduate Turkish students currently enrolled in Istanbul Technical Institute. The participants, twelve graduate teaching candidates studying at Binghamton University, were sorted into twelve individual groups and paired with one or two Turkish students. All participants remained with the same international group members through the six-week virtual cultural exchange. Each week participants were instructed to complete a pre and post-exchange survey, which covered topics relevant to grammar teaching and cultural competency. While most surveys were qualitative, there were quantitative elements included. The pre- and post-survey responses were collected and quantified, resulting in a summary of the teacher candidates' week one beliefs of their successes in cultural competency and teaching grammar in comparison to their success throughout the exchange's duration and week 6. The results demonstrated that while the virtual cultural exchange allowed some participants more confidence in teaching grammar and a more comprehensive understanding of cultural competency and therefore learning, some participants experienced an opposite result; throughout the duration of the exchange, a number of participants became less confident and therefore indicated less success in their teaching of grammar and cultural competency. Positively, the study results indicated the importance of teacher education in the use of visual aids and asking intentional questions to increase cultural competency.

Lexical bundles, sequences of words that recur frequently in corpus-based discourse, are indicators of fluent language production both in L1 and L2. Hence, to the best of researcher’s knowledge, no research is conducted on the characteristics of lexical bundles in the conclusion section of applied linguistics research articles. Consequently, the present study aims to extend this line of research by comparing the form, function, and frequency of four-word lexical bundles in the conclusion section of 225 research articles published in international vis-à-vis Iranian applied linguistics journals. The findings revealed that the bundles were more frequent in the conclusion section of research articles in Iranian journals as opposed to international journals. Structural analysis of lexical bundles showed that passive structure was used infrequently in international journals. In addition, analyzing the function of lexical bundles indicated that procedure and resultative bundles were used more frequently by Iranian writers. Based on the results of this study, it can be concluded that Iranian writers overused lexical bundles in terms of passive structure, procedure, and resultative bundles in comparison with international writers. Results will be applicable for researchers and authors who want to communicate more effectively in their communities of practice.

Endangerment of diversity is among the great problems of modern era, deterioration of linguistic diversity of the world being among its clear illustrations. This study is based on this idea that causes of deterioration of biodiversity and sociolinguistic diversity are similar, not to say being the same. Therefore, after explanting the “introduction”, “review of the literature” and “theoretical base of the research”, we have focused on Iran’s endangered languages, to present some suggestions seeming to be suitable for increasing the vitality of these endangered languages. This study underlines the importance of the size of a speech community, the declining prestige of the language, and the decrease of the usual functions of it as the main factors leading to the endangerment and ultimate demise of a language. As a result, increasing the solidarity of a speech community, maintaining the usual functions of endangered languages, and promoting their prestige among their speakers are among the ways mentioned for preserving such languages and dialects of Iran.

With the spread of second language acquisition research, third language acquisition has gradually become a new research field. This study aimed at investigating the role of background language transfer in the acquisition of English adjective placement which is similar in Turkmen (i.e., L1) and English (i.e., L3) and different in Persian (i.e., L2). Moreover, the effect of gender on the acquisition of English adjective placement by monolingual Persian and bilingual Turkmen Iranian EFL learners was investigated. Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was given to homogenize and select participants who were in the initial state of L2 and L3 acquisition. The selected participants in the main phase of the study were assigned into two groups namely, Persian learners of English, as well as Turkmen learners of English. The present study was carried out using Grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT) and the Production Test. Two-way Between-groups ANOVA was used to analyze data. The results disconfirmed the findings of the hypothese related to L3 acquisition namely Cumulative Enhancement Model (CEM), and the L2 Status Factor, and confirmed the findings of the L1 transfer. Moreover, the results showed that gender did not have a significant effect on acquisition of English adjective placement by monolingual and bilingual learners. The results have some implications for teaching English in the EFL context.