Apples - Journal of Applied Language Studies

Feedback practices in foreign language emergency remote teaching in Finland

2022-02-07T14:41:33+02:00

This case study investigated students’ perceptions of teacher feedback in foreign language emergency remote teaching in Finnish general upper secondary education. A total of 251 students from seven schools answered an online questionnaire. The results showed that students found teacher feedback to be encouraging, clear, instructive and general. Compared to students with higher course grades, students with lower course grades found teacher feedback to be discouraging, vague, unclear, and demotivating. Students perceived the quantity of oral feedback to be scarce. The results imply that feedback was not personalised to match students’ individual needs, and that teachers mostly relied on written feedback. Teachers can use these findings to reflect on their approach to feedback in emergency remote teaching and redesign strategies to diversify their feedback practices.

Students’ conceptualizations of monolingual Swedish-language spaces and bilingual practices at a bilingual university in Finland

2022-03-21T19:04:45+02:00

This paper aims to analyze students’ discourses on language policies and practices in a Swedish-medium study program at the largest bilingual university in Finland. In educational discourse and practice in Finland, the position of Swedish as a de facto minority language has traditionally been understood as secured through institutional language separation. While the declared language policies at the University of Helsinki have witnessed a shift towards the simultaneous use of multiple languages, the structure of the study programs still reflect a policy of parallel monolingualisms (Heller, 2007). By analyzing student interviews using a spatially informed framework, we look at how the students in a Swedish-medium study program negotiate the meaning of the program as a linguistic space and how bilingual policies and practices appear to them in this construct. Our findings show that the familiar discourses of language separation in minority language educational contexts also circulated in higher education: monolingual Swedish-medium programs were seen as “svenska rum” (Swedish rooms or spaces), material and social markers of the status of Swedish at the university and guaranteeing the access to education in the other national language. However, bilingual policies and teaching practices were seen as necessary to deconstruct linguistic and social borders between students in different programs in order to prevent alienation and to improve language skills. Nevertheless, the existing bilingual courses were oftentimes experienced as marginalizing the users of Swedish and careful planning was pointed out as crucial in implementing successful bilingual and multilingual practices in higher education.

Positive stances toward cultural and linguistic diversity in Finnish schools after educational reforms

2022-01-26T12:59:34+02:00

This study examined students’ (N = 659) and teachers’ (N = 74) stances toward linguistic and cultural diversity in Finland after national educational policy reforms. The students’ and teachers’ stances were positive, and the students felt appreciated at school; however, differences were found based on the gender, age, and first language of the students and between teacher groups. Positive stances toward languages and language use seemed to decrease with age, and older students and students with other L1 than Finnish had a lower sense of belonging. Targeted attention should be paid to further increasing culturally sustaining and linguistically responsive school cultures.

Clausal and phrasal complexity in research articles published in well-established and predatory journals

2022-10-11T11:26:29+03:00

Predatory publishing has attracted much scholarly attention recently, but little is known about the actual material published in predatory journals. In this paper, we address this gap focusing on syntactic complexity. Using both traditional syntactic complexity measures and more fine-grained indices of phrasal and clausal complexity, the study explores the similarities and differences between two corpora consisting of 220 research articles drawn from two comparable journals in the discipline of Political Science, one purportedly predatory and one top-ranking. The results show that the articles look similar in many respects (e.g., mean length of sentences/T-units, number of T-units per sentence). Differences are found in more fine-grained indices such as clausal complements, adverbial clauses, and noun phrases with noun premodifiers, which are associated with discipline-specific rhetorical and ideational functions. The study demonstrates the potential of linguistic analyses in contributing to our understanding of predatory publishing as a complex phenomenon.

Social and Institutional Factors Affecting Language Learning Activities

2022-08-16T10:11:44+03:00

This article aims to contribute to an understanding of how social and institutional factors affect the language learning environments of university students studying less-commonly taught languages (Turner, 1958), at beginner level by distance online. The empirical material is drawn from longitudinal case studies of students who enrolled in beginner-level distance courses in LCTLs at a regional Swedish university in the early 2010s. The study supports previous research illustrating the importance of sociocultural factors in learning activities. Furthermore, the study adds to research showing that for LCTLs an online learning context provides affordances that simply may not exist in campus settings and makes the study of LCTLs accessible to people for whom it would otherwise not be, an important contribution to linguistic diversity. The novel finding of this study is the direct and clearly articulated effect of different policies and frameworks on individuals’ choices of how, when and where to study, which suggests a need to examine further the ways that government and supranational entities shape the decisions made by adult learners.

Exploring the conditions of English language education through the experience of Eritrean Sophomore English language learners and teachers

2022-10-24T17:05:59+03:00

This study addresses the little studied context of English language education in Eritrea. Despite the teaching of English as a subject and the forward-looking mother tongue policy implemented in Eritrean elementary education, Eritrean students struggle to cope with English as the medium of instruction from the start of junior school to the end of tertiary education. This qualitative study analyses sixteen sophomore student interviews and six teacher interviews to critically explore the conditions of English language education in Eritrea. Using an ecological perspective, the findings from this study highlight how the affective, didactic, study and linguistic conditions interrelate with one another to form the characteristic features of the English language education ecosystem and provide insights into the different ways participants within this ecosystem respond to these conditions. The aim of this study is to better understand what supports and hinders students’ language development in order to be able to support the reformation and transformation of English language education in Eritrea.