LALEJ: Language and Literacy Education Journal

NEGOTIATING PEDAGOGICAL CULTURES: CLASSROOM PRACTICES OF NATIVE ENGLISH-SPEAKING TEACHERS IN CHINESE UNIVERSITIES

Yiyun Liang, Fatiha Senom — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0800

Although many studies discuss native English-speaking teachers’ (NEST) identities, most focus on beliefs, narratives, or institutional discourses rather than what teachers actually do in the classroom. To fill this gap, this qualitative multiple-case study examines how NESTs construct and negotiate their professional identities through classroom practices in Chinese universities. Drawing on classroom observations of four NESTs who are from America and Britain and working at two different universities in China, the study employs an integrative framework informed by sociocultural and poststructuralist perspectives to explore three interrelated processes: pedagogical negotiation, cultural mediation, and identity performance. Through inductive thematic analysis based on the classroom observation fieldnotes, the findings reveal that identity construction is a dynamic process enacted through everyday teaching practices, as teachers balance communicative pedagogies with local expectations rooted in exam-oriented traditions and hierarchical norms. Through classroom interaction, humour, and task design, the teachers mediated cultural and pedagogical meanings while performing and reshaping their professional selves. The study extends current understandings of language teacher identity by highlighting classroom practice as a key site of negotiation and identity performance for NESTs working in non-native English contexts.

VOICES OF DISSENT: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF AMERICAN PUNK LYRICS (1990s-2000s)

Brendan Jeremy Lim Jia En, Dexter Sigan John — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0800

This study investigates the messages and common themes conveyed through American punk music lyrics from the 1990s to 2000s using Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis framework. A qualitative case study approach examined seven songs from prominent American punk bands spanning grunge, pop punk, hardcore, metalcore, and emo subgenres, which include Nirvana, Green Day, Hatebreed, Converge, Orchid, Silverstein, and My Chemical Romance. The textual dimension revealed lexical strategies that foreground alienation and entrapment through constraining vocabulary and fragmented grammatical structures. Discursive practice analysis showed how punk lyrics appropriate and subvert dominant cultural narratives whilst constructing authenticity through confessional modes. Social practice analysis connected these linguistic features to broader sociocultural contexts, revealing resistance to capitalist structures and a critique of institutionalised authority. Three dominant themes emerged from the analysis. Alienation and social entrapment, systematic critique of institutionalised authority, and collective trauma in response to catastrophic historical events. The findings demonstrate that American punk lyrics function as ideological interventions that expose power relations embedded within late capitalist society, transforming individual suffering into collective political consciousness whilst challenging naturalised social inequalities.

LEARNER CORPUS RESEARCH IN SLA FRAMEWORK: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS

Faizah Mohamad Nusri, Siti Zaidah Zainuddin, Amir Rashad Mustaffa — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0800

Learner Corpus Research (LCR) has become increasingly relevant to Second Language Acquisition (SLA), yet its systematic integration within experimental research designs remains relatively limited. This systematic review investigates how LCR has been incorporated into experimentally oriented SLA studies published between 2015 and March 2024. Guided by the PRISMA 2020 framework, ten studies were identified from the Scopus database that explicitly combined learner corpus data with experimental or quasi-experimental methods. The review examines these studies in terms of their targeted SLA constructs, types of learner data, methodological orientations, and analytical procedures. The findings show a strong preference for a quantitative approach and performance-based constructs, with particular emphasis on the complexity–accuracy–fluency (CAF) framework. The reviewed studies also show a clear preference for employing Natural Language Processing tools, particularly Coh-Metrix and syntactic complexity analysers such as SynLex. Across the reviewed studies, learner corpora consistently serve three key functions: accounting for experimentally observed effects, validating instructional outcomes through learners’ extended performance, and facilitating triangulation across multiple data sources. Despite its clear methodological and theoretical value, the integration of LCR into experimental SLA research is still uneven.

STUDENT WEAKNESSES AND SUPERVISOR COMMENTS ON FINAL YEAR PROJECT DRAFTS ON NEWSPAPER FRAMING OF FLOODS

Su-Hie Ting, Mohd Aiman Azrie Nasarudin — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0800

University students take academic writing courses, but they may not adequately prepare them for research writing in their final year project because the genre conventions are largely unfamiliar to students. The study examined the changes made in drafts of a final year project on newspaper framing of floods in response to supervisor feedback. The specific aspects examined are: (1) weaknesses in the content of drafts, and (2) the focal point of the supervisor’s feedback. The case study involved the analysis of 11 drafts of a final year project report written by a student in a Malaysian public university. Coding was done at the comment level based on an analysis framework. The results indicate that the main weakness of the student was writing the research problem, which required four drafts and repeated rewriting. The easiest sections were data collection procedures and limitations, and did not need rewriting. The participant description section required only one round of comments. The analysis revealed that the weaknesses were largely due to a lack of synthesis of the literature read and unfamiliarity with the expected content of the various sections of a thesis. The longitudinal analysis revealed that the student sometimes exhibited a delayed response to comments, and the supervisor had to progress from giving referential feedback to rewriting parts of the writing, giving more specific comments, and even using sentence completion to get the student to produce acceptable content in the final year project report. A majority of the comments were on content (69.6% of 125 comments), and the information provided was often inadequate and repetitive. Relatively fewer comments were on organisation (17.6%) and language (12.8%). The study suggests that supervisors need to closely guide the students to conceptualise the research problem, and experiment with various feedback strategies to tailor feedback type to student writing.

EXPLORING PHYSICS EDUCATION STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION TOWARD ESP INSTRUCTION: EVIDENCE FROM A SURVEY STUDY

Wahyunengsih, Humaira Salsabila, Fadzil Ainun Najib — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0800

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is essential for the academic achievement of physics education students, especially for understanding scientific content and communicating research findings. This study seeks to look at the viewpoints of students in the physics department on English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and to discern the elements influencing their attitudes, motivation, and involvement in ESP instruction. A questionnaire with 50 items was given to 80 physics students as part of a descriptive qualitative approach. The finding indicates that the students demonstrated a general positive perception with an overall mean score of 3.84. A total of 56.87% of respondents had favourable opinions, mostly because of ESP's value in enhancing academic reading and writing as well as understanding scientific vocabulary. Motivation was seen as the most important contributing factor (M = 4.12), followed by prior experience with English and instructional methodologies. Students said that contextual and interactive ESP exercises improved their engagement and confidence in employing academic English. According to the study's findings, physics education students believe that ESP is pertinent and helpful for their academic and professional growth. Strong motivation, encouraging learning environments, and context-based teaching strategies all contribute to the development of positive attitudes. These results highlight the need for ESP course designs that closely integrate physics-related materials to strengthen students’ readiness for scientific communication.