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Crowdsourcing Translation as a Post-Editing Method (CTPE) has emerged as a rapid and inexpensive method for translation and has drawn significant attention in recent years. This qualitative study aims to analyze and synthesize the approaches and aspects underpinning CTPE research and to identify its potential that is yet to be discovered. Through a systematic literature review focused on empirical papers, we examined the limited literature thematically and identified recurring central themes. Our review reveals that the topic of CTPE requires further attention and that its potential benefits are yet to be fully discovered. We discuss the eight core concepts that emerged during our analysis, including the purpose of CTPE, CTPE areas of application, ongoing CTPE processes, platform and crowd characteristics, motivation, CTPE domains, and future perspectives. By highlighting the strengths of CTPE, we conclude that it has the potential to be a highly effective translation method in various domains.

With the global spread of English as the lingua franca for academic publishing, non-native researchers and university students are constantly facing linguistic barriers including insufficient vocabulary knowledge in writing for publication. This persistent need motivated the development of a good number of corpus-based word lists for frequently used academic and technical words in research articles across disciplines. Nevertheless, despite its importance in corpus-based study of language for word list development, replication research has received far less attention in this line of inquiry. The current study aimed to address this gap and replicated two published studies that investigated the use of academic vocabulary in applied linguistics research articles. To this end, research articles published from 2010 to 2020 in 20 well-known journals in the field were collected, and a corpus with around 48 million words was compiled and analyzed. The findings indicated that academic vocabulary accounted for 11.46% of the corpus, which is similar and close to the reported coverage of the AWL in replicated studies. However, regarding the frequently occurring academic and non-academic content words, the findings showed considerable variation with respect to the results reported earlier. In light of these findings, the study highlighted the importance of replication research to test the reliability of corpus-based vocabulary studies that developed field-specific academic word lists. Finally, the study developed an updated version for applied linguistics academic word list, that might be regarded as a resource and guide for the vocabulary learning component of the relevant EAP programs in the field.

EFL teachers’ conceptions of Alternative Assessment (AA) strategies in English language classrooms are of significance since they can affect the teachers’ overall performance in the classroom. This study aimed to explore Iranian EFL teachers’ conceptions of AA strategies. In so doing, a sequential mixed methods design was used. The participants of the study consisted of 30 (15 males and 15 females) Iranian EFL teachers with MA and Ph.D. degrees in English language teaching (ELT) who were selected through convenience sampling. To collect the required data, the Teachers’ Perceptions of Alternative Assessment Questionnaire (Elharrar) was used as an open-ended questionnaire. Data analysis was conducted through qualitative thematic analysis and presenting the extracted themes in frequency and percentage formats. It was found that most of the teachers perceived the positive influences of AA. Additionally, it was revealed that the teachers attached some advantages to AA that help them provide a more quality teaching environment. The findings of this study may render implications for EFL teachers, teacher trainers, and administrators.        

The present work is a contribution to the debate around attitude towards English as a foreign language in Cameroon. By case-studying an under-searched area through a multi-component tool: the Attitude and Motivation Test Battery, it proposes a different reflection to the question. The test was administered to 211 Grade 11, 12, and 13 Francophone students from various urban and semi-urban schools in the city and its suburbs. It was based on the postulates that attitude is a dynamic characteristic that varies according to place and time on the one hand, and that it is far too complex to be examined from the prism of a single variable. The results revealed that of the six parameters that made up the three components of the tool, three were negative and three were positive, with the integrative orientation slightly outpacing the instrumental one. This underscores the need to envisage attitude as a multi-component variable, as well as the need to reckon with evolving social variables. In general, the results reveal that attitude towards EFL is not as desperate as usually thought. It can be intimated that recent socio-political initiatives aiming at reinforcing French-English bilingualism are gradually bearing fruits. Thus, socio-political ideologies appear to have significant effects on overall attitude towards EFL.

As an integral dimension of instruction, assessment determines whether or not the educational goals are being fulfilled. The present study was an attempt to investigate Iranian ESP instructors’ common classroom assessment practices. To this end, based on convenience sampling, eight different ESP teachers teaching BA students from a variety of departments at Rasht Islamic Azad University, Iran were selected. An observation checklist containing 31 items was used as the only data-gathering instrument of this study. The results of the descriptive statistics revealed that some assessment practices including using portfolio to assess student progress, assessing group class participation, conducting item analysis for teacher-made tests, and writing matching questions were applied less frequently in the ESP classes. However, some assessment practices such as incorporating attendance in the calculation of grades and recognizing unethical, illegal, or inappropriate uses of assessment information were more likely to be used in the observed ESP classes. The instructors were also more likely to incorporate classroom behavior in the calculation of grades, incorporate extra credit activities in the calculation of grades, recognize unethical, illegal, or inappropriate assessment methods, and inform students how grades are to be assigned. It is concluded that ESP teachers utilize both traditional testing and alternative assessment for achieving a complementary process of assessment, and they call for an integration of them due to their importance in assessing both the process and product of learning. The results of this study may hopefully be beneficial for curriculum developers, materials developers, course and syllabus designers, teachers and teacher trainers, and the other stakeholders in the fields of language teaching and learning as well.

Engagement and interaction have recently been considered practical activities essentially in educational settings. Due to the importance of this notion, this research paper reviewed the qualitative study aimed to find out the evaluation of Iranian EFL students’ emotional attitudes and perceptions towards interactive tasks on self-monitoring, self-regulation, and willingness to communicate in learning. Accordingly, the study as personality assessment developed the semi-structured interviews with 40 students in an experimental group and 40 students in a control group to explore students’ motivational beliefs and their attitudes towards interactive tasks influencing their performance in learning and assisting them to communicate successfully. Based on the attitudinal analysis as the results of this study, using the Transcribed Interview Sample with coding (an extract) clearly identified that students with interactive tasks mainly outperformed those with regular instruction. Furthermore, the findings of the research indicated that students’ achievement was improved in terms of their motivation, autonomy, and empowerment as contributed to their learning. However, this study revealed that teachers could increase the academically collaborative talk as well as social-emotional behavior of students in their teaching and learning environments to share feeling safe, taking risks, and enjoy constructive effects.

The interaction between the writers and the experts while using citations is one of the main features of academic texts. For the integration of external experts into the text, writers usually use reporting verbs, which seem to function differently. Furthermore, selecting reporting verbs (RVs) by the researchers of disciplines seems to vary. This paper explored the functions of RVs across sciences. To this end, 200 “Results and Discussion” section of RAs from the four sciences, namely Life Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities, Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Health Sciences were gathered and used as the data, and their functions of RVs were analyzed based on Hyland’s framework (2002). Hyland (2002) considered three basic RV types based on their function, including research, cognitive, and discourse acts, subsequently dividing each category into several subcategories. The results showed that the writers in Life Sciences used more research acts in comparison to the other disciplines. In terms of cognition acts, the rates of tentative verbs were high in all sciences since the researchers tried to report the results with caution as they were uncertain about the findings. The results approved this claim, indicating the high frequency of tentative verbs under the category of discourse acts, across disciplines using verbs like hypothesize, indicate, and suggest to show doubt with different rates. The obtained results can guide novice writers of the above-mentioned four disciplines to advance an authorial perspective and adjust to the expert conventions of the relevant research areas.