Roger Christopher Barnard

The University of Waikato · applied linguistics

The book provides a grounded, narrative exploration of contemporary qualitative PhD research in the fields of language education and applied linguistics. The chapters are authored by current and former PhD candidates studying in New Zealand, with commentaries from international experts in the field. The book contains ten chapters in addition to the...

Roger Barnard was born in Brighton, and decided as a boy that he wanted to live and work abroad. Starting out as a high school teacher, he worked in English language education (ELE) and applied linguistics in Europe, the Middle East, New Zealand and Asia. Over a career spanning 50 years, he has been a language teacher, director of language institut...

This Afterword begins with a brief review of various ethical dilemmas faced by the student authors in the prologue and narrative chapters. This is followed by a more detailed discussion of four of the threads running through these chapters and those of the international scholars. Firstly, with regard to the position of the researcher, the advantage...

This book makes a fresh contribution to the field of research ethics by considering research issues through relatable autobiographical narratives. The book’s core offers narratives by novice second language education researchers who are completing PhD degrees using data from international research participants. These narratives expose challenges re...

Series: Routledge Critical Studies in Asian Education This timely volume opens a window on issues related to English language education in Vietnam. The authors consider that teacher quality is the key factor to be considered if the national English language curriculum outcomes are to be achievable. Aiming to shed light on key issues recently observ...

Ministries of Education in many countries have adopted various forms of school-based assessment (SBA) to replace (for example, New Zealand) or complement (for example, England, Australia and Malaysia) more conventional forms of assessment such as tests and examinations. Central to these alternative approaches to SBA is formative assessment. In rece...

There has been increasing interest in exploring what language teachers believe about teaching (Borg 2006). Often these beliefs are expressed in terms of metaphors (Richards 1998; Woodward 1991). Richards (1996) asserts that teachers’ personal principles would reflect their teaching approach in which these principles guide the teachers’ instructiona...

The aim of the book is to explain a range of options for implementing the reflective practice cycle in educational settings in various international contexts. It presents a series of empirical case studies illustrating many different ways of implementing the reflective practice cycle, and how they can be researched by practitioners and academics. I...

The idea for this collection of case studies came to us after reading the two reports of the study by Simon Borg and Saleh Al-Busaidi (2012a; 2012b) which explored the perceptions and reported practices about learner autonomy (LA)of English language instructors at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. Our previous and current research has been heavily...

There are some theoretical convergences as to what facilitation constitutes, but it is less widely understood what teachers - whether practising or those preparing to teach - understand by the term. Also, there have been relatively few studies focusing on facilitation in Malaysian educational contexts. Given this paucity of local empirical studies,...

This paper discusses a number of key issues in English language education in a variety of Asian countries. The points presented arise from the author's experience of teaching and researching in collaboration with a wide range of academic colleagues-applied linguists-working in these contexts.

Professional experience, as well as a great deal of published research (e.g. Gass & Varonis, 1991; Varonis & Gass, 1985a), suggests that even successful users of English as a second language unwittingly give rise to communication problems when encoding and decoding certain features of language, both linguistic and pragmatic. Among the latter is the...

An increasing number of universities across the world are adopting English as the medium of instruction, particularly at the graduate level. This paper begins by briefly describing the historical development of such English medium instruction (EMI) programmes in European universities, and the reasons which are frequently given to justify them. A nu...

Providing feedback on students’ written work is a key professional activity in tertiary education. Although there has been research into the effectiveness of lecturers’ feedback, there is a need for more studies comparing students’ perceptions with those of their teachers. This article discusses the design and implementation of an innovatory approa...

This paper discusses a number of current issues and concerns relating to policies relating to English language education, with particular attention to educational contexts in Asia. It begins by briefly identifying the goals of a language policy, and the role of applied linguistics in planning language education. There follow examples of language p...

Over the past 20 years, there has been increasing interest in exploring what language teachers believe (Borg, 2006). Often these beliefs are expressed in terms of metaphors (Richards, 1998; Woodward, 1991), but there has been little recent research connecting the two strands. The present study is based on the personal reflections of a group of 72 t...

In the complex, multilingual societies of the 21st century, codeswitching is an everyday occurrence, and yet the use of students’ first language in the English language classroom has been consistently discouraged by teachers and educational policy-makers. This volume begins by examining current theoretical work on codeswitching and then proceeds to...

This book presents a novel approach to discussing how to research language teacher cognition and practice. An introductory chapter by theeditors and an overview of the research field by Simon Borg precede eigh case studies written by new researchers, each of which focuses on one approach to collecting data. These approaches range from questionnaire...

Codeswitching between languages in English language classrooms has been disparaged by textbook writers, methodologists and educational policymakers in many countries. This paper reports an action research project which examined language use in English classes in Timor-Leste. The first aim was to identify the extent of codeswitching by audio-recordi...

Teachers’ feedback on students’ written work is an important aspect of pedagogy. However, theoretical views differ on what constitutes ‘good’ feedback, both among applied linguists and academics in other disciplines. In-depth research needs to be carried out into the contextual difficulties of evaluating and assessing academic assignments, and the...

Like many other methodological innovations, Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) has been applied to many English language curriculums across Asia. However, little research has been done to explore what teachers know and believe about these reforms in their specific contexts. This paper derives from an in-depth study of teacher cognition in Vietname...

Analysts of curricular innovation distinguish two different versions. One is the documented curriculum, or the intended innovation, which presents idealized innovative prescriptions while the other is the realized version - that which is actually implemented in classrooms. This distinction reflects the complexity of curricular innovation which has...

This article suggests that Activity Theory (AT) can be applied as a holistic framework to analyse the complex sociocultural issues that arise when academics wish to engage in collaborative activity across institutional and cultural boundaries. Attention will initially focus on how Activity Theory, first formulated in the 1930s by Leont’ev (1978), a...

This article reviews the book “Linguistic imperialism continued”, edited by Robert Phillipson.

This article reviews the book: “The politics of language education: Individuals and institutions”, edited by J.C. Alderson.

Immigrant children from diverse language backgrounds face not only linguistic challenges when enrolled in mainstream English-medium classrooms, but also difficulties adjusting to an unfamiliar learning community. The culture of primary school classrooms in New Zealand typically reflects conventions across three dimensions: interactional, instructio...

This report discusses findings from a small-scale scoping study, which is part of a larger curriculum project—a collaborative venture between staff from the Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa'e (UNTL) and a New Zealand university. The aim of the wider project is to develop a context-sensitive English language curriculum for students at UNTL who are...

This paper considers the extent to which research participants express their opinions and attitudes differently, according to whether they are engaged in one-to-one interviews or in a focus group with members of their community of practice. While the respective advantages and disadvantages of using individual interviews and focus groups have been d...

This paper reports on a survey of New Zealand teachers ' attitudes towards grammar and grammar teaching in their own particular teaching contexts. It uses a questionnaire adapted from that used in a survey of teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in British universities (Burgess & Etherington, 2002), followed by a series of email intervie...

This new book edited by Alison Mackey provides a clear overview of the state of research into the role of interaction in SLA, and includes 16 new studies especially written for this book. Altogether, 27 university-based authors contributed to these studies - two in New Zealand (Rod Ellis and Rebecca Adams), two in Japan, and the rest in the USA or...

The present policy of the Ministry of Education is that all schools should offer instruction in an additional language from Year 7 to Year 10. The additional languages may be te reo Māori, a Pacific language, or one of several international languages. This paper focuses on the latter, and suggests that, at the present time, it would be unwise in ma...

This paper considers how independent and interdependent learning can be fostered through a process approach to the teaching of writing. It does so by presenting the theoretical rational which underlies a university academic skills programme. Drawing on reports of this programme which have been published elsewhere (e.g., Brine & Campbell, 2002), it...

The two volumes of this new encyclopedia contain over five hundred self-contained essays, each between 1000 and 3000 words, covering a very wide range of topics. They have been written by some three hundred specialists from 34 countries (including several from New Zealand) who were invited to write for readers with no specialist knowledge of the su...

This paper discusses complex issues surrounding second language teaching and learning and relates them to the introduction of second language teaching in New Zealand primary schools. After considering the recent trend in many countries to introduce second languages in increasingly younger learners, a review is made of dominant paradigms of second l...

This is a report of an action research project currently under way at a university in Japan. The aim of this project is to develop the reading skills of junior high school students through tutorial sessions led by trained university students using principles and procedures of a reading programme, Pause Prompt Praise, developed in New Zealand. This...

In this paper, data collected from interaction between pupils in a mainstream intermediate classroom are interpreted from a sociocultural perspective. Extracts of conversations between classmates illustrate ways in which some pupils can scaffold the learning of their classmates, and specifically those who come from non-English speaking backgrounds....

Essay Review of Kennedy, S., and Dewar, S. (1997). Non-English speaking background students: a study of programmes and support in New Zealand schools. Wellington: Ministry of Education, Research and International Section. Kennedy and Dewar provide a report of programmes and support for some of the NESB (non-English speaking background) learners in...

EFL teachers are increasingly under scrutiny – for reasons of quality control, teacher development, and empirical research. Attention needs to be paid to the different perspectives of the various participants in order to ensure that access to classrooms is negotiated sensitively, and that information derived from observation is not abused. This art...

This article analyses two similar trials of ELT text books which took place in the Sultanate of Oman within a few years of each other. The article compares the different approaches used in the two trials and draws some conclusions concerning the most effective methods to undertake trials of new curriculum material.

In 2006 the Ministry of Education in Taiwan - like those in other Asian countries - decided to introduce English instruction from the 3rd grade of primary schools. This paper presents and interprets a transcript of classroom interaction taken from a 6th grade primary school EFL classroom in downtown Kaohsiung. The present paper differs somewhat fro...

It must be emphasized at the outset that these thoughts are concerned with post-experience professional development-that is, in-service training, rather than pre-service, or initial teacher training. The ideas discussed below derive from programs I have run in Ministries of Education in Europe and the Middle East, and they have proved to be effecti...

There are a number of pretty sound reasons why good language teachers should also be good language learners. This paper briefly presents some of these reasons, and then explains how and why foreign language learning is provided in one particular course of initial training available in New Zealand, and what some of the trainees thought of the experi...

This paper focuses on the linguistic and cultural (‘languaculture’, Agar, 1994) challenges faced by learners from diverse language backgrounds (DLB) in New Zealand schools. It describes the typical learning context in primary classrooms terms of interactional, instructional, and cognitive dimensions. It then presents vignettes of four DLB learners...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Southampton, 2000.

Although it is now generally agreed that grammar should be an integral element of second language programmes, there is still a diversity of opinions about how it should be taught. In this paper, attention is first drawn to relevant issues raised in reviews of the teaching of grammar derived from SLA research and teacher cognition. This paper then r...

New Zealand schools are increasingly diverse in terms of language and culture, and many immigrant school children are faced with the ‘languacultural’ (Agar, 1994) challenge of learning not only a new language but a new culture of learning – to learn new classroom interaction skills (Barnard, 2005) as a route from Basic Interpersonal Communication S...

Review of the book: Learning vocabulary in another language. This article has been published in the journal: New Zealand Studies in Applied Linguistic. Used with permission.