FIRE: Futuristic Implementations of Research in Education

Editorial

Sezen Arslan — 2023-05-31

Speaking anxiety and playing online games among adolescent EFL learners

Sulenur Unlu — 2023-05-31

While speaking is essential in learning English as a foreign language (EFL), speaking anxiety may create a barrier to being fluent and accurate among learners. In this sense, playing online games may provide opportunities for adolescent EFL students to improve their speaking skills and reduce their anxiety levels. However, the conclusions of a limited number of studies do not provide a consensus on the effects of online gaming on speaking anxiety among adolescents. This descriptive study aims to find the frequencies of playing online games in English and speaking anxiety among adolescents and explore whether the level of speaking anxiety among adolescent EFL learners differs in accordance with online games they play in the target language or not. Two background questionnaires and the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) were administered to 175 high school students. The results showed that the majority of adolescent EFL learners engaged in playing online games in English and that they had a medium level of speaking anxiety. The study also concludes that speaking anxiety levels significantly decreased among adolescents who preferred online gaming in English. It was recommended that EFL teachers should encourage their students to play online games where the target language is used and raise their awareness of potential problems.

Deschooling ELT with post-method pedagogy in a digital era and pandemic state

Muhammed Fatih Gokmen — 2023-05-31

Proposed by Ivan Illich in the 1970s, the deschooling society was one of the most contentious and radical thoughts in education in terms of its critics against compulsory education around the globe and proposals in the name of networks in which everyone in need of learning and teaching can participate to learn and teach anywhere and anytime without any prescriptions or proscriptions. With the advent of the internet and technology, the paradigmatic change towards post-method pedagogy in education and ELT, and the constricting current pandemic state, we have been much closer than ever to the actualization of deschooling society. This work, as a caveat, was not solely formed to deliver brief information about the contents of the book but rather also to reassess, renew, and readapt the deschooling concept of the 1970s into the 21st-century digital era at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic with the implications of a post-modern understanding of ELT. The issue discussed in the present paper is in general about the way of formal compulsory education through schooling, yet in specific the implications of deschooling on ELT in the current chaotic state of the world. Therefore, a brief reappraisal of the book was preliminarily outlined, and later its connections with ELT within the framework of post-method pedagogy were explicated in the revival part.

Translanguaging – a birth of new languages or a threat to a language loss?: The analysis of in-migrant and out-migrant contexts

Tamilla Mammadova — 2023-05-31

Recently, reinforced social, political, economic, and other pull and push factors have encouraged extensive global migration. Human mobility also assumes the displacement of languages from their original geographic locations to new locations and language ecologies. One of the critical linguistic outcomes of migration is the translanguaging process that takes place through the mixture of a simplified version of two or more languages without strictly following the established language rules. While some research revealed the phenomenon of translanguaging, more was needed to apprehend its impact on the formation of new languages and variations. Even less research has studied the fate of migrant languages under the pressure of translanguaging. This paper investigates whether migration triggers the development of new languages or leads to the fade of migrants' native languages. The key focus of this paper is to convey a message to educational institutions to take care of both local and migrant-native languages so that it does not negatively affect communication within the teaching and learning process.