Many educators are required to further their knowledge and skills through professional development initiatives. These programs are affected by numerous elements. A crucial but often overlooked factor is the well-being of teachers. This qualitative case study explores how acknowledging the well-being of two participants and addressing their needs…

The teaching of critical thinking (CT) has become an important requirement in many English language classrooms at different educational levels, yet little is known about how teachers promote the learning of CT. This article reports on a qualitative study examining the ways in which two university English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers in…

This paper examines intersecting concerns in global citizenship education (GCE) and English Language Teaching (ELT) in the face of globalisation. While these two educational agendas cannot be assumed to automatically converge, our study signals that promising overlaps emerge from the enactment of dialogic practices in second language education.…

This meta-analysis synthesizes 49 standardized mean-change differences between control and treatment groups as effect sizes from 28 independent studies, investigating the efficacy of existing reading interventions on literacy skills for Chinese children. Six potentially important moderators were considered in this study. These moderators included…

Based on the model of reading engagement processes within classroom contexts, this research examined the link between student-perceived reading strategy instruction (RSI) and reading comprehension via multiple mediators, including autonomous reading motivation and reading strategy use (RSU), among 5,275 Chinese fourth graders. Multilevel mediation…

Despite the recent interest in student feedback literacy, few studies have considered how students can be guided to develop this literacy in language learning. This article reports on a study that aims to develop student feedback literacy through a series of training activities. These activities were introduced to a cohort of students to explore…

Background: To better understand the intricate science of reading development, both cognitive and affective factors must be taken into consideration. This developmental study aims to enrich the literature by exploring how reading motivation -- an affective factor -- contributes to reading comprehension in Chinese elementary schoolers, beyond…

This case study explores the trajectory of a reading teacher's self-directed development when implementing drama-based pedagogy in an under-resourced College in China. Through qualitative analyses of multiple data sources collected over one semester, the study demonstrates that the teacher's self-directed use of drama-based pedagogy following…

Purpose: This 2-year longitudinal study examined the unique prediction of a dynamic assessment (DA) of character decoding on Chinese early reading development, and further explored whether learning potential, as assessed by DA, predicts subsequent character reading development in a sample of 135 native Mandarin-speaking Chinese students from first…

It has been suggested that the reading acceleration program (RAP) (Breznitz et al. in Nature Communications 4: 1486, 2013), in which participants are forced to read at a rate faster than their normal reading fluency rate, improves reading fluency and comprehension in alphabetic languages. However, its effectiveness has never been examined in…

Recent decades have witnessed growing attention to child reading education, but research on reading teacher training remains scarce, constituting an impediment to the further advancement of reading instruction. This study seeks to explore the paths to improving reading teachers' professional competence via structured training, using Qinjinmuyu's…

This study addresses a gap in resilience interventions for rural preschoolers by validating a 14-week play-based picture-book reading program involving 80 Chinese preschoolers aged 4-5 years. Participants were randomly assigned to non-intervention (NI), play intervention (PI), picture-book reading intervention (PRI), or play-based picture-book…

Dialogic instruction, a form of instruction that engages students in meaningful and substantive classroom dialogue, has been shown to benefit students in many ways. However, few studies on dialogic instruction have focused on the role and agency of classroom teachers as they navigate and negotiate the vagaries of classroom talk, especially in…

This qualitative case study investigated L2 readers' semester-long experiences with web-based pre-class peer discussions (WPPD). Data were collected from a university L2 reading course and included field notes on 21 students' web-based learning activities and in-class learning activities, interviews with these students, and their reflections.…

This paper presents the results of a retrospective study that investigates the cognitive effects of learning a foreign language in late adulthood. The learner group, consisting of 21 L1 Chinese speakers who have been learning to read Arabic for 2 years and 4 months, were compared to the matched group on their performance on a series of cognitive…