Regardless of numerous studies supporting the effectiveness of utilizing music and songs in second language teaching, there is a remarkably limited amount of research investigating how music and songs are actually used by language teachers and the beliefs underpinning their practices, particularly in the Malaysian educational context. This qualitative study explored Malaysian ESL teachers’ beliefs and practices with regard to the use of music and songs in language instruction at different levels of education as well as factors influencing their instructional practices. The research participants consisted of five primary-level, five secondary-level and five tertiary-level ESL teachers working at public and private educational institutions, who were selected using purposeful sampling strategy. Data were gathered through individual semi-structured interviews and analyzed using Miles and Huberman’s (1994) framework for qualitative data analysis. Findings of the study indicated the ESL teachers from all three levels of education held overall positive beliefs about the benefits and appropriateness of music and songs as a teaching tool and utilized them in various ways to promote students’ language learning. A number of factors were found to influence the teachers’ use of music and songs in their classrooms. The findings of the study have implications for various educational stakeholders.

Willingness to communicate (WTC) is an individual’s predisposition to communicate with a person or persons at a specific time. Over the past century, there has been a dramatic increase in WTC research. This study aims to offer an overview of the existing literature regarding WTC from 1900 to 2022 and provide a bibliometric and visual analysis of the research status as well as the development trend of this research field. A total of 428 journal articles were retrieved for the purpose of conducting bibliometric research. The data for this study were collected from the Web of Science (WOS). The results established the development status of the field of WTC, the annual scientific production and growth rate, the thematic evolution and trend topic, co-citation, and coupling between authors, sources, and countries. The bibliometric analysis showed that: (1) In the past decades, research in WTC has continued to soar and annual publications can be divided into three stages, which are an initial stage, a slow development stage, and a rapid expansion stage. It has been discussed to a wider extent mainly within the fields of education and linguistics; (2) of the 38 countries that the articles were exported from, the United States topped the list with the most publications, and Canada received the most citations. China has the most inter-country collaboration compared to other countries, which is at the center of international cooperation. China’s main cooperation countries were Iran, Japan, Canada, and Australia. The top author in the WTC field with the most production and impact is MacIntyre, PD, while System was the most popular journal. (3) By means of keyword analysis, “second language” was the most frequent keyword, followed by “model” and then “attitude”. Based on the results of the thematic evolution analysis, the research themes for 2021 to 2022 are “model”, “competence”, “Chinese”, “abroad”, “teachers”. The findings may be beneficial to L2 teachers and learners better to understand the role of WTC in language study. Researchers in this field might find the study useful for finding new research directions, relevant sources, and opportunities for collaboration.

Difficulty in learning gives huge impact to the process of language discovery among school children. LINUS students are categorized in this group and regarded as Low Achiever (LA) regardless of their education level. Currently, schools are provided with traditional learning materials such as textbook prepared by the Ministry of Education and it is up to the teachers’ own creativity and initiative to turn the materials into a more interesting learning source [1], [2]. However, depending solely on these learning materials alone is not enough as these children will easily lose their attention as they become bored and finally lost interest to proceed with the learning process [3]. Therefore, there is a need to utilize the elements of technology in order to motivate and facilitate these LINUS students in learning vocabulary in English. This experimental study aimed to explore the effectiveness of using mobile augmented reality (MAR) application in vocabulary learning among LINUS students. 45 students were involved and the development of MAR in vocabulary learning in this study was investigated based on the ADDIE Instructional Design (ID) method as a framework. As a form of measurement, British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS) III was used and findings showed that there was a significant improvement in the post test after 6 months of MAR implementation. Although this study showed an encouraging results, there was still lack of skills in terms of writing the words learnt via augmented reality. The results of this study provide the discussion on the practicality of using Augmented Reality to help the struggling learners to cope with acquiring and learning English language in ESL context.

This article presents a comprehensive systematic literature review of the associations between genre-based approaches (GBAs) and English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) writing. It provides an overview of GBAs and second language (L2) writing. The review further elaborates on the theoretical backgrounds of GBAs and ESL/EFL writing. The article then critically reviews 38 studies conducted on GBAs and ESL/EFL writing in the past 20 years (2003-2023). A methodological review was also performed to analyze the various research methods employed by previous researchers. Four major themes of research on GBAs and ESL/EFL writing were identified: research articles’ writing, thesis or dissertations writing, argumentative writing, and other types of professional writing. Additionally, three major methodological approaches were identified: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. The article culminates by discussing the implications of the results of this review and recommends promising directions for future research.