Project-based learning (PBL) has gained popularity in education recently. This teaching method provides opportunities for students to learn independently by doing group works in the form of a project. It is seen as a suitable method to teach EFL to replace the traditional ways of teaching. Thus, this case study explores the students' and teachers' experience implementing PBL in the EFL class. Three EFL classes from three different high schools in Indonesia were observed to explore this issue. Six students and three teachers were interviewed to confirm the observation’s result and determine their perception of learning using PBL. The findings show that the class situation improved positively after implementing PBL. Furthermore, PBL was well perceived by both students and teachers. The teaching and learning process went smoothly and well-controlled. The students and teachers show positive perceptions toward PBL in EFL classes. However, some negative points of PBL were also pointed out. Thus, educational sectors may use this study's results to improve the educational quality, specifically for EFL classes.

Academic writing for publication in higher education is cognitively and linguistically complex. University students grapple with academic writing for publication because of academic genre/convention, linguistic competence, and academic literacy among others. For this reason, a learning environment does matter. The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is a learner-controlled environment for language learning. To examine this issue, a qualitative study with an action research design conducted with 28 graduate students as participants. The three main findings: (1) ways of encouraging students to write academic writing for publication through the personal learning environment as a learning platform; (2) implementing PLE's in the academic writing for publication course: content knowledge consideration; and (3) implementing PLE's in the academic writing for publication course: pedagogical consideration. In general, the findings indicate that PLE gives positive impacts on emerging students' academic writing for publication in the context of higher education. The educational organization needs to consider this issue. Keywords: Action research, academic writing for publication, learning autonomy, personal learning environment

This study reports the use of engagement in high-rated and low-rated EFL undergraduate students’ argumentative essays. The engagement here refers to one of the aspects in interacting with the readers, which is called metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005a). The data in this study were ten highest-rated and ten lowest-rated argumentative essays written by first-year undergraduate students. The data were coded manually by two raters to maintain data validity. The results reveal that high-rated essays contain less engagement than low-rated ones. However, it also shows that the engagement in high-rated essays was more varied and grammatically sophisticated than those in low-rated essays. Furthermore, while this study reveals that the higher number of engagement used in argumentative essays does not always coincide with the improved quality of the writing, it implies that the writing quality and score do not depend on the number of engagement expressed but more on the ways students use the engagement effectively. Thus, the explicit teaching on how to use engagement effectively in persuasive writings may be useful for the students to build more persuasive arguments as well as to improve their writing quality.

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