English textbooks play a paramount role in teaching process, and are expected to contain appropriate contents that can support students to acquire required competences for effective communication. The expected contents should contain different aspects of language abilities or competences well-known as communicative competence. Thus, the present study is aimed to explicate the representation of communicative competence aspects in the spoken dialogue instances contained in Indonesian EFL textbooks. Three English textbooks, prepared and designed under the auspices of the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture, are selected for the analysis. The findings suggest the textbooks have not provided sufficient dialogues that give useful models for students to use in communication. Amid the scarcity of the models, the available dialogues also do not much reflect how authentic spoken dialogues occur in real-life communication due to inadequacy to reflect real-life communication as insufficient representation of the communicative competence particularly in contained dialogue models.

The role of English in Indonesia can be said quite special because English is the only compulsory foreign language included in secondary curriculums. However, the special status of English in national education is not accompanied by satisfactory results. Out-classroom experience (OCE) is believed to overcome this issue and has been applied successfully. Therefore, this study investigates the use of out-classroom experience in enhancing Indonesian EFL learners’ ability in speaking English. By conducting a case study approach, the research used triangulation data collection techniques consisting of classroom observation, interview, and speaking performance test. The study involved 40 undergraduate students from one of the public universities in Banten province as its subjects. The result showed that the use of OCE positively contributes to the development of students’ speaking development. Out-classroom activities can facilitate the learners to access or even create language exposures by themselves. This study provided some implications about using OCE for language teachers and educational practitioners. Keywords: Out-Classroom experiences, speaking, college students, EFL context

The present study aims to investigate young people's attitudes about foreign language learning in Northern Ireland, depending on diverse residential areas and household economic backgrounds. A cross-sectional design was used in this study to conduct descriptive research. The present study uses secondary data from the Access Research Knowledge (ARK) in Northern Ireland's Young Life and Time (YLT) survey, which has been performed yearly since 2003. The survey consists of 103 items that may be completed in two ways: online (15.5 percent) or on paper (84.5 percent).  The emphasis of this study was on three variables: young people's home areas (urban and rural); household economic backgrounds; and their educational backgrounds (not very well-off, average, and very well-off); and the attitude to foreign language learning. The outcomes of this study revealed that disparities between urban and rural areas had a major impact on young people's views about foreign language programs. Compared to household prosperity, which did not give strong evidence of disparities in this study, the impact of this problem was considerably more prominent.

In this study, 30 male and 30 female Indonesian intermediate EFL learners were investigated to find out the gender differences in performing refusal strategy and the effect of interlocutor status on refusal strategy performed by the selected participants. A qualitative approach was employed in this study by using a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) with 12 scenarios. The data were analyzed into the refusal taxonomy proposed by Beebe et al. (1990). The results showed that the indirect strategy become the most frequently used strategy performed by male and female students. However, the female students have used a variety of indirect strategies slightly greater than did the male students. Moreover, the interlocutor status also affected a similar effect on the refusal strategy performed by the participants. Therefore, there is no significant difference in refusals between male and female students, and the results reveal that EFL students prefer to refuse respectfully to avoid offending others. The researchers proposed that future studies use not only DCT but also other instruments in collecting data in order to acquire complete data to explore pragmatic competency.

Research involving children and young people has a particular challenge in comparison to research involving adults. Of this particular challenge is related to the issues of ethical considerations and research methods that the researchers have to commit when conducting research. These are two essential research components and integrally linked to one another because they determine the quality and integrity of the research being conducted. These issues require thorough consideration and implemented differently from the research involving adults. Therefore, this paper aimed to discuss the ethical issues and research methods in researching children and critically evaluate these issues from the research practices by taking the cases of the articles in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Three articles were selected for further analysis to identify the ways the authors address these issues in their articles. The findings indicated that the authors mainly reported common ethical principles, such as voluntary participation and anonymity, but did not explicitly outline the ethical procedures specific for their children participation in their papers. There was also no indication that they employed appropriate methods to work with children such as using child-friendly methods encouraging children's participations and giving them space to express opinions and thoughts.