<em>Motivation and help-seeking as self-regulated learning strategies are essential for the students to increase academic persistence, cope with academic challenges, and take an active role in their learning process. To date, self-regulated learning strategy and motivation in learning have been extensively studied. However, little attention and effort have been made to investigate the correlation between a motivation variable and help-seeking strategy at the Indonesian high school level. To fill the gap in the previous research, this study aimed to investigate high school students’ motivation in learning English and the extent to which it correlated with their help-seeking strategy. To reach the aforementioned aim, a correlational-method design was applied in this research. The researchers gathered the data using two types of data collection techniques, namely a close-ended questionnaire and semi-structured interview to provide triangulation. Ninety-eight students of a private senior high school in Cirebon, Indonesia were involved in this study. The findings revealed that those high school students tended to be instrumentally motivated in learning English. Furthermore, they were also reported to have positive attitudes and good initiatives to engage in help-seeking strategies whenever it was necessary. From the statistical calculation utilizing SPSS version 25, it was found that motivation and help-seeking strategy had a strong positive correlation (r=.645), which inferred that as the students had a high level of motivation; they were more inclined to engage in help-seeking strategies.</em>

Despite the growing interest in research on Teacher Professional Development (TPD)  carried out by previous researchers, the voices of local EFL teachers in different regions in Indonesia in which top-down TPD activities are still prevalent remain underrepresented. As a result, in order to fill a gap in the literature, the current study sought to investigate the TPD activities undertaken by EFL teachers, the extent to which those formal TPD programs had an impact on their professional development based on their perceptions, and the constraints that they encountered. This descriptive qualitative study utilized a questionnaire and semi-structured interview as the instruments to gather the data and ensure triangulation for trustworthiness. Twenty-five English teachers from various Junior High schools associated with MGMP in Cirebon, West Java were voluntarily involved in this research. The result revealed that TPD activities that the participants have undertaken all these times helped them improve self-efficacy, attitudes, beliefs, reflective competence, classroom practice and instructional skills, and teacher knowledge and skills. Nevertheless, some challenges such as excessive workload as a teacher, time constraints or mismatched schedule, limited choices of TPD programs that were not in line with teachers’ interests, the mismatch between teachers’ needs and what the program offered, limited access and information about the programs, and less effective program duration remained prevalent during the TPD program implementation.

Successful classroom verbal interactions will occur when both the teacher and the students intend to be cooperative conversational agents contributing to the conversation's aims. In Pragmatics, this underlying principle is called Grice’s conversational maxims. However, in the classroom, both sides often intentionally flout these conversational maxims. Thus, this research aimed to conduct a pragmatic analysis to investigate the types of Grice’s conversational maxims violated by the main character of Freedom Writers movie along with the categories of teacher’s verbal interactions found in that movie under Flanders Interaction Analysis Categories System (FIACS). Using the document analysis method, the researcher used the movie transcript as the primary document to be analyzed. The findings showed that the four maxims were violated intentionally for several reasons, including warning the students of the consequences of their actions, encouraging them, avoiding certain topics of discussion, and emphasizing important messages without blatantly stating them to the whole class, and avoiding hurting the students’ feelings. Meanwhile, under Flanders Interaction Analysis Categories (FIAC), direct and indirect talks could be found in the movie. The result of this study can provide educators and pre-service teachers a glimpse of the importance of promoting appropriate classroom verbal interactions by analyzing the quality of classroom verbal interaction in terms of Grice’s Conversational Maxims and Flanders’ Interaction Analysis.

The short story as a literary work has been ubiquitously used to teach language and literature. However, not all short stories are appropriate and suitable to be used in the language-learning classroom. One of the aspects that should be considered in choosing short stories to teach language and literature is the readability level. The matching of appropriate text difficulty level to the readers’ reading ability is crucial to inculcate an interest in reading and elicit comprehension. Derived from this rationale, this study aimed to investigate the readability level of short stories used in the Introduction to Educational English Literature Course (IEEL). Moreover, this study also attempted to analyse the students’ perceptions of the short stories assigned to them to read in the IEEL course. In measuring the readability level, document analysis utilizing the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Formula was employed. To strengthen the data and ensure triangulation, 5 participants were purposely selected to be interviewed to explore their perspectives after reading those short stories. The results showed that 3 short stories namely The Birthday Party, The Dead Men’s Path, and Turning Thirty were categorized as standard (63.1), fairly easy (74.4), and easy level (83.7) respectively. Lastly, further inquiries through semi-structured interviews found that the 5 participants were reported to have positive viewpoints after reading those short stories.