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The role of English in Afghanistan has always been contentious, but in 2001 English acquired symbolic capital that provided people with a motive to invest in learning the language. To better understand this investment, this study employed Darvin and Norton's Model of Investment along with the notion of Linguistic Entrepreneurship to investigate how dynamic shifts in the global era can influence people's willingness to invest in a new language, and how this investment is tied to issues of ideology, capital, and identity. Narrative data were collected via frames and interviews to present the experiences of people who had lived through a relatively prosperous time in Afghanistan's recent history, yet who also faced uncertainty due to the sudden shift in power that threatened the conditions which had allowed them to align themselves with more global ambitions. The study reveals how government and western support was influential in Afghans investing in English, which allowed them to accrue economic, cultural, and social capital, transforming them into linguistic entrepreneurs. However, recent events mean this support has been marginalized, diminishing the ability of Afghans to invest in English and leaving the participants in this study in a precarious position as new ideologies which promote opposition to western influence take hold of the country.

While the satisfaction of international students is frequently surveyed, much of this research is based on a very limited range of closed-item data collection methods, producing findings that partially reflect the researchers' assumptions in designing the survey items. Recognizing the potential value in using methods that are more openended and qualitative analyses, the present study employed narrative frames and follow-up interviews to explore the satisfiers and dissatisfiers for international vocational education students at one institution in New Zealand. Reporting on perceptions of the class, institution, and community, the findings identify the participants' top-of-mind (dis)satisfiers and complement the existing literature by identifying seldom-reported themes. Discussion of issues in analyzing narrative frames is also provided.

This study investigates the experiences of an international graduate student at a South Korean university via positional identity theory. It reveals the positional identities that evolved out of the student's experiences studying the Korean language prior to starting her graduate degree, and during her time as a graduate student. Applying narrative research methodology that employed interviews and journal entries, the findings reveal that the student's self-perceived right to receive her lectures in English coupled with negative experiences learning Korean prior to her graduate studies influenced her willingness to learn the Korean language and impacted upon her experiences during her graduate lectures. Perceived neglected duties and denied rights clustered to form positional identities which were radically different to described identities held prior to her time in the South Korean educational context. Implications on what these results might mean for the newly developing international graduate student market in Korea are then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The teaching of English as a foreign language in South Korean public schools has seen the implementation of a number of new innovations. One such innovation, the teaching of English through English, dubbed TETE, is a government-initiated policy that requires public schools to teach English by only using English. Nevertheless, studies reveal that teachers are not implementing the policy. The current study, through a series of observations and interviews, ascertained that teachers were not implementing the government policy at the elementary-school level due to a conflict in government decrees, making it difficult for them to teach English by only using English while maintaining student motivation to learn English. The study reveals the importance that teachers place on the belief that motivation needs to be maintained at all costs, even superseding the need to maximize target language exposure. The paper calls for further studies of teachers who have established techniques to maintain student motivations for learning the target language while teaching exclusively in the target language, as well as touching upon the idea of the need for an alternative to the TETE policy.

In East Asian nations such as Korea--where EFL is increasingly central to education policy--more and more workshops, seminars, and conferences focus on helping teachers incorporate extensive reading (ER) programs into their teaching contexts. There is a wide range of materials available for ER, including graded readers--novels and short stories that are calibrated to the different language levels of learners. Consequently, intensive reading, accompanied by comprehension questions and language analysis tasks, continued to dominate in Korean classrooms. In order to offer an alternative to this trend, the authors developed the Bimodal Narrative Approach (BNA). This bimodal (reading and listening) approach adheres to many of the main precepts of ER and expands the method by adding listening activities to the extensive reading of a graded reader novel and accompanying audio pack. This article describes how the BNA was taught to a group of public school teachers participating in an in-service training program, including specific reading and listening activities and their evaluation. Video-based activities and evaluation are also discussed.