Olga Kozar

This study seeks to identify differences in language learning progress and experiences among 24 adult migrants, who arrived to Australia after the age of 40. The results suggest that age per se was not a reliable predictor of language learning progress. Instead, the initial English level of participants when they arrived to Australia, opportunities to use English and prior level of education were associated with considerable language learning gains. For example, participants who had a higher initial English level were able to find jobs that required them to perform a range of oral and written tasks across different domain, which further improved their level, while participants who had a low initial level were mostly unemployed. Another common factor we noted among participants with high and reasonable gains but not among those who made little progress was a proactive attitude and the use of a range of language learning strategies beyond the classroom. The study also revealed differences in age construal among participants with high and reasonable gains and those who did not improve.

Advances in technology and a shifting demographic of post-graduate students have resulted in a larger than ever number of off-campus PhD students. These students tend to be less satisfied than their on-campus counterparts with their candidature experience. Improving the current situation requires effort from multiple university stakeholders, including academic middle managers, who play a role in allocating resources and setting research training agenda. However, with the intensification of academic workload, academic managers might not view the support of off-campus PhD students as a high priority. This study investigates the attitudes of middle managers in a large Australian university concerning the provision of training and support to off-campus PhD students. The findings reveal that a complex interplay of discourses hinder the provision of support to off-campus PhD students. Implications for practice are discussed.

Even though there are increasing numbers of PhD students in the distance mode, our current understanding of PhD candidature at a distance is limited and incomplete. On the one end of the spectrum are accounts of unhappy and isolated doctoral students who are separated from communities of practice. At the same time, literature offers accounts of PhD students at a distance who view themselves as agential and autonomous and are happy not to get sidetracked by others. In this reflection we ask what distinguishes the conventional PhD student from one who is studying at a distance, and invite more research on self-efficacy and vicarious learning of PhD students at a distance.

Videoconferencing tools, like Skype, etc., are being increasingly used in language education worldwide. Despite assumed socio-affective and pedagogical benefits of using webcams in synchronous online language lessons, such as the feeling of co-presence or the possibilities of non-verbal communication, little is known about attitudes held by experienced online teachers towards webcams and their actual use of this tool during private online language lessons. This study interviews 20 experienced online language tutors and 20 adult students about their attitudes towards webcams and their use of webcams. The findings suggest that most teachers and students only used webcams at the start of their lessons for socio-affective reasons and discontinued the use of webcams after the first 2–3 weeks. Some common reasons for reducing the use of webcams were the perception of ‘webcamming’ as a more tiring mode, the feeling of self-consciousness and privacy concerns. The study calls for more research on the use of webcams, webcam-specific semio-pedagogical skills and suggests directions of future studies.

With the recent dramatic increase in global movements for work, leisure, or migration, more people than ever before are learning a language later in life. Together with the general trend towards increased life expectancy and life-long learning, this makes age in language learning a critical research issue. Muñoz and colleagues are therefore very much to be congratulated for putting age back on the applied linguistics table with their Special Issue ‘Complexities and Interactions of Age in Second Language Learning: Broadening the Research Agenda’. In this response to the Special Issue, however, we would like to go even further in broadening the agenda for age-related research in SLA by extending the object of inquiry from ultimate attainment to optimal proficiency development, and including research goals that move beyond theoretical questions of maturational constraint to address more directly the practical issues facing older language learners and their teachers.

A recent development in English teaching in Russia is the emergence of private online language-tutoring schools, which offer one-on-one lessons by means of audio/videoconferencing. It remains unclear: (1) how these new providers of educational services are presenting themselves to the potential learners; (2) what ideology they tend to drawn on and (3) whether there is sufficient similarity to conceptualise these websites as exemplars of the same genre. This paper employs the tools of critical discourse analysis (CDA), Genre Theory and Appraisal within the Systemic Functional Linguistics to study the language of 17 websites of private online language schools. The study aims to investigate whether the websites exhibit similar discourse and ideology and whether they might belong to the same ‘genre prototype’. The analysis reveals a considerable thematic, structural and rhetorical similarity between the websites and a high presence of neoliberal ideology.

Private tutoring is a common and worldwide phenomenon. However, there is a dearth of up-to-date research on private tutoring compared with that on institutional one-to-one teaching, which could be explained by challenges associated with data collection. This article proposes using publicly available online advertisements of private tutors as a method of acquiring data on private tutoring practices. It describes a two-stage study which employed this technique to investigate private tutoring practices in Moscow city. The first stage of the study looks at the subjects which are commonly offered for tuition in Moscow city, and the second part qualitatively analyses 32 profiles of top-ranking tutors in order to identify potential attributes of a ‘high-ranking’ tutor. The particular focus is made on the demographics and self-presentation style of private tutors in Moscow. The findings show that while the majority of tutoring services in Moscow seem to target school students preparing for the Unified State Examination, the most frequently offered subject is English for Speakers of Other Languages, possibly due to a larger target clientele (both school students and adult learners). Other findings include a difference in self-presentation style between two groups of private tutors: those who offer school-curriculum subjects, and those who tutor foreign languages.