Issue 46 (2026): in progress

Teacher professional identity (TPI) has become central to understanding teachers’ agency, emotions, and career development, yet existing studies remain largely Western-centric and overlook how gendered hierarchies shape identity in Asian higher education. Little research has examined how female English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers with PhDs in Thailand negotiate their professional selves amid prestige-driven and patriarchal institutions. This study investigates how Thai female EFL teachers with PhDs negotiate professional identities within the intersecting pressures of teaching, research, gender expectations, and hierarchical academic systems. Adopting a critical–dialogical self approach that integrates dialogical self theory (DST) with a feminist perspective, we conceptualize teacher identity as dialogical, relational, and shaped by power-laden structures. Drawing on narrative inquiry supported by corpus-informed thematic analysis, life stories of two Thai female EFL academics were analyzed through the lenses of self-, other-, and structural positioning. Findings reveal hybrid “I-positions” (e.g., educator, mentor, supervisor-researcher) negotiated within institutional hierarchies that reward productivity but undervalue care work. Tensions of role overload, emotional labor, and neoliberal accountability shaped participants’ self-efficacy and resilience. The study extends DST by theorizing professional identity as affective, relational, and structurally embedded, urging institutional policies that recognize hybrid roles and foster equitable, emotionally sustainable academic cultures in non-Western contexts.

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Within the Malaysian context, reading is a critical foundational skill in the learning process, particularly during the early childhood education stages where cognitive development is rapid. This study examines the implementation and overall effectiveness of the specifically designed Easy Reading Module in supporting preschool children who face persistent difficulties in acquiring Malay reading skills, emphasizing qualitative analysis as the primary method. The study was conducted in a preschool located in the Jelebu District, Negeri Sembilan, involving a purposive sample of one preschool teacher and the 25 preschool children who experienced reading difficulties. Data were collected over a comprehensive 12-week intervention period through semi-structured interviews with the teacher and non-participant classroom observations of children’s engagement, confidence, and phonological awareness during their use of the Easy Reading Module. The findings indicate that the Easy Reading Module enhanced children’s engagement, confidence, and phonological awareness, while also supporting more active participation in reading activities within the classroom. The study highlights how structured and developmentally appropriate instructional materials such as the Easy Reading Module can support early literacy acquisition and offers valuable implications for teaching practices, instructional design, and policy development in early childhood literacy education to improve long-term educational outcome. Ultimately, the module’s success in improving literacy skills underscore the necessity of structure instructional materials for advancing earlier teaching practices policy.

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The high rate of digitalization of education services has significantly changed the way education agencies recruit, communicate with, and provide services to potential students. In this respect, data-driven online marketing has become one of the strategic tools that provide individualized educational services, which address the needs of various learner profiles and expectations. The current research paper is a critique of how education agencies have implemented the use of data analytics and digital marketing technologies to shape personalisation strategies and improve student engagement. The qualitative research design was embraced, where a semi-structured interview was conducted with the professionals in education agencies to investigate their experiences, perceptions, and practices concerning data-driven marketing. The results have shown that the use of data-informed decision-making can allow the agencies to optimize the audience segmentation, communication strategy, and service delivery during the student recruitment lifecycle. However, the issues of data integration, ethical issues, and organisational capacity still encroach on the largest scale of personalized approaches. The research paper is also relevant to the already existing literature in both providing empirical information regarding the role of data-driven digital marketing in education agencies and in pointing out its effects on the construction of personalized education services in the increasingly competitive global education market.

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In this study, interpretive phenomenology was adopted to explore how university students make sense of AI risks when using AI in language learning contexts. Eighteen undergraduate students were interviewed individually, with participants also completing experience journals during the two-week interview period. Three dialectical themes were found after analyzing all interview transcripts and journals: (1) "the panic of too much convenience." Students felt torn between the lure of being efficient and losing control, oscillating between saving time vs. taking shortcuts to learn, feeling empowered vs. dependent, affirming vs. losing authorship; (2) "hallucination" and "gatekeeper": AI's output had "hallucinations," which destroyed trust; students switched roles from producer to proofreader, experiencing physical anxiety about academic integrity; (3) "Is it still my learning?" cognitive offloading caused metacognitive doubt whether deep learning still took place once there were no longer any desirable difficulties. Our results suggest that risk does not belong to AI itself but rather is a meaningful world created by users under certain conditions. Instead of simply accepting/rejecting AI, students have developed context-based self-regulation strategies against AI risks. Our study tries to go beyond the limits of stage models for technology adoption and offers a phenomenological account of what it feels like to be a learner living in technologically mediated times. We argue here for turning the conflict into teaching moments so as to nurture critically minded AI literacies.

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This mixed-methods study investigates the efficacy and learner experience of using an AI-generated, multi-dimensional scaffold during the pre-writing stage of continuation writing tasks for Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. The quantitative phase employed a between-subjects design (N = 52 undergraduates), comparing an AI Scaffold Group with a No-Scaffold Control Group. Results indicated the scaffold group produced texts with significantly higher holistic quality, fluency, and lexical alignment, though no significant differences were found in grammatical accuracy. The qualitative phase, which is central to this study's purpose of achieving an in-depth understanding, involved stimulated recall interviews and scaffold use logs with a focal sub-sample. A reflexive thematic analysis of this rich qualitative data revealed that learners experienced the scaffold as a tool that: (1) reduced cognitive load by structuring the complex planning process, (2) deepened their comprehension and connection to the source narrative by activating a detailed situation model, and (3) increased confidence and self-efficacy by providing actionable linguistic and structural guidance. The integrated findings substantiate the role of AI-generated scaffolding as a potential instructional tool, demonstrating that its primary benefits are mediated through cognitive and affective pathways that facilitate a more engaged and meaningful interaction with the writing task. This study contributes to the fields of AI in education and L2 writing by delineating not only the outcomes but, more importantly, the lived experience and underlying learner-cognitive processes of AI-assisted planning, thereby highlighting the essential role of interpretive qualitative inquiry in evaluating educational technology.

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This qualitative study examines Chinese university EFL students’ classroom experiences and perceptions of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT). Data were collected through in-depth interviews with 15 purposefully selected students at a public university in China and analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings show three key features of the learner experience. First, students often followed a preparation-performance sequence. Second, tasks were commonly done through peer collaboration. Third, students’ emotions often shifted from anxiety to satisfaction during tasks. Students also constructed clear meanings from these experiences, which shaped their motivation and engagement. Many came to see English as a practical tool for communication. They reported a stronger sense of achievement when tasks included step-by-step support from teachers and peers. Interest, enjoyment, and a sense of classroom community also helped maintain engagement. The main contribution is an integrated framework that explains successful TBLT implementation from the student perspective. It brings together contextual and personal factors that students identified as enabling (e.g., supportive task design and interest-driven engagement) or constraining (e.g., time pressure and low self-confidence). The framework suggests that TBLT success depends on alignment between classroom conditions and learners’ internal dispositions. Practical teaching suggestions are offered based on students’ perspectives to support TBLT adaptation in similar contexts.

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This study explored how academic leaders applied principles of positive psychology in fostering inclusive educational environments and examined how positive psychological traits shaped their leadership experiences, challenges, and strategies. Anchored in an exploratory qualitative research design, the study sought to capture the lived experiences and leadership practices of academic leaders within diverse institutional contexts. One-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with eighteen (18) academic leaders, allowing for in-depth insights into how inclusion was enacted beyond formal policies. The collected data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis to identify recurring patterns and meanings across participants’ narratives. Findings revealed that academic leaders operationalized positive psychology through hope-oriented practices, well-being initiatives, strengths-based leadership approaches, and the intentional cultivation of belongingness within their institutions. These practices played a significant role in nurturing inclusive cultures by promoting psychological safety, collaboration, mutual respect, and active engagement among both students and staff. Moreover, the results highlighted that positive psychological traits, particularly resilience, optimism, empathy, and gratitude, served as essential leadership resources. These traits enabled leaders to navigate institutional constraints, sustain inclusive initiatives over time, and respond adaptively to resistance, change, and learner diversity. The study concluded that inclusive education was strengthened not solely through policies, frameworks, or structural mechanisms, but through everyday leadership practices grounded in positive psychological principles. Embodying and modeling these traits, academic leaders translated inclusive ideals into meaningful institutional practice. The study concluded that inclusive education was strengthened not only through policies and structural mechanisms but through leadership practices grounded in positive psychological principles, underscoring the central role of academic leaders in translating inclusion from policy intent into institutional practice.

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Sustainable learning participation has emerged as a key issue in higher education, especially in situations where academic pressure and the speed of change in education are high. This paper looks at the role of social support and motivation in maintaining student engagement in the long run amongst Chinese university students. This research is designed to examine the effect of social support processes and motivation processes on maintaining long-term learning engagement in postsecondary education. The semi-structured interviews took place with 25 undergraduate and postgraduate students from Chinese public universities. NVivo-assisted thematic analysis was used in analyzing data through an interpretivist paradigm. The concept of sustainable engagement that will be used in this research is the ability of students to be able to recover and re-engage when they are disengaged, as opposed to being continuously motivated. The experience of sustainable learning is dynamic and thus cycles of disengagement and recovery, and not constant motivation. Relational support provided by family, peers, teachers, and institutions plays the role of psychological and structural infrastructure, which helps in sustaining persistence and re-engagement. Intrinsic interest, future orientation, self-efficacy, and perceived meaning are motivation factors that are very important resources that promote engagement in the long run. This research will add to the body of literature on engagement by offering a conceptualization of sustainable engagement as a process of recovery and illustrating a reciprocal interaction between social support and motivation in the formation of long-term engagement. The results serve as qualitative information to teachers and schools that would want to create enabling learning conditions that support persistence and student wellness.

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Palawan, Philippines, is characterized by deep cultural heterogeneity and multilingual classrooms, making it a critical context for examining culturally responsive and localized approaches to mathematics education. Anchored on the principles of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, Ethnomathematics, and Social Constructivism, this study investigated the opportunities and challenges of contextualizing and localizing mathematics instruction and examined its implications for teaching practices, student learning, and curriculum development in this culturally complex frontier region. Employing a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, quantitative data were first collected through structured surveys from 100 secondary mathematics teachers and 300 students to identify general trends in perceptions of localized instruction. These findings then guided the qualitative phase, which involved semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions to explain and deepen understanding of the quantitative results. Findings revealed that contextualized and localized mathematics instruction significantly enhanced student engagement, motivation, conceptual understanding, collaboration, and cultural identity, as lessons grounded in community experiences and familiar practices made abstract concepts more meaningful and accessible. However, several systemic challenges were also identified, including limited availability of high-quality localized instructional materials, increased teacher preparation demands, linguistic diversity within single classrooms, misalignment with standardized curriculum and assessment systems, and inconsistent institutional support. This study contributes new empirical evidence on the tension between linguistic plurality and standardized educational structures within Indigenous–migrant learning environments, a dimension that remains underexamined in Southeast Asian mathematics education research. Sustainable implementation requires targeted teacher training for multi-ethnic classrooms, alignment of localized instruction with curriculum and assessment systems, adequate instructional resources, and stronger institutional and community support.

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This paper discusses how English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instructors perceive the use of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) in facilitating speaking skills in Chinese EFL contexts. The study employs a qualitative descriptive research design because it seeks to explore the perceived barriers and effective teaching methods associated with task-based speaking instruction. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data by interviewing twelve EFL instructors in universities and language institutions in China, which was complemented by reflective notes. Thematic analysis was employed to analyze the data. The results have shown that instructors are struggling with a number of problems, such as large class sizes, difficulties in assessing speaking achievement, lack of motivation among students, and limited institutional resources. Regardless of these limitations, the instructors mentioned using successful strategies such as task adaptation and scaffolding, flexible grouping techniques, and formative feedback practices to support student participation and communicative engagement. The findings indicate that TBLT has great potential to enhance speaking skills, but its effectiveness is highly reliant on whether the instructors can adapt the principles of tasks to the reality of contexts. The paper highlights the need to synchronize assessment activities with communicative purposes and institutional support of task-based pedagogy. Curriculum designers and policymakers are encouraged to develop flexible assessment systems and professional development programs that focus on enhancing the effective implementation of TBLT in EFL speaking instruction.

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Despite the rich landscape of Philippine literature, there remains a limited understanding of how specific literary forms and their linguistic delivery influence students' motivation to read across the archipelago. Grounded in Guthrie and Wigfield's Engagement Model, this study addresses this gap by exploring the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that shape learners' engagement with local texts. Utilizing an exploratory qualitative design, the study involved 18 language students purposefully selected from the Philippines' three major island groups, Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, who participated in semi-structured one-on-one interviews. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed a duality in reading motivation: while learners are primarily driven to read contemporary genres due to their social realism and linguistic accessibility via "Taglish", they simultaneously exhibit deep engagement with complex historical narratives like Noli Me Tangere. This finding suggests that historical consciousness, the desire for identity reclamation, can override linguistic barriers regardless of regional background. The study concludes that effective literature instruction must navigate both the psychological need for mirroring lived experiences and the sociological need for anchoring a unified national identity. These insights support a pedagogical strategy of thematic pairing, where educators integrate high-interest contemporary texts with canonical works to optimize student engagement on a national scale.

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The increasing prominence of English language proficiency in Malaysia has prompted many parents to take an active role in supporting their preschool children’s language learning beyond the formal education system. While parental involvement in education is not new, limited research has explored how Malaysian parents facilitate English language acquisition at home during the early childhood years. This qualitative study sought to explore the motivation, teaching methods, perceived challenges and coping strategies in home-based English language teaching and learning among parents of preschool-aged children. Data were collected through in-depth interviews involving diverse groups of parents from urban and semi-urban settings in Malaysia. The thematic analysis of data collected revealed five dominant themes that discussed agency and motivation, strategies and resources, strategic use of digital tools, challenges of consistency and confidence, as well as coping strategies. The study’s findings highlight the evolving role of Malaysian parents as co-educators in early language development and underscore the need for greater institutional support and resource curation for home-based English learning. Implications suggest that early childhood education policies and programs should integrate parent-focused digital literacy initiatives and provide accessible, culturally relevant language learning tools to bridge gaps in parental knowledge and capacity.

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