Journal of Studies in the English Language

About the Journal

Editorial JSEL — 2026-04-30

Note from the Editor-in-Chief

Neil Bowen — 2026-04-30

Editorial Team

Editorial JSEL — 2026-04-30

Documentary Style and Symbolic Imagery in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy

Gentjana Taraj — 2026-04-30

The influence of Theodore Dreiser on American naturalism is widely recognized, despite his prose often being criticized for excessive detail and stylistic awkwardness. This study argues that these features can be understood not simply as flaws but as part of a deliberate strategy that reinforces the novel’s naturalistic portrayal of human behavior as shaped by social, environmental, and psychological forces. Close reading of An American Tragedy shows that Dreiser’s style is inseparable from his deterministic vision. Patterns such as mirrored events, parallel character trajectories, recurring symbolic objects, and color imagery work together to represent Clyde Griffiths’ fragmented consciousness and the tension between external pressures and internal conflict. The analysis also examines the novel’s documentary-like narrative form, highlighting the integration of legal, inner, moral, and journalistic discourses. Natural imagery, material objects, and recurring color motifs are treated as part of a broader symbolic pattern that develops across the narrative. These elements collectively suggest a structured pattern of organization through which Clyde’s aspirations, hopes, fears, and social constraints are expressed. In light of these findings, the article shows that stylistic features in the novel function as formal elements that contribute to the representation of naturalistic determinism at the linguistic, structural, and symbolic levels.

From Needs Analysis to Instructional Design: Developing a Metacognitive Instructional Model for Teaching Workplace English Listening and Speaking in Thai Higher Education

Unaree Taladngoen — 2026-04-30

Metacognitive strategies can potentially develop EFL students’ English listening and speaking skills and foster metacognitive awareness and systematic, self-regulated learning. Nonetheless, metacognitive instruction has been limited to stand-alone interventions investigating listening or speaking skill development. Consequently, this mixed-methods study conducts a needs analysis—indispensable for instructional model development—to investigate the learning needs and target needs of 88 Thai EFL undergraduates, five Thai EFL teachers, and 28 employers, with the aim of developing a metacognitive instructional model for teaching workplace English listening and speaking at a Thai public university. Employing data and methodological triangulation, the instruments included online questionnaires, semi-structured interview questions, and a classroom observation protocol. Semi-structured interviews were conducted until data saturation was reached with fourteen undergraduates, five teachers, and four employers. Three randomly selected classrooms of the English for Working Skills course were observed twice. Data were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings revealed learning needs related to segregated-skill instruction and integrated-skill practice, incorporating diverse activities and integrating 21st-century skills. Target needs comprised necessities, lacks, and wants associated with workplace success. A theoretical, contextually informed metacognitive instructional model is then proposed, comprising in-class and out-of-class sections, with activities structured around the planning, monitoring, and reflecting phases to promote English communication and self-regulation.

Construal of the Contemporary: A Lexico-Grammatical Analysis of Stance and Voice in EFL Student Teacher Reflections on Language Teaching

Marianna Lőrincz — 2026-04-30

Amid the abundance of teacher cognition scholarship, how student teachers linguistically construct their understanding of contemporary language teaching remains largely overlooked. Drawing on a lexico-grammatical profiling approach, this study explored stance, modality, and attribution as linguistic indicators of professional voice from the perspective of corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The research employed LancsBox X on a corpus of reflective essays written by 52 Ukrainian EFL student teachers to analyze keywords, functional stance markers, 3-grams, collocation patterns, and concordance lines. The findings epitomize a discourse of epistemic modesty, positive affect, and a balance of self-attribution and generalized attribution. Hedges predominated over boosters, commensurate with cautious engagement with professional knowledge, while “should” emerged as a principal marker of acceptance of disciplinary norms. Collocational networks further illustrate participants’ identification with learner-centered and context-sensitive language pedagogy, evincing an orientation toward principled eclecticism. Ultimately, this study shows that language not only reflects teacher cognitions but also provides a lens through which they can be examined.

Personality Traits and the Intention to Use Artificial Intelligence Tools in English Language Learning: A Mixed-Methods Extension of the UTAUT Framework

Daniel James Richardson — 2026-04-30

Current understanding of AI use by undergraduate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students is limited. The role of personality in their acceptance of AI also remains underexplored. Therefore, the purpose of the current study is to investigate EFL students’ use of AI outside of the classroom, the factors behind their AI use, and the impact of personality traits on their patterns of use. We adapt and extend the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) in an explanatory sequential research model to examine these areas. We collected survey data from 238 undergraduates enrolled in English classes at a Thai university. The data were analyzed with partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). We also conducted focus group interviews with 29 survey respondents. A hybrid deductive–inductive thematic process was used to extract themes from the focus group data. Survey results highlight almost universal use of AI among our sample, with Performance Expectancy being the strongest predictor of EFL students’ intention to use AI. Social Influence also plays a significant role, although the influence of personality traits is limited. Focus group findings confirm the normalization of students’ AI use outside of the classroom, largely due to perceived efficiency gains. In addition, students frequently reported using simple risk management strategies. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for EFL teachers and the UTAUT framework. Specifically, we point to the potential redundancy of certain core UTAUT constructs and suggest model extensions that capture the influence of social media.

Stances in Research Article Abstracts: An Analysis of Abstracts in Literary Journals

Watinee Suntara — 2026-04-30

In academic discourse, research article abstracts are often considered objective; however, they are inherently evaluative and frequently encode subjectivity through linguistic choices. Although abstracts have been extensively studied, literary research article abstracts (LRAs) have not received the same level of attention. This study investigates the rhetorical structure and use of stance in one hundred LRAs from high-impact journals. We employ Tankó’s (2017) revised move-structure model and Hyland’s (2005) interactional metadiscourse framework to analyze the corpus of abstracts. The rhetorical analysis shows no dominant structure, contrary to conventional accounts. LRA writers prefer to assert their interpretations using boosters, which show the highest density in the Outcome (0.63), Background (0.58), and Purpose (0.56) moves. Attitude markers are used most frequently in the Background move (0.65). Consistent with academic conventions, the use of self-references is typical of the Methodology move (0.43). The use of these devices indicates that LRAs are intentionally subjective and contain evaluative language and strategic rhetorical choices deployed to engage readers and enhance the authors’ credibility. The findings underscore the need for EFL/ESL students and novice writers to recognize academic discourse as strategically evaluative rather than purely objective.

English Linguistic Traces in Thai Translation: A Preliminary Stylometric Study of Textual Traceability in Human and LLM Translation

Sanooch Nathalang — 2026-04-30

This preliminary study examines stylometric patterns in a small corpus of English-to-Thai literary translations produced by six human translators and three LLM systems across six source passages. Human translations function both as evidence of stylometric patterns in literary translation and as reference points against which the three LLM systems are evaluated. The inclusion of multiple LLMs allows the study to examine how stylometric traces emerge in LLM translations, both in comparison with human translations and across the systems themselves. Using lexical diversity measures, sentence-based syntactic measures, Burrows’ Delta, and BERTScore F1 as a semantic fidelity control, the study explores textual differences between the human translations and the outputs within this corpus. The most distinct contrasts appear in Maas values, sentence-length variance, and overall stylistic distance, while some measures show overlap across systems. Overall, the findings show that both human and LLM translations leave traceable stylometric patterns, though these are distributed differently across lexical richness, sentence-length patterning, pronominal reference, and overall stylistic distance. For English language studies, the findings offer a concrete illustration of how marked features of English literary prose are preserved, flattened, or shifted when rendered into a typologically distant language, which may be useful for translation pedagogy, post-editing, and the critical reading of AI-assisted translation.