Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching (JLLT)

Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching

Volume 3 (2012) Issue 2

Foreword to the Issue

The second issue of this year, which completes the third volume of JLLT, comprises five articles and two book reviews, covering three target languages: English, French, and German. The areas focussed upon are corrective feedback, language testing,  vocabulary instruction, the teaching of tenses, and formulaic expressions.

In the framework of English as a second or foreign language, K. James Hartshorn and Norman W. Evans (both Provo (Utah, USA) analyse the differential effects of comprehensive corrective feedback on L2 writing accuracy. The authors examine a strategy of instruction, based on skill acquisition theory, which simultaneously focusses on all types of errors. The positive results of this method, which noticeably improved students’ writing accuracy, are shown with respect to mechanical, lexical and grammatical areas. The authors end their contribution by pointing to some pedagogical and methodologican implications of their findings.

Kay Chen Soh (Singapore), complements one of his studies published in JLLT 1 (2010) 2 (271-296) in which he examined bilingual testing at the phrase and the text level, referring to English and Chinese in a contrastive approach. In these studies, which focussed on the word level, he found that by bilingual texting, a higher correlation in students’ textual performance could be achieved than would be possible in two separate language tests. In the present study, he extends this finding to the phrase and text level and has found the same positive effect as the one on the word level. The author refers his results to language methodology, especially to practical language teaching and language assessment.

Alexandra Reuber (New Orleans USA) presents a differentiated approach to vocabulary instruction for French as a foreign language. Taking two short movies on French daily life as the basis of her action research, she elaborates an approach which not only offers students authentic teaching materials, but also takes their individuality into account. Her approach thus creates a learning environment in which every learner feels respected and heard, reducing students’ language anxiety and, at the same time, increasing their motivation for the foreign language and its culture.

Valerie Wust (Raleigh (NC), USA) also targets at French. Her article features a concrete grammatical topic: the never ending story of imparfait and pasé composé. Wust’s approach is highly creative because she questions a phenomenon which has traditionally been transferred from one generation of French teachers and methodologists to the next: the chronological order in which the passé composé is taught first, and the imparfait, only afterwards. In her study, the author finds that the opposite sequence, with the imparfait being taught before the passé composé, has positive effects on students’ mastery of these two tenses. If her findings can be confirmed in further studies, the curriculum of French grammar instruction might have to be re-written.

Frank Kostrzewa (Karlsruhe, Germany) points to the importance of formulaic expressions and routines for the acquisition of German as a second and foreign language. Due to the relatively rigid nature of such chunk expressions, they give students a feeling of security when they make utterances in the foreign language as well as a more immediate access to the structures of this language. In this perspective, the language-learning process is not necessarily one whose complexity gradually increases, but rather a process which integrates complex structures from its very beginning. Should this be further verified, processes of construction and deconstruction would logically be of fairly equal relevance to language acquisition. 

The present issue of JLLT is competed by two book reviews. The first one is by Thomas Tinnefeld (Saarbrücken, Germany) on Tertiary Language Learning (2010) by Veronica Smith. In her monograph, the author gives an outline of recent developments in language teaching methodology and has her reflexions and teaching experience flow into an efficient approach oriented to intermediate to advanced adult learners: scenario-based language learning.

The second book review is by Xuan Jiang (Miami (Florida), USA) on The Handbook of Scholarly Writing and Publishing (2011) by Tonette S. Rocco and Tim Hatcher. On the one hand, it may not be customary to review a book here which does not have a direct impact on linguistics or language teaching. Yet, on the other hand, the book, in the wide range of sciences that it covers, is of practical importance for academics and may positively influence potential articles submitted to this journal. In this sense, this book review can be considered as valuable on a meta-level.

Finally, as the editor, I would like to thank the authors of this issue for having submitted their articles to JLLT as well as our readers who take an interest in reading them. Last but not least, I wish our readers an informative read.

Thomas Tinnefeld

JLLT

Editor