Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 4 (2013) Issue 1
Foreword to the Issue
It is our pleasure to
present six articles and two book reviews in the present issue of
JLLT. The articles refer to
language methodology, with respect to linguistics and literature, and
to English and Spanish as foreign languages. Five of the articles
published here are in English. One is in Spanish - and
this one is the first
Spanish article ever published in JLLT.
The topics of the
articles in this issue range from language assessment and vocabulary
instruction to learners of English, via Spanish speech
intelligibility of English native speakers, the negotiation of
meaning in Spanish, the teaching of Spanish relative pronouns and the
use of comic strips in Spanish language instruction.
The
present
issue is opened up by Veronika
Timpe
(Dortmund, Germany), who deals with the problem of task difficulty in
task-based language assessment. Task difficulty is a fundamental problem in
this respect because if the question of how difficult a given task is
cannot be answered in a reliable manner, language assessment as a
whole becomes highly questionable. This question not only refers to
whether a task is 'easy' or 'difficult', but it also refers to all the
possible 'degrees of difficulties' which come into play on this
continuum. It is not surprising that this question has inspired a
considerable amount of research in the past few decades. The present
contribution is a review article in which general issues are
discussed, with a psycholinguistic and a sociolinguistic approach
being employed to investigate the issue in question. The suggestions
for further research made by the author at the end of the article may
help to advance this field of study.
Gabriella
Morvay and Mary
Sepp (both New York, USA)
treat the question of how to measure productive vocabulary in English
language learners with reference to writing as well as academic
vocabulary, the mastery of which will increase students' chances to
enrol in credit-bearing courses. In testing students' performance, the authors
tried to establish a relation between the
former's productive vocabulary knowledge on the one
hand and academic writing on the other. This article closes the part
of the present issue which is related to English as a foreign
language.
The
present issue is further unfolded with articles in the field of
Spanish as a foreign language. Ángel
Ozle Esquerra
(London, UK) presents a study of his own on the influence of gender,
aptitude and motivation on the speech intelligibility of English
learners of Spanish. On the basis of current
research approaches for these three parameters, the author found
correlations in two cases and no correlation in one case. In the
given context, it can already be stated that motivation is of utmost
importance.
Montserrat
Mir
(Normal (IL), USA) reports her research study on the negotiation
on meaning in Spanish task-focused conversations. Her
study explores the influence of topic familiarity and task design and
widely confirms previous research done in this field of study. The
research results suggest a general attractiveness of
spot-the-difference tasks. Moreover, the author found that the
triggers used to elicit clarifications are of high relevance.
Zahir
Mumin
(Albany (NY), USA) tackles the grammatical chapter of Spanish which,
at times, is challenging for learners: the relative pronouns lo
que, que, and
quien(es).
In his article, the author presents a new model and an interlanguage
hierarchy which enable teachers to instruct their learners more
efficiently in this field and which, if applied consistently, may lead
to a better acquisition of Spanish relative pronouns by native
speakers of English. The author identifies a potential negative L1 transfer as the main reason for the lack of mastery of English natives when it comes to the use of relative pronouns in Spanish.
As
language teaching is not only based on linguistic methodology but can
also have literature as a basis, the article of César
Diego Rexach (Osnabrück,
Germany) on a novel use of comic strips for the teaching of Spanish
as a foreign language has been included in this issue. Rexach's
article is the first one to refer to literature. In his article, the
author suggests a new approach towards the use of comic strips in
Spanish language teaching, in which comics are not just utilised as
simple introductions to topics to be discussed or new content to be
dealt with. The author favours an approach in which the comic strip
is an objective of teaching rather than merely a medium. Rexach's
contribution completes the first section of the present issue.
The
second section comprises two book reviews. The first one is presented
by Günter
Schmale
(Metz, France), who analyses the book Linguistics
by Anne E. Baker & Kees Hengeveld (2012), which was conceived as
an introduction to linguistics. The second book review is contributed
by Thomas
Tinnefeld (Saarbrücken,
Germany), who analyses the Lernwörterbuch
Chinesisch by
Huiqun Mao (2011)
("Learning
Dictionary of Chinese"). As this dictionary targets at German
learners of Chinese, this book review is presented in German.
Editor
and editorial board hope that the articles published in this issue
will inspire researchers to further deepen some of the topics dealt
with here and to submit their research results to JLLT.
Thomas Tinnefeld
JLLT
Editor