Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 5 (2014) Issue 2
pp. 145-146
Foreword to the Issue
The present issue completes the fifth volume of the Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching. It is hosts six articles and one book review. The articles cover topical research questions in the fields of students’ classroom interaction, (special forms of) task-based language learning and task complexity, the oft-neglected field of prosody in the language classroom, the area of teaching practice and, last but not least, cognitive text reception.
Volume 5 (2014) Issue 2
pp. 145-146
Foreword to the Issue
The present issue completes the fifth volume of the Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching. It is hosts six articles and one book review. The articles cover topical research questions in the fields of students’ classroom interaction, (special forms of) task-based language learning and task complexity, the oft-neglected field of prosody in the language classroom, the area of teaching practice and, last but not least, cognitive text reception.
The first article of the issue reflects upon research in a Spanish-speaking context, featuring English as the target language. Sara Quintero Ramírez and María Luisa Arias Moreno (both Guadalajara, Mexico) present a study that focuses on the potential improvement of students’ classroom interaction by means of weblogs (i.e. blogs). The setting was in a writing course of English in a BA TEFL programme at a Mexican university. Blogs maintained by students were employed to enhance their specific skills and strategies, but also to boost students’ critical thinking and language creativity. The article also describes how the co-construction of knowledge worked in the research setting.
Elizabeth Enkin (Lincoln (Nebraska), USA) and Kenneth Forster (Tucson (Arizona), USA) report about an examination on the training effect of the maze task, a psycholinguistic experimental technique for second language learning. The maze task represents a real-time instrument for measuring sentence processing. This task type, normally used to incite the additive production of sentences, was employed to train beginner students of Spanish. It was found that maze training was of great benefit to students in that it enabled them to cultivate their procedural representations. In the experiment, two approaches were described and analysed, one referring to structures of Spanish being more or less parallel to English structures and the other one featuring those structures of Spanish that were syntactically different. Results showed that the maze task is a promising task type and that it was well received by students.
Research into cognitive task complexity is presented in the subsequent article contributed by Marcela Ruiz-Funes (Statesboro (GA), USA), the researcher focusing on Spanish text production. Based on a corresponding research background, students were given the task to write two essays of different cognitive complexity levels that were evaluated for linguistic complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAS). The data obtained were, in a first approach, analysed by task type exclusively and then by task type and performance level combined. The findings suggest a positive correlation between task complexity on the one hand and CAS and proficiency level on the other.
Research into a widely neglected field is presented by Berit Aronsson (Umeå, Sweden), who aims to attribute a more prominent role to prosody in the foreign language classroom. Targeting at Spanish taught in a Swedish context, the author gives a survey of the communicative side of prosody and, by analysing the CEFR, the Spanish curriculum and current textbooks, indicates ways of how recent research findings can ensure access of prosody to practical teaching.
The fifth article by Frédérique Grim (Fort Collins, USA) targets at French as a foreign language. The author explores the question of how college teaching assistants implement the instructions given to them by their coordinator. The researcher’s target was to find out whether the desired curriculum was taught by the teaching assistants accordingly. The research results give insight into the teaching assistants’ fulfillment of instructions and also hint at potential consequences for teacher training.
A study which is not aimed at teaching but focuses on text reception in general is presented by Hans W. Giessen (Saarbrücken, Germany), whose hypothesis was that text reception and reading speed generally depend on the type of text that is being read and not only on the content that is conveyed. The researcher presented students identical texts which were rendered in two different text types: poetry on the one hand and prose on the other. The first results discussed in his article indeed suggest a correlation of this kind, with poetry being read much more slowly than prose. Should these results be confirmed by large-scale studies, they might not only hint at reading comprehension in terms of different text types, but also in terms of different types of text layout.
The present issue is rounded off by a review by Thomas Tinnefeld (Saarbrücken, Germany) on a recent book edited by Christoph Bürgel & Dirk Siepmann on new findings in the field of linguistics and language methodology. The book presents the scientific outcome of the first Osnabrück Symposium (Germany) organised by the authors in 2011.
The articles published in this issue of JLLT cover various studies which may complement each other in multifarious ways. The present issue may again be of interest to our readers in different language fields, be it at a university or a high-school level. It is in this sense that I wish all our readers some enjoyable hours spent with the present issue of JLLT.
Thomas Tinnefeld
JLLT
Editor