Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Foreword to the Issue
The present issue of JLLT, which opens up the journal's tenth year, comes with four articles on English language teaching and one article on linguistics with reference to a Taiwanese aboriginal language. The authors of these articles are based in Germany, South Korea, the USA, and Taiwan.
In the first article, Andrew Schenck (Songdo, South Korea) & Mathew Baldwin (Daejeon, South Korea) examine the question of whether form-focused instruction is an investment into students' learning or whether it is a waste of time. The authors hypothesise that, whereas a kind of input enhancement, which does not differentiate with regards to the grammatical features in question nor with regards to different levels of learner proficiency, may not really be efficient, it is fruitful when used in an individualised and differentiated way. Indeed, the results of their empirical study show that students' mastery of some individual features of English morphosyntax could be improved at the B1 level of CEFR using input enhancement. The findings hint to the fact that drawing students' attention to those grammatical features that are of special relevance to their respective proficiency level may offer considerable chances to improve their linguistic accuracy.
The second article presented in this issue deals with vocabulary and complements the previous one in a certain sense. Danijela Ikonic & Thomas Hawes (both Munich, Germany) present an empirical study on the use of English vocabulary apps for classroom use. Mobile apps presently taking more and more importance in our private and professional lives, language learning apps are become increasingly prevalent as well. More often than not, however, they are used for independent learning and not in classroom contexts, where many teachers take them as a disturbance rather than helpful learning tools. In the empirical study carried out at a German vocational school, students' performance in a vocabulary test was investigated, with them having or not having access to a corresponding app, i.e. Quizlet. A majority of students indeed performed better in the test when using the above-mentioned learning app. In addition, students' attitudes towards employing vocabulary learning apps were examined. A majority of students found employing apps for school to be reasonable and even more motivating than paper-based materials traditionally used in the classroom. The results, then, suggest that making wider use of language learning apps in the future may be promising for learning, teaching, and testing.
In a communicative approach, Todd Hernández (Milwaukee, (WI), USA) & Paulo Boero (Nashville (TN), USA) examine students’ chances of acquiring or improving their Spanish pragmatic skills while studying abroad. On the basis of service encounter requests, the authors present an empirical study in the framework of which students were offered a 90-minute lesson on theoretical instruction about requests, and during their stay abroad, they had to perform communicative tasks and were given assignments for guided reflection. The results indicate that students did improve their pragmatic skills during the time they spent abroad and, thus, suggest that awareness-raising instruction offered to students before going abroad represents an efficient way of boosting their pragmatic competence.
Looking into French L2 writing, Sheri Dion (Exeter (NH), USA) addresses Kristeva's notion of the subject in process. Her assumption is that taking the linguistic, psychological and pedagogical side of the writing process into consideration will foster students' foreign language writing skills. Basing her reflections on the as yet rather limited findings in the literature, the author indicates practical advice (not only) for language teaching.
A purely linguistic study is presented by Ya-Ling Chang (Yilan, Taiwan), who uses a domain approach to analyse language maintenance and language shift in one of the biggest aboriginal Pangch villages in Taiwan. In her empirical study, the author documents the erosion of Pangch and the role of language policy in shaping its linguistic structures, analysing data on speakers' language proficiency and language use in different everyday situations. Findings show that age is a decisive factor for language change through time and that education is of high importance with regards to the mastery of Mandarin Chinese, the latter representing the dominant language. Due to the dominance of Chinese, the heritage language is not really transmitted to the next generations. In those (everyday) contexts, in which Pangch is traditionally used, men appear to be the better language keepers than women.
This short overview shows that the articles presented in this issue cover a relatively large range of topics between language acquisition and linguistics, with the linguistic topic, for the first time in JLLT, featuring an Asian minority language. I am therefore convinced that readers will find some insight and inspiration for further research of their own – which may then be published in this journal.
Thomas Tinnefeld
JLLT
Editor