Volume 10 (2019) Issue 2, pp. 129-130
Foreword to the Issue
This twentieth issue of JLLT comes with five articles, two of which are on English, one on French, one on Spanish and one on German. Four of the five articles deal with language methodology and one with linguistics, the latter, however, representing the background of all the articles. The authors of this issue work in Norway, the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Germany.
The first article is by Michel Cabot (Oslo, Norway), who investigates the types of feedback that are preferred by Norwegian student teachers with respect to their writing skills and their most important learning moments. With this study, he fills an important gap in the field of language methodology: on the one hand, it is important to know what kind of feedback future teachers prefer for themselves, because only then will they be able to give fruitful feedback to their pupils in their future professional lives. On the other hand, only little research has so far been done on feedback. On top of that, writing skills is not really a domain which has enjoyed the most intensive research activities. The study presented here is based on a set of different types of interviews and was carried out in Norway. The feedback basis consisted of two different essays, one with written and oral feedback given on it and the other one without any feedback given at all. The findings showed that the teacher students preferred varied feedback which incited them to reflect on their own performance. They particularly preferred accuracy-oriented feedback. Clearly, this study is of potential importance for all those language teachers who desire to optimise their feedback.
Marcela Ruiz-Funes (Statesboro (GA), USA) also executed a study on writing, examining its potential for language learning, especially for learners of Spanish and with respect to languaging and task complexity. On the basis of a multiple case study, also supported by the Inputlog software, and following a think-aloud approach, students were first asked to perform two writing tasks located at different cognitive complexity levels, and then, to fill in a questionnaire. Findings showed that students predominantly focused on lexis and only then on form, with task demands and learner proficiency pointing to some variations in this process and learner proficiency turning out to be a decisive factor. The author suggests that learner proficiency become an essential factor in future studies on task complexity and languaging.
A study on a grammatical topic, i.e. the acquisition of English subject-verb agreement, is presented by Kristin Killie (Tromsø, Norway), the grammatical focus being on the subject, and the group of informants being Norwegian learners in their teenage years. Looking into the question of whether learners make more mistakes with certain subject types than with others, the findings showed that more such mistakes were made when noun subjects were involved than in cases in where personal pronouns were the subjects. The researcher found drilling and high input rate to be decisive for this result. In the domain of noun subjects, complex nouns that consisted of two or more noun phrases, especially when used in combination, caused high error rates. The author suggests that noun subjects, especially complex ones, deserve teachers’ special attention, as learners urgently need training in this field.
Focusing on French, Vincent Chanethom (Fairfax (VA), USA) & Patrick-André Mather (San Juan, Puerto Rico) present a study on nasal vowel contrasts and their perception and production by English- and Spanish-speaking learners. Focus was on the two nasals /ɑ̃/ and /õ/, and, among other things, the relationship between the perception and production of these vowels was examined. Spanish natives were found to master these two nasals rather well whereas the English natives among the participants did not pronounce them so accurately and were not able to distinguish them so clearly. The authors recommend that French language teachers particularly focus on the contrast between /ɑ̃/ and /õ/, especially when teaching French to native speakers of English.
A study on a culture-related topic, i.e. contemporary German advertising as presented in posters and advertisements, is provided by Thomas Tinnefeld (Saarbrücken, Germany). Against the background of a language-related definition of culture, cultural connotations are analysed which include aspects of recent German political history, German economy and current social and environmental perspectives. In this part of the study, relevant filters are identified, which support the impact of the advertisements analysed. With regard to text-image references, some highly creative examples are studied, in which text and image display a relationship of complementarity, exemplification and symbolisation. This analysis presents a clear picture of contemporary German culture.
The articles presented in this issue doubtlessly come with inspiration for further research. As when one question is solved, several new ones open up, I am looking forward to further studies on and new answers to traditional and new challenges of foreign language teaching. In this vein, I wish all our readers a happy 2020 full of inspiration and academic drive.
Thomas Tinnefeld
JLLT
Editor