Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 12 (2021) Issue 1, pp. 7-8
The first issue of JLLT‘s 12th volume comes with five articles in two languages (English and Spanish) and on three languages. The authors whose papers are published in this issue come from the USA, the UK, Mexico, Sweden, and Germany. The fields covered are historical linguistics, foreign language methodology, mobile apps, grammar, and sign language.
The issue is opened up by Dallin D. Oaks (Provo (Utah) USA), who presents Mother Goose nursery rhymes as a suitable source for teaching historical linguistics. This subject, which, as one might expect, is oftentimes regarded as ‘boring‘ by students is presented here in such a way that it stands good chances of enhancing the latter‘s interest in this field, also because it may evoke childhood memories. The fact that these nursery rhymes are not so remote from modern English usage as no longer to be intelligible makes them an attractive object of teaching language change. The author gives an overview of some of the most important subfields of historical linguistics, such as voicing, phonological change or changes in morphology, syntax and semantics, to name but these, pedagogically supporting them by giving numerous examples.
In an opinion article, Thomas Tinnefeld (Saarbrücken, Germany) describes and analyses the development of the role of the teacher from the 1950s up to the present day. This period of around seventy years has brought dramatic changes in the teacher‘s role and in his or her practical work and importance in the classroom. The grammar-translation method and the audio-lingual method required a totally different type of teacher as compared to the subsequent communicative and constructivist approaches, not to mention the latest developments of virtual and / or hybrid or hyflex teaching. The teachers‘ daily classroom work has not always reflected the complexity of his or her work. Yet, the latest developments seem to be promising in this respect because nowadays, it cannot be denied that the teaching profession is an extremely complex and flexibility-oriented one so as to best respond to students‘ present and future demands.
Within an action-research oriented approach, Ángel Osle (Exeter, UK) investigates the use of mobile learning applications for developing learners' speaking skills, using the Telegram app for a group of Chinese natives learning Spanish. Featuring the relatively modern field of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), the study - even if based on a comparatively small sample of students - shows some positive outcome of VLE for the learning of foreign languages, some of which may even lie in the use of the corresponding app itself. The results also imply - this may be added - that in the modern and virtual time we live in, it is as important as ever, if not even more important, to offer students instruments that naturally belong to their lives and to make the best use of these instruments for language teaching and learning.
In their Spanish contribution to the present issue, Sara Quintero Ramírez & Sonny A. Castro Yáñez (both Guadalajara, México) research upon teachers' ideas and praxis in the teaching of Spanish in Mexico. Their qualitative study aims to identify teachers' ideas about teaching Spanish grammar and to compare them with the methodology they use in class. The consistency - and especially the inconsistencies - found between these teachers' beliefs and the way they organise their instruction may make any language teacher rethink his or her daily practice. Even if this is a qualitative study with the numbers of teachers taking part in it being rather small, every reader is invited to make some personal deductions from the findings presented in this paper so as to reflect on his or her teaching practice from a different perspective.
The last but, of course, not least contribution made to the present issue is made by Ingela Holmström (Stockholm, Sweden) and looks into a special type of language, i.e. Swedish sign language. In this context, a central problem consists in the fact that sign language communication does not happen in the same modality as verbal languages do. This means that, unlike a text orally expressed in a given language that is interpreted into another language (e.g. French into English), in sign language, the ideas that need to be expressed have to be transferred from the verbal / oral modality (i.e. that of words) to the visual-gestural modality, with interlocutors using their hands, their arms, their faces and their whole bodies to express what they would like to communicate. On top of that, linguistic features that are different from spoken language, such as spatiality, iconicity and simultaneity, need to be learnt. The author describes and analyses the teaching of such features to a group of hearing L2-students learning Swedish sign language at the university. Due to the specific requirements of sign language, a largely different teaching context and totally unfamiliar language learning processes are presented.
Coming up with a relatively wide range of topics dealt with in the various articles, the present issue promises to be a captivating read and might generate numerous ideas that, in turn, might advance research in this way or that. Should this process be triggered, this would not only make our authors happy, but also the members of our Editorial Advisory Board, not to mention the editor.
Thomas Tinnefeld
JLLT
Editor