Journal of linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 12 (2021) Issue 2, pp. 123-125
Foreword to the Issue
This year’s second issue of JLLT comes with five articles and one book review and is focused on Europe, with contributors coming from the UK, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and Poland. The fields covered are students’ accent preferences, migrant speakers’ language choices as well as the teaching of grammar and students’ mastery of grammatical features. Let’s take a look at the individual contributions so as to make this cryptic description a little bit more concrete.
In their article, Gezina Christien Dorothé Huttenga (Groningen, NL) & Dick Smakman (Leiden, NL) analyse patterns and motivations of English major students’ accent choices in the Netherlands, using a multiple approach consisting of a quantitative survey, interviews, and the production of sound files. The question the authors raised was whether Dutch first-year students preferred Standard British English or General American when speaking English. The results showed that students’ choices were associated with their social identity and the image of themselves they wanted to display when communicating in English. Students' preferences showed a clear tendency towards one of these two accents - which one it was, will be revealed in the article -, and the way students evaluated these two most important accents is highly interesting. What is also highly instructive is the fact that some students adapt their accents to the respective situational context. Yet, they hardly ever use the one or the other accent consistently but mix them, with their own native accent also shining through. Teachers, in turn, may use different accents to offer students a pronunciation model, which, in addition to a basic orientation, may help them construct their own pronunciation based on the connotations and associations they may want to convey. On top of that, any (native and foreign) language user, i.e. all of us, may wonder to what end we use different accents in different situations and when communicating with different people so as to convey an image of ourselves that we find desirable or appropriate. What is obvious, then, is that pronunciation is much more than ‘just’ correctly rendering the sounds of a given language in a meaningful way: metaphorically speaking, it is the ‘dress’ that a speaker’s language wears and that will be evaluated and, in optimal situations, appreciated by this person’s interlocutors.
Covering the realm of grammar, Deak Kirkham & Milada Walková (Leeds, UK) present their 7Cs model, which is designed for highly practical and pedagogical purposes and which was developed by teacher for teachers. This model, which, in principle, is applicable to any (western) language, claims to be more accessible and much easier to understand than competing models that were developed in the field of linguistics. In this article, readers are provided with a concise description of language, which they may use to ease their students' access to grammar and offer them an overall understanding of linguistic phenomena. This approach is practically applied to the passive voice. The categories used, like combinations, concepts or contexts, are meant to help learners look through the complexity of language structures and help them understand what they may otherwise never be able to comprehend. Those readers who are active foreign language teachers may decide for themselves whether this model appeals to them and may be helpful to them. What it definitely does is to offer them an alternative to existing models, and this fact alone represents a value in itself.
A special area of English grammar is in the focus of the contribution made by Sofie Larasen (Måløy, Norway) & Kristian A. Rusten (Bergen, Norway), who present a corpus-based study of the use of the definite and the indefinite article by young Norwegian learners of English. Due to the specific systematicity of Scandinavian languages, the correct use of the articles represents an issue for Norwegian learners of English, which means that they overuse, underuse or use the English articles ungrammatically. The authors show how the use of the articles develops in the course of school education. Even if the results of this study are not to be revealed in this foreword, it can be said that article use does not only represent a potential problem for Norwegian learners, but for nearly any learner of English, and that the correct mastery of the articles is anything but trivial. All this points one more time to the fact that much more awareness raising with respect to the teaching and learning of the English articles is necessary than many teachers and learners may think.
Another grammatical source of problems is subject-verb agreement, especially the use of the third-person-singular -s. This is the grammatical field which Kristin Killie (Tromsø, Norway) deals with in her article, in which she describes and analyses errors of this type made by young Norwegian learners of the same age groups as the ones investigated in the previous article. Whereas in other linguistic communities, like the German one, to quote an additional example, the third-person-singular -s is left out too frequently, young Norwegians learners seem to strive for hypercorrectness by overusing the third-person-singular -s in contexts where it is neither appropriate nor necessary. Due to the high complexity of the problem, which is also caused by sentence and utterance types in which subject and verb are clearly separated from each other, the author finds it necessary to conduct longitudinal studies so as to provide more reliable data than are available today, and thus points to the necessity of even more intensive research on this topic to be conducted. Here again, a well-defined grammatical area proves to be more difficult for learners than many may think, and, what is more, this phenomenon represents a problem for an uncountable number of learners of English world-wide.
In the only German article in the present issue, Naxhi Selimi (Goldau, Switzerland) describes and analyses language profiles of third-generation Albanian migrants in Germany and Switzerland. Employing a multi-method approach, the author presents an empirical study, in the framework of which he also proposes a complex profiling model for spoken Albanian, thus filling a research gap. The survey - interviews and questionnaires - carried out lays the groundwork for developing language materials at the different proficiency levels examined, i.e. beginner, semi-advanced and advanced. The article offers a multitude of facets of the problem which may inspire further studies including other linguistic communities.
This issue of JLLT is rounded off by a review on Greta Gorsuch’s & Dale. T. Griffee’s “Second Language Testing for Student Evaluation and Classroom Research by Monika Sobejko (Krakov, Poland), who provides a functional insight into this book.
The present issue doubtlessly offers our readers some inspiration with respect to foreign language teaching and learning. Even if its focus predominantly is on English, the studies published here go far beyond the scope of this language and can easily be extended and transferred to other languages - either for reasons of plausibility or by way of conducting further research that looks into similar aspects of French, Spanish or German, for example. It is in this vein that I wish readers some hours of intensive reflection on what we love most - i.e. languages and their teaching and learning - during which they may forget time and space, figuring out new research questions and planning new research designs.
Thomas Tinnefeld
JLLT
Editor