Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 133 (2022) Issue 1
Foreword to the Issue
The first issue of JLLT’s 13th volume comes with five articles and two book reviews. The fields covered in the articles are foreign language methodology, the psychological importance of learners’ mother tongue for the learning of other languages, the teaching of pronunciation, the potential washback effect produced by language exams, and, last but not least, code-switching. The languages dealt with are English, Swedish, Vietnamese, Japanese and Albanian as native languages, and English, French, Spanish and German as target languages. This distribution points to the plurilingual character of JLLT. Four articles are written in English, and one is in German. The two book reviews, with one of them being in English and the other one in German, give attention to the use of linguistics in the foreign language classroom, and text linguistics in a German-Polish perspective.
In their study, Vi Thanh Son (Gothenburg, Sweden) & Joost van de Weijer (Lund, Sweden) investigate the potential impact of pupils’ exposure to English (as a foreign language) in activities outside the classroom, comparing a Vietnamese and a Swedish group of learners. For this purpose, demographic factors as well as children’s procedural and declarative knowledge were taken into account. Among other things, the findings suggest a significant correlation between children’s exposure to English and the development of their mental lexicon. It may be added that the results of this study support those of previous studies, which are equally promising and suggest that one of the prerequisites – if not the most important one – of language learning consists in including the language(s) to be learnt or perfected, into the learners’ lives. Inversely, this means that learning a second or third language in a classroom context alone, will not get learners very far.
The second article by Frédérique Grim (Fort Collins (Co), USA) also presents an action-research project which is placed outside the foreign-language classroom. It deals with the teaching of French pronunciation to American university students by giving them the opportunity to apply their skills through telling French stories to a general audience at an American municipal library. In the given context, pronunciation is a fruitful research field in two ways: on the one hand, together with grammar, it can be considered a highly important factor for the mastery of a foreign language; on the other, it has been attributed relatively little importance with respect to its potential contribution to the intelligibility of nonnative speakers, so that the article aims at filling this gap. Thanks to the realistic environment the project is placed in, students were given the opportunity to test their skills in an authentic environment. The article gives, then, answers to the questions of whether preparing university students to present French stories to a real-life audience can improve their pronunciation and their awareness of it, and of whether such a project motivates them and helps them understand the importance of their engagement for their community. Just like the previous one, this article also suggests that bringing foreign language teaching into the ‘real’ world can represent a fruitful way to include language learning in learner's lives.
Another success factor of language learning may be the way students consider the potential value of their mother tongue for learning other languages. This also includes the idea that if they find their native language useful for learning other languages, students' learning outcome may be better than if they do not attribute any potential value to their mother tongue. Indeed, in the study presented by Blake Turnbull (Kyoto, Japan), Japanese university students believed that the use of their native language may improve their English reading and writing skills as well as their grammar and vocabulary learning. Additionally, it may be underlined that the question of whether students’ impressions generally correspond to reality or not may be of secondary importance: as long as they think that their mother tongue can help them learn English more efficiently, there will be a positive effect, even if it is nothing but a placebo effect. The findings of this study, then, support the idea that a learner’s mother tongue plays an important role for his or her learning other languages and cannot simply be ignored. This also means that what contrastive linguists found in the second half of the 20th century is still of importance nowadays. Thus, this idea should be exploited more than has been the case up to the present day.
The potential washback effect of a university admission exam, the Serial Assessment Program (PAS), on the practice of Spanish language teachers in Brazil is the topic presented by by Yasser Abdullah Al Tamimi (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), Gladys Quevedo-Camargo (Brasília, Brazil) & Rafael Sena Raposo de Melo (Brasília, Brazil). This diagnostic, summative, and formative Spanish reading-skills test particularly addresses students with limited financial means. The findings of this case study, which combines a quantitative and a qualitative approach, indeed point to a limited washback effect, which included the use of previous test examples to give students an impression of the general format of this test and a certain prevalence of bottom-up approaches to reading. It may be added that this study also implies the importance of clear differentiation between proficiency-oriented language teaching on the one hand and language courses which particularly teach test-taking skills on the other.
The only German article contained in the present issue is provided by Naxhi Selimi (Goldau, Switzerland), Basil Schader (Zurich, Switzerland) & Andrea Cantieni (Goldau, Switzerland). This article, which does not have a pedagogic background, describes the coexistence of two languages in the speakers’ minds the way it manifests itself in the form of code switching, and that in the respective Albanian communities in Germany and Switzerland. In order to give insights into the code-switching practised in these communities, the authors interviewed 120 representatives of three generations (G1, G2, and G3). The findings show that code-switching is generally and equally practised by all the three generations in both countries, with the (older) G1 displaying less frequency in this respect than the other two generations. Moreover, code-switching was used for the same reasons By all three generations: to express a certain content or certain communicative requirements, to compensate for lexical gaps in the speaker’s lexicon, and to display language identity. Additionally, in the youngest generation, code-switching occurred more and more in public and was no longer limited to private life. The present article, then, documents a trend which is becoming more and more prevalent and which consists in considering code-switching as an important linguistic phenomenon that needs to be researched on.
The first of the two book reviews published in the present issue is by Daniel J. Nappo (Martin (TN), USA) on Judy Hochberg’s book “Bringing Linguistics into the Spanish Language Classroom. A Teacher’s Guide”. According to the reviewer, this book is highly practice-oriented and provides invaluable information and inspiration to the Spanish language teacher, who will be a better instructor after having read the book and by making good use of its infrastructure like the numerous PowerPoint slides it comes with in its different appendices.
The second book review is by Heinz-Helmut Lüger (Landau, Germany) on Zofia Bilut-Homplewicz’s book on developments, problems, and desiderata in German and Polish text linguistics, which represents the second book of the author's underlying project, with her first book having been analysed in JLLT 5 (2014) 1 by the same reviewer. According to him, this book not only comes with deep insights into topical developments in the field of text linguistics, but also represents an urgent plea for an intensification of scientific exchange between Poland and Germany.
It is clear, then, that the present issue, which, by the way, is the 25th of JLLT, has the potential to offer inspiration, stimulation and motivation to anyone who conducts research on applied linguistics and methodology or uses it in class in the endeavour of practical language teaching.
Thomas Tinnefeld
JLLT
Editor