Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 13 (2022) Issue 2
Foreword to the Issue
The present issue of JLLT, which completes its 13th volume, presents five articles and deals with the teaching of English and German. In more detail, the articles investigate teaching writing, using formative assessment to support student learning, teaching and learning English in special situations like the pandemic, a pedagogy of including students’ home languages in the classroom, and emotional aspects of reading comprehension in a German context.
The first article by K. James Hartshorn (Provo, USA), Norman W. Evans (Provo, USA), Jesse Egbert (Flagstaff, USA) & Amy Johnson (Provo, USA) is about disciplinary differences that play a role in university ESL writing at undergraduate level in the USA. In this study, the perspective is that of university professors and their perceptions about writing throughout the whole of their students’ undergraduate studies. Five disciplines were investigated, i.e. biology, business, computer science, engineering, and psychology. The aspects examined in detail were the amount of writing that students were expected to perform during their studies, the intensity of feedback they received from their professors, the extent to which they were allowed to resubmit their texts for improvement, the identification and weight of exam-relevant text types, the most significant challenges with regards to writing as well as the writing purposes characteristic for each discipline. Whereas some factors could be identified as being relatively stable throughout the disciplines in question, others, among which the purpose of writing, showed remarkable differences. The findings of this study are of potential relevance not only for university instructors, but also for students, as the findings presented here clearly show in which degree programmes writing is really important and in which ones it plays a minor part.
Another form of examination, i.e. formative assessment, is researched by James Herbach & Kinsella Valies (Shizuoka, Japan). The authors explore the potential of formative assessment for boosting Japanese students’ self-confidence and even their fluency in English. This action-research project included the clarity of instructions students were given, and the materials used for practice and for testing students’ speaking abilities, such as reading a text aloud, describing a picture and expressing one’s own opinion. Eleven freshman student groups from all the university departments took part in this study, with on-site and online teaching being included. A formative speaking-assessment module offered students clear and concise instruction, information on their strengths and weaknesses, and feedback from their instructors. The findings of this study documented a considerable improvement of students’ performance between the midterm and the final exams. On top of that, students’ confidence to express their ideas in English went up in all the groups investigated. In a broader view, these findings also imply that, if done properly, assessment, which, more often than not, evokes somewhat negative associations, can also be employed to help students develop their capacities and personalities and thus deserves a better image.
The teaching of English during the COVID-19 pandemic is examined by Rashit Emini (Skopje, North Macedonia) & Sharon C. Lee (Dallas (TX), USA). In this case study, carried out in a North Macedonian primary school, the authors employed a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods to collect data about the views of four teachers, the school’s headmistress, and 73 pupils from different grades about the impact of teaching and learning English online. The highly negative effects of these measures on pupils’ learning outcomes could be identified, and this although, back in 2020, the school in question as well as its teachers had reacted to the new situation immediately. Consequently, teachers and students were relieved when finally being back to the on-site mode. Let us all, if this may be added here, be happy about the fact that teaching and learning are back to normal, without forgetting, however, what we have learned during the pandemic, and let us try to keep the good things of online teaching, be it the hybrid mode or different forms of blended learning.
An insight into a practical aspect of language policy is provided by Anna Burnley (Tallahassee (FL), USA), who develops pedagogical strategies to diminish concepts of language privileging among American pre-service teachers, pleading for the inclusion of students’ respective home languages in the English-language classroom. For the author, this inclusion represents a possible way to reduce potential language endangerment. She pleads for pre-service teachers to view students’ bilingualism, or even multilingualism, as a positive influence rather than a disturbing factor, as language endangerment ultimately means cultural endangerment. She rightly sees this change of view as a positive aspect which might work in favour of the additive factors of all languages. One of the strong points of this contribution is the author’s practical insight and her time-tested advice, which are not only of help to pre-service teachers but to all instructors who teach multicultural student groups.
The fifth article, contributed by Eleni Peleki (Flensburg, Germany), is in German and analyses the role of state emotions in the context of reading comprehension in culturally heterogeneous German primary-school classes. 79 randomly selected mono- and multilingual pupils were tested so as to find out whether there was any correlation between the pupil’s competence in reading comprehension and their (positive or negative) state emotions. The potential influence of gender and linguistic socialisation were also examined. The findings are apt for being included in the methodology of German as a first, second or foreign language.
Again, the contributions made to the present issue are varied enough to find their readers and to give them food for thought. In this vein, I thank all the authors for their trust and confidence in JLLT and wish all the readers enthralling hours of academic reflection as well as inspiration for their own teaching practice and / or further articles of their own.
Thomas Tinnefeld
JLLT
Editor