Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 5 (2014) Issue 2
pp. 145-146


Foreword to the Issue

The present issue completes the fifth volume of the Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching. It is hosts six articles and one book review. The articles cover topical research questions in the fields of students’ classroom interaction, (special forms of) task-based language learning and task complexity, the oft-neglected field of prosody in the language classroom, the area of teaching practice and, last but not least, cognitive text reception.

The first article of the issue reflects upon research in a Spanish-speaking context, featuring English as the target language. Sara Quintero Ramírez and María Luisa Arias Moreno (both Guadalajara, Mexico) present a study that focuses on the potential improvement of students’ classroom interaction by means of weblogs (i.e. blogs). The setting was in a writing course of English in a BA TEFL programme at a Mexican university. Blogs maintained by students were employed to enhance their specific skills and strategies, but also to boost students’ critical thinking and language creativity. The article also describes how the co-construction of knowledge worked in the research setting.

Elizabeth Enkin (Lincoln (Nebraska), USA) and Kenneth Forster (Tucson (Arizona), USA) report about an examination on the training effect of the maze task, a psycholinguistic experimental technique for second language learning. The maze task represents a real-time instrument for measuring sentence processing. This task type, normally used to incite the additive production of sentences, was employed to train beginner students of Spanish. It was found that maze training was of great benefit to students in that it enabled them to cultivate their procedural representations. In the experiment, two approaches were described and analysed, one referring to structures of Spanish being more or less parallel to English structures and the other one featuring those structures of Spanish that were syntactically different. Results showed that the maze task is a promising task type and that it was well received by students.

Research into cognitive task complexity is presented in the subsequent article contributed by Marcela Ruiz-Funes (Statesboro (GA), USA), the researcher focusing on Spanish text production. Based on a corresponding research background, students were given the task to write two essays of different cognitive complexity levels that were evaluated for linguistic complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAS). The data obtained were, in a first approach, analysed by task type exclusively and then by task type and performance level combined. The findings suggest a positive correlation between task complexity on the one hand and CAS and proficiency level on the other.

Research into a widely neglected field is presented by Berit Aronsson (Umeå, Sweden), who aims to attribute a more prominent role to prosody in the foreign language classroom. Targeting at Spanish taught in a Swedish context, the author gives a survey of the communicative side of prosody and, by analysing the CEFR, the Spanish curriculum and current textbooks, indicates ways of how recent research findings can ensure access of prosody to practical teaching.

The fifth article by Frédérique Grim (Fort Collins, USA) targets at French as a foreign language. The author explores the question of how college teaching assistants implement the instructions given to them by their coordinator. The researcher’s target was to find out whether the desired curriculum was taught by the teaching assistants accordingly. The research results give insight into the teaching assistants’ fulfillment of instructions and also hint at potential consequences for teacher training.

A study which is not aimed at teaching but focuses on text reception in general is presented by Hans W. Giessen (Saarbrücken, Germany), whose hypothesis was that text reception and reading speed generally depend on the type of text that is being read and not only on the content that is conveyed. The researcher presented students identical texts which were rendered in two different text types: poetry on the one hand and prose on the other. The first results discussed in his article indeed suggest a correlation of this kind, with poetry being read much more slowly than prose. Should these results be confirmed by large-scale studies, they might not only hint at reading comprehension in terms of different text types, but also in terms of different types of text layout.

The present issue is rounded off by a review by Thomas Tinnefeld (Saarbrücken, Germany) on a recent book edited by Christoph Bürgel & Dirk Siepmann on new findings in the field of linguistics and language methodology. The book presents the scientific outcome of the first Osnabrück Symposium (Germany) organised by the authors in 2011.

The articles published in this issue of JLLT cover various studies which may complement each other in multifarious ways. The present issue may again be of interest to our readers in different language fields, be it at a university or a high-school level. It is in this sense that I wish all our readers some enjoyable hours spent with the present issue of JLLT.

Thomas Tinnefeld

JLLT

Editor

Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching

Volume 5 (2014) Issue 1

Foreword to the Issue

The present issue commences the fifth volume of the Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching. This issue comprises six articles and three book reviews The articles selected here offer insight into the teaching of reading, the learning of vocabulary, grammatical instruction, and the sociolinguistic competence of language learners, potential remedies that can be implemented into language learning software, and, last but not least, the teaching and learning of lexical chunks.

The first article by Shing-Lung Chen (Kaohsiung, Taiwan) describes a model that aims to reduce or even possibly eliminate potential failures occurring in language learning programmes in the speech recognition process. Modern language learning software, specially made for the correct decoding of learners’ utterances, is designed on the basis of linear rather than circular models. In the author’s opinion, however, only circular models can serve to compensate for communication failures and, thus, assure the continuation of given communication processes. In this article, potential problems of language learning programmes are analysed and possible remedies are  suggested.

In the subsequent article by Chris Merkelbach (Taipei, Taiwan), the teaching of reading skills in Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) is the issue in the focus of the author’s attention. Students generally encountering tremendous difficulties in reading academic Chinese texts of a certain length within a reasonable lapse of time, the article depicts the  prominent importance of reading skills in the framework of the mastery of this language. Considering the fact that Western students of Chinese are, as a rule, experienced language learners, the author elaborates on selected reading styles, suggesting ways and techniques to teach these strategies in CSL classes. Special focus is laid on the syntactic and textual levels.

The third article by Nina Daskalovska (Stip, Republic of Macedonia) also deals with reading, but considers it as a way to boost students’ incidental vocabulary learning,  taking into account that reading is generally recognised as one of the essential sources of human beings to extend their vocabulary banks. Providing the second replication of a study by Zahar, Cob and Spada (2001; see the article) with the first replication study also being her own, the author analysed a group of university students in their first and second year of English instruction. Her results suggest a positive relation between learners’ existent vocabulary size and their relative acquisition of new words,  as well as a positive correla-tion between the frequency with which new words appear in a given text and the proba-bility of students acquiring them. The study also confirms that learners’ general pre-knowledge and their cognitive abilities may be of decisive importance for their vocabulary extension through reading.

Grammar is in the focus of Andrew Schenck’s & Wonkyung Choi’s (both Daejeon, South Korea) contribution. The authors recommend best practices for the teaching of some important grammatical features of English. In the introductory part of their article, the authors state the principal ineffectiveness of those ways of teaching grammar that follow a one-for-all approach. Focusing on adult learners, with a close examination of their learning such grammatical items as the definite article and the plural noun, they point to the poten-tial outcome of three different techniques: explicit focus on meaning, explicit focus on form, and implicit focus on form. The findings of the study reveal that grammatical instruction should vary according to the traits of the individual grammatical item, the instruction employed, and learners’ language proficiency. On this basis, an empirical method is suggested that takes the respective content of grammar instruction into account.

In her article, Anna Krulatz (Trondheim, Norway), gives insight into the sociolinguistic competence of foreign language learners, analysing written electronic requests (emails) produced by non-natives and natives of Russian under test conditions. Focusing on the head act of request on the one hand and internal and external modifications on the other, the researcher identified various differences between the requests produced by non-native and native speakers. In addition, the author also found that although non-native speakers’ strategies occasionally  approximate those utilised by native speakers, the sociolinguistic competence of the latter is most rarely fully attained by the former.

Patrycja Golebiewska / Christian Jones (both Preston, UK) elaborate on lexical chunks, comparing the potential effectiveness of Observe Hypothesise Experiment (OHE) and Presentation Practice Production (PPP). In their experiment, the authors found that both approaches proved to be promising in terms of improving students’ productive and receptive language knowledge, no statistically significant data in favor of the one or the other framework being identified. Their research suggests that both input- and output-based language activities have the potential of enhancing students’ acquisition of lexical chunks. Instructors’ choice of the one framework or the other - so they conclude - may therefore be based on their personal teaching preferences or on their estimation of the effectiveness of learning styles rather than on the potential success of the use of these two approaches.

The present issue is rounded off by three book reviews: the first one by Heinz-Helmut Lüger (Koblenz-Landau, Germany) on Zofia Bilut-Homplewicz’s book on perspectivation in text linguistics (2013), the second one by Elisabeth Kolb (Munich, Germany) on a book on mediation in foreign language teaching edited by Daniel Reimann & Andrea Rössler (2013), and the third one by László Kovács (Szombathely, Hungary) on Erzsébet Drahota-Szabó’s book on intertextuality and translation (2013)

This issue sees a varied selection of articles which will not only will answer but also may open up further research questions. As well as the articles, the three book reviews presented in this issue may  ultimately entice our readers to  pick up the respective books and read them in detail. In either case, the editor hopes that JLLT  has reached one of its objectives, i.e. to cast a tiny light  on one of the most interesting, inspiring, and meanwhile, most complex fields - the relationship between linguistics on the one hand and language teaching on the other. Being aware of all this, we wish our readers a pleasant time thumbing through and enjoying the latest issue of JLLT.

Thomas Tinnefeld

JLLT

Editor