Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching

Volume 6 (2015) Issue 2 (PDF)

Foreword to the Issue

The Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching completes the second issue of its sixth volume with six articles and one book review. The topics researched upon cover the testing of young EFL learners, oral communication in its productive and receptive perspective, writing in English as a second language, all published in English, and the existence of quality standards in foreign language teaching as well as the category of aspect in a Korean-German contrastive study, both published in German.

The issue is opened up by Istvan Jerry Thekes (Szeged, Hungary), who investigates an integrated diagnostic vocabulary test for young learners of English. In a further step, his study may lead to a modification of the existing test on the basis of the findings. A notable result of his findings is that students scored highest in recognising nouns. Besides, the listening tasks correlated most highly with each other. An important aspect which may be added in this context is that the findings presented in this article implicitly point to the necessity of constantly verifying test devices in use so as to increase their reliability and validity.

Tapping on English learnt as a foreign language by Arabic speakers, Asmaa Shehata (Calgary, Canada) presents a new study on training students for second-language word recognition. With regards to the identification and acquisition of the Arabic pharyngeal-glottal consonant contrast, the researcher found that students’ exposition to several talkers, rather than to a single one, led to significantly higher discrimination rates. If these results, admittedly found in the framework of a relatively limited study, can be confirmed and eventually generalized, this finding would endorse the approach of presenting students with a high number of video and audio recordings generated by a multitude of speakers so as to enable them much sooner that otherwise possible to understand the native realisation of the foreign language to be learnt.

The following two articles centre on the specific situation of Asian students learning English as a foreign / second language. In the first one, Matthew Michaud (Kobe, Japan) looks into communicative competence and communicative language teaching presently practised in Japanese high schools. The study focuses on some of the problems concerning learning methods of Japanese students and the way they practice oral communication in class. His findings hint to the fact that those textbooks that are not ministry-approved are more suitable for acquiring oral skills than those which have been approved officially.

The second article featuring Asia - in this case, Taiwan - is by Andrew Szanajda (Taichung, Taiwan, ROC) & Wei-Yu Chang (Durham, United Kingdom), who offer reflexions and recommendations for ESL writing classes. While many of these reflections may be more or less expectable in Western classrooms, they are rather innovative for teaching English to Asian learners, i.e. in a cultural context in which the group counts more than the individual and where shy students are far more numerous in class than outspoken ones. If writing were practised in Asian classes – and not only there – in the way it is presented in this article, students’ actual language performance would doubtlessly be raised and they might be more inclined to enjoy producing written texts.

Apart from these four English articles, the present issue contains two more articles that are written in German. Inez De Florio-Hansen (Kassel, Germany) elaborates on the discrepancies between language policies and the wants and benefits of instructors and students. In this context, the PISA studies, whose results have been rather prevalent for the past 15 years, are scrutinised just like the different performance standards which have influenced work in the foreign language classroom in the past few years. Issues raised in this article are, for example, the question of how the results of foreign language teaching and learning can be measured, the insufficiency of the idea of performance that is not supported by the mastery of content, and the discrepancy between standards-based approaches and such phenomena as language awareness and (inter/trans)cultural attitudes. Based on a German setting of language teaching and learning, the article aims to help teachers implement the different standards for the best of their students instead of being restricted by these standards in their daily classroom work. According to the author, only value-based foreign language teaching can valorise students’ and teachers’ personalities and enhance the efficiency of learning and teaching.

The final, purely linguistic article of the present issue is on the category of aspect in a contrastive Korean-German approach. Frank Kostrzewa (Karlsruhe, Germany) describes the different language devices that permit to express aspect in Korean - an agglutinating language - and German, where aspect differentiation is rather underdeveloped. Aiming at an even more fruitful analysis of aspect, the author advocates a combination of the categories aspect on the one hand and action, tense and eventuality on the other.

Last but not least, I would like to thank the authors for having submitted their manuscripts to JLLT. Above all, I would like to thank our readers who take note of the different articles for the potential use in their own research. Eventually, I wish all the readers coming across JLLT some enlightening hours of study.

Thomas Tinnefeld

JLLT

Editor