Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching

Volume 7 (2016) Issue 2 (PDF)

Foreword to the Issue

The present issue of JLLT comprises four articles and one book review, three of the articles and the book review coming in English and one article being published in German. The fields covered by these contributions are applied linguistics and foreign language methodology, in particular text composition, assessment of teachers' attitudes, and scientifically oriented language teaching.

The first article by K. James Hartshorn (Provo (Utah), USA) is on applied linguistics, yet not on the science itself, but on the quality control practised in journal publications in this field, i.e. the peer-review process. His study is situated in the a context in which, as is presently the case, peer review, as the method of choice in the sciences, has got more and more under criticism in numerous fields, with modern review processes showing a tendency towards including procedures that, just like social platforms. entail public evaluation which is anything but anonymous. The analysis of empirical data provided by journal editors, editorial board members and reviewers according to their different roles, show the various ways peer review is perceived, with advantages and disadvantages or üeer review being discussed and suggestions given. One of the strong points of this article is the fact that Hartshorn does not only present the also statistical data, but also provides opinions uttered by his respondents, which shed some more light to the whole process than a mere analysis of the figures would have been able to. From the edtor's perspective, it is important to note, as is done here in addition to Hartshorn's reflexions, that all those envolved in any kind of review process – as editors just like as authors – should do their best to develop awareness to the process not only for the best of science, but also for the best of the human beings who are behind these processes, so that researchers, young or old, not be confronted with what may be called “cold science”, but be esimated for their work and their enthusiasm without which no science would ever be possible.

A methodological approach is followed by Marcela Ruiz-Funes (Statesboro, GA, USA), who presents a study of her own with regards to writing in Spanish at the university level. After an overwiew on the curricular importance attached to Spanish at American universities, key notions in the field of writing are more closely examined: writing to learn a language, to learn content, to develop composing skills and ciritical thinking. In addition, tasks given in a classroom context and their outcomes are analyse as well as the different purposes of writing, that are defines as either, social, academic, or professional. Finally, the author gives concrete suggestions for developing students' writing skills from elementary to the graduate level. Marcela Ruiz-Funes's article, this may be added here, might contribute to attaching more importance to writing in practical foreign language teaching and to overcome a situation in which this skill is often unduly disregarded to the advantage of speaking. In the era of cloud computing, i.e. Google Docs, classroom writing can take a new dimension.

Not so much the language learner as the teacher is the centre of the study by Anna Krulatz (Trondheim, Norway) & Anne Dahl (Trondheim, Norway) that explores the of Norwegian teachers' readiness to teach multilingual students. The authors' empirical online survey on the respondents' potential training in multilingualism, their ides about the skill, ths knowledge and, not to forget, the resources that are necessary to teach multilingual classes, revealed that the partaking teachers had not received any multilingualism training, but trusted themselves to teach classes that were linguistically diverse. The author use their findings to discuss some implications to be put into practice in the field of teacher training. In addition to these findings, it may be noted here that teaching students with various linguistic backgrounds will doubtlessly become more and more important in the yers and decades to come. Therefore, we cannot start early enough to make reflexions on thits prectical implementation and further development.

The teacher is also the focus of the article by Inez De Florio-Hansen (Kassel, Germany), who advocates scientifically based foreign language teaching, informing them about up-to-date findings about this discipline. Starting from the understanding, effective teaching and successful learning go together. After giving an overview on the different orientaations of qualitative and quantitative research, the author describes the inflouence of meta- and mega-analytic studies on teaching and pleads for a practice-oriented implementation of scienfitic findings in language teaching, i.e direct instruction, represented by interactive whole-class teaching. The author synthesises her approach in the presentation of her 30-step Model of Effective Teaching (MET), which is backed up by an example of an English and a French teaching unit, respectively. These examples illustrate in what way topical research data of today can be integrated into foreign language teaching. These examples can serve as models for teachers to know how valuable scientific findings can be applied to there own practice.

The issue is completed by a book review by Günter Schmale (Lyon, France) on David Wood's (2015) book Fundamentals of Formulaic Language. The reviewer being an expert in this field, he additionally shares some of his knowledge with his readers, which makes this review valuable.

As is traditionally the case in this place, I would like to thank the authors for their contributions and the editorial board for their support. Those readers who my find JLLT appealing are cordially invited to submit their papers for peer vewiew and, possily, publication here.

Thomas Tinnefeld

JLLT

Editor