|
Makale Özeti:
|
Dear EJAL Readers,
Welcome to our second issue. Yes, we have reached our second issue and are truly optimistic about the future of the fledgling journal of OURS. Ours it is, as it belongs to the international community of applied linguists. We, as the editors, would like to thank numerous words of encouragement and compliment for the launch of the Journal from diverse contexts of the profession. With such support, we are confident that a bright future awaits Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics.
We are once again excited and proud to be publishing interesting and equally enlightening articles and reviews in this issue. It has been really challenging to make decisions about the papers submitted to EJAL. However, we are confident that we have made the right choices. In the second issue of Volume 1, we have five articles and reviews of two books.
The first article is by Rod Ellis. Ellis, in his article, deals with the place of focusing on form and focusing on forms in communicative language teaching. He discusses focus on form both from theoretical perspective and practical viewpoint. He provides evidence for and examples of strategies that can be employed by learners and teachers when they do focus-on-form. He emphasizes that teachers and learners alike need to focus on form for incidental language learning and that the belief that teachers should not interfere with language learner’s language output during a communicative active is not at all reasonable. He goes on to argue that focusing-on-form and focusing-on-forms are perhaps not opponents but allies to each other.
In our second article, David Newby argues that grammar teaching remains to be a controversial issue and that applied linguists have failed to pay due attention to various aspects of pedagogical grammar. In his article, then, David Newby presents a theoretical model of pedagogical grammar (Cognitive + Communicative Grammar). He draws his discussion on findings from cognitive linguistics and communicative language teaching. Identifying the central tasks of pedagogical grammar, David Newby exemplifies principles of adopting and addressing pedagogical grammar in the realm of teaching grammar in second or foreign language classes.
The third article is a joint paper by the late Professor Cem Alptekin and Gülcan Erçetin. Gülcan Erçetin reverently continues to report on work they started together before Professor Cem Alptekin himself got ill and eventually passed away. It is, therefore, our mission to commemorate Professor Cem Alptekin’s contribution to our understanding the process of second language acquisition, and for this matter to EJAL with a research article. In their article, the authors report on findings from an eye-tracking experiment. They investigated the relationship between eye-movement measures and processing and store outcomes of reading span tasks. Further, they looked at the relationship between working memory and L2 reading comprehension. These results further our understanding of whether eye movement measures can help us validate offline span task outcomes and their relationship with L2 reading. Cem Alptekin and Gülcan Erçetin conclude that, although they provide valuable insights into the topic of working memory, it may be premature to employ eye movement measures as manifestation of working memory functions during reading in an L2.
Andrea DeCapua and Lingshan Tian, in the fourth article, reports on findings from their research study where they aimed to explore discursive moves and patterns of advice giving as a crucial part of the development of one’s communicative competence. They classify six main categories of discursive moves and four categories of advice giving patterns. Andrea DeCapua and Lingshan Tian also try to show how such knowledge can be incorporated into early childhood education courses. The authors also make some suggestions for cross-disciplinary future research.
Learning a second or foreign language entails contact of different cultures and norms, which might sometimes result in some misunderstandings by member of both cultures. Thus, the fifth article by Bridget Maureen Walker Palmer explores such a phenomenon. She focuses on some cultural conflicts experienced between Western, native English-speaking instructors of English and their Arab university students. In her article, Bridget Maureen Walker Palmer reports on findings from a study where she both consulted instructors of English and their students. She identifies nine categories of classroom cultural conflicts and the major ones were inappropriate materials/discussion topics, mixed-gender issues, and disrespect for religious customs. She also makes some suggestions for further research.
We also have two book reviews. The first review is by Larissa Moreira Brangel. She has attempted to introduce and review Oxford Primary Dictionary edited by Allen, Delahunty, O’Neill, and Rennie (2011) and published by Oxford University Press. After a critical cross-referencing with regards to what a dictionary is expected to offer to its users, she concludes that it can be of practical value for young students as well as native English-speaking and foreign language learners alike.
Conversation analysis has a lot to offer to our understanding of the language acquisition and use. Finally, in this issue, Maria Vanessa aus der Wieschen attempts to introduce and review a new book, Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse, by Olcay Sert (2015), published by Edinburgh University Press. Maria Vanessa aus der Wieschen provides a detailed description of each chapter and offers a fair review of the book. She believes that the book has strong implications both for classroom research and teacher education, and therefore recommends Olcay Sert’s book to anyone interested in classroom research, teacher education, language learning, and social interaction.
We have a new addition to our editorial team. Professor Filomena Capucho will serve with us in EJAL as an associate editor from the second issue onwards. She has been a reliable support since the beginning of our journal project and will continue to do so by taking a more active role in the review and editing process of manuscripts. We would like to welcome her aboard. Thank you Filomena for joining us.
We owe thanks to our associate editors Chi Cheung Ruby YANG, Filomena Capucho, Gholam Hassan Khajavy, and József Horváth. They worked hard to complete the review process of a considerable number of manuscript submissions. Without their input, life would have been much harder. Thank you all. Anonymous reviewers of individual papers deserve a well-earned credit for the success of EJAL. They have been most constructive, cooperative, and timely with their review reports. Millions of thanks for your invaluable feedback on behalf of our authors. Finally, we need to acknowledge and express our gratitude to those authors who chose EJAL as an outlet for their work. We feel privileged to include their contributions in this issue. Regretfully, however, it was not possible to include all submissions here. We wish them good luck with their work and hope they will once again consider EJAL to submit their future work.
It has been a great pleasure to see through the review process of all these extremely informing articles and book reviews. We found them enlightening and we truly hope our readers will feel the same.
Hope to see you in our next issue in March 2016.
Happy reading!
|