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Makale Özeti:
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Dear EJAL Readers,
We are happy to publish first issue of the third volume. It is a pleasure to see that EJAL has reached its third year and is moving forward in confidence and quality. We would like to send our heartfelt thanks to members of our editorial board and anonymous reviewers for their efforts and constructive feedback in the review process of manuscripts. We are fully aware and acknowledge that we would not have been able to publish EJAL without their input. Thank you all for your endless support and efforts.
EJAL has continued to attract attention of many authors to publish their research in the broad field of applied linguistics. After our in-house and external review cycles, we have been able to include six research articles in this issue. Needless to say, we had to make difficult decisions in the selection of articles and are grateful to our authors of the articles in this issue for their cooperation during the review cycles.
The first article in this issue of EJAL is a collaborative study by Goudarz Alibakhshi, Mowla Miri (Allameh Tabataba’I University, Tehran, Iran), Ali Kushki (Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran) and Peyman Salehpour Bavarsad (Lorestan University, Khoramabad, Iran). From a sociocultural perspective, they explore the efficiency of two types of Group-Dynamic Assessment (G-DA, concurrent and cumulative) in teaching English articles. By comparing the performances of two groups with three editing tasks on articles, they are able to show both types of G-DA increased gains in learning articles. They also add to their findings that the concurrent group outperforms the cumulative one.
The second article is related to the field of psycholinguistics. Ali Akbar Ansarin and Solmaz Saeeidi Manesh (University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran) attempt to investigate if bilinguals share semantic features of their L1 and L2 using masked semantic priming paradigm. They have two experiments in which the target words are in English, but the primes are in Persian in the first experiment and in English in the second. By using DMDX software, they measure the reaction time of sixty Persian-English bilinguals for these prompts. Their findings indicate that bilinguals have shared semantic representation for two languages with different scripts only for the cognate words. They also suggest that using semantically related words, for non-cognate words, in the process of language teaching is useful in advanced proficiency levels.
The third article is a quasi-experimental study by Adrian Leis (Miyagi University of Education, Japan) and Matthew Wilson (Miyagi University, Japan). The authors aim to test a scoring method for regular testing proposed by themselves which provides feedback on test results to each student based upon his or her increases or decreases with the previous test score (Idio-comparative scoring system) by comparing it with a regular ‘individual result together with class average’ method for two months. The authors suggest the Idio-comparative approach as one to be considered by language teachers in order to assist with building and preserving the confidence of the students participating in the class.
Jabbar Al Muzzamil Fareen (SRM University, India) is the author of the fourth article. He tries to understand tertiary level senior Information Technology students’ language and communication problems while they face job interviews. He further analyzes the learning needs of those students and the target demands of the HR Managers. The findings show that the technical students need to adopt relevant job related oral and written communication skills to competently perform in on-campus recruitments. Taking into consideration to examine present and target situational needs, a specific needs based intensive communicative course is suggested by the author to satisfy the learners’ learning needs and their target situational demands.
Roman Olegovich Lesnov (Northern Arizona University, United States), the author of the fifth article, aims to investigate whether an assessment construct of second language (L2) listening comprehension should include the decoding of visual information. He uses participants’ scores on the achievement tests to compare the difficulty of items of different formats (audio-only and video-enhanced delivery) and to determine whether this difficulty related to video type (context versus content) and students’ proficiency level. He suggests that at least for higher-level students, listening testlets enhanced with videos containing mostly content-related visuals are significantly easier than their audio-only counterparts are. In contrast, the inclusion of videos with mostly context visuals does not affect the difficulty of testlets in any proficiency category.
Finally, the authors of the sixth article, Mehmet Akıncı (Şehir University, Turkey) and Senem Yıldız (Boğaziçi University, Turkey) investigate the effectiveness of data-driven learning (DDL), explicit instruction and these two methods combined in teaching verb+noun (V+N) collocations to advanced Turkish learners of English. They measure recognition accuracy of V+N collocations along with participants’ judgment about the acceptability of these collocations. They also explore the opinions of learners about using corpus in learning V+N collocations. The data are subject to quantitative analysis, and authors provide descriptive statistics of the results.
We hope that our readers will find the content of this issue as useful as the previous issues for their research and practice into language learning and teaching as much as we found it interesting and stimulating in the process of preparing the issue. Publishing a journal is an evercontinuing process. Having been able to release the EJAL 3(1) issue, the next task is to start preparing the second issue.
Happy reading!
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