Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 2004, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 3-4 © Centre for Language Studies National University of Singapore

Editorial

Welcome to the inaugural issue of e-FLT, or the Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching. It is a peer-reviewed journal published in the Internet with the primary objective of disseminating scholarly information which is expected to impact on and make a contribution to research, development and practice in Second and Foreign Language Teaching and Learning.

e-FLT is unique among journals of language teaching and learning in that it offers a multilingual platform. Besides English, contributors may submit manuscripts in Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Malay, Tamil, Thai and Vietnamese, the nine languages currently taught at the Centre for Language Studies. The journal commits itself to this ambitious undertaking to reach out to a wider audience of academics, researchers, practitioners and other professionals specializing in various languages, and to extend the exchange of insights, views and findings beyond the frontiers of the currently dominant area of English Language Teaching. To facilitate this exchange, each article or review in a language other than English will be accompanied by a short summary in English.

As an electronic journal, e-FLT seeks to exploit the advantages of Internet technologies to deliver content, provide reading support, and facilitate exchanges and discussions among its readers. Flexibility and adaptability serve as important guiding principles. Articles will be available to readers as webpages in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) offering hyperlinks for quick and easy navigation within the articles as well as to relevant materials and sites in the Internet. Readers who prefer a more traditional mode of reading are welcome to download and print the articles in Portable Document Format (PDF). The provision of online discussion forums will hopefully prove in time to be a significant innovation which encourages greater reader participation and fruitful exchanges between authors and readers.

The Editorial Board is grateful to Desmond Allison who, in the opening article of this issue on changing understandings of classroom practices, discusses the place of an electronic journal such as e-FLT in the domain of foreign language teaching, and makes suggestions for its coverage and the profitable use of technology. It should be evident from the introductory remarks above that this journal embraces Allison's recommendation for the "modest generic experimentation" (see this issue, p. 5) which the electronic medium affords. His position on the mission and nature of an electronic journal constitutes part of his overall call for more interactive and reflective approaches towards understanding foreign language classrooms.

In the other articles of this issue, Anna Uhl Chamot identifies eight current issues that have emerged from the vast body of language learning strategy research and discusses their impact on second and foreign language classrooms. Erwin Tschirner examines if long sequences of language study necessarily lead to higher proficiency levels and stronger academic language skills among students. His conclusions are based on an empirical study which evaluates the success of English language instruction in secondary schools in the German state of Saxony in meeting vocabulary thresholds for university students of English Language and Literature. Toshio Okazaki addresses the problem Japanese educators face in teaching Japanese reading to children from overseas and proposes the Endogenous Development Model as a theoretical framework for developing proficiency in reading academic Japanese. Arguing that the learning of a second language requires both cultural and linguistic competence, Stephen F. Culhane develops a framework, the Intercultural Interaction Model, which illumines how acculturation attitudes and learning motivation determine the breadth and depth of second language acquisition. Daming Xu's article, written in Chinese, reports on gender-related differences in Chinese university students' usage of English and provides an account of the possible sociolinguistic factors behind these differences. In the final article, written in Vietnamese, Thien Nam Nguyen applies Pit Corder's Error Analysis Framework to the analysis of errors produced by learners of Vietnamese as a foreign language in the use of classifiers and discusses the impact of his findings for teaching methodology.

This issue is rounded off by reviews of the following publications: 1) the French language textbooks, "STUDIO 100 niveau 1, STUDIO 100 niveau 2 and STUDIO +"; 2) "A survey of teaching Chinese as a foreign language"; and 3) "A reference Indonesian grammar for speakers of Indonesian as a foreign language". True to the multilingual spirit of this journal, all three reviews are in languages other than English, namely French, Chinese and Indonesian respectively.

Finally, we would like to express our appreciation for the support that has been forthcoming from the members of our International Advisory Board, all established scholars in their respective fields, and from our sponsors, Cornelsen Verlag of Germany and 3A Corporation of Japan. Last but least, we would also like to thank you, our readers. We hope you will show us even greater support by taking up our offer of a free subscription, and by sending us your submissions and feedback in the near future.


Wai Meng Chan
Editor

 

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