Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 3 © Centre for Language Studies National University of Singapore

Editorial  

In the current issue, the second of the year 2005, we present five articles and two book reviews. While this issue contains one article less than the June 2006 issue, this is due to a great extent to the rejection rate of 33%. Though we received a very healthy number of submissions in this year, we regret that we were unable to accept about a third of these for publication – an indication of our commitment to quality. We are nevertheless grateful to all who have submitted manuscripts and would like to encourage colleagues in language teaching and related disciplines to continue to send us their manuscripts. In this issue, we would also like to acknowledge the vital contributions of our external reviewers, who help ensure the quality of e-FLT, by publishing their names.

The first article in this issue is contributed by Brian Tomlinson, who surveys the current state of ELT materials in Asia and raises some pertinent issues about their future development. Among his recommendations is the call to replace Standard British English and General American English by an evolving international variety of English, International English, as Asian coursebooks’ target variety of English.

In the second article, Olaf Bärenfänger proposes the application of key ideas from the domain of project management to the management of hybrid learning, which he defines as learning involving different instructional strategies, delivery mechanisms, and forms of knowledge and skills acquisition. The article will attempt to show how learning processes in which many protagonists and learning materials are involved can be efficiently planned, controlled and evaluated by means of learning management.

Miwako Yanagisawa elaborates on the notion of language socialization in the third article. Presenting qualitative data collected from the narratives of learners of Japanese as a second language, she shows that these learners are socialized into the values and norms of the target culture through the second language learning process and are capable of utilizing their acquired cultural awareness in the target language.

In the next article, Alla Zareva looks at the new 2006 TOEFL-iBT exam and discusses the changes introduced in this version of TOEFL as well as the reasons promoting these changes, including especially the need for a test of English for academic purposes to capture the intergrated nature of different language skills in academic settings.

In the fifth and last article, written in German, Myong-Soon Hong and Hyang-Ki Min explain why a lack of vocabulary related to the learner's cultural background is often a hindrance to active verbal communication. They present arguments for incorporating such vocabulary in universal vocabulary training as well as some suggestions for achieving this in the language classroom.

Included in this issue are also reviews of the following two books: 1) "Self-esteem of Japanese college students: Suggestions based on research on how to foster their self-esteem" (reviewed by Ryoko Suzuki); and 2) "Sociolinguistics: The Essential Readings" (reviewed by Jingquan Li, in Chinese).

We hope to have your continued support for e-FLT and look forward to receiving your feedback and contributions. Just a gentle reminder: article submissions for the June and December 2006 issues should reach us by 15th February and 15th August 2006 respectively.

Wai Meng Chan
Editor

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