Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 2009, Vol. 6, No. 2, p. 115–116 © Centre for Language Studies National University of Singapore

Editorial

 

Volume 6, Issue 2 opens with an article by Klaus Brandl who looks at how novice teachers go about implementing tasks in the task-based language classroom. In particular, he seeks to ascertain if and which implementational demands pose challenges for these teachers and which strategies they use to cope with these problems.

In the second article, Wenhua Hsu builds on her contribution in the previous issue (Vol. 6, No. 1) on the lexical coverage of general purpose College English textbooks used in Taiwanese universities. In this sequel, she extends her corpus-based analysis to eight business core textbooks in English. The results reveal that while the vocabulary coverage is more limited in business textbooks than in General English textbooks, they include more academic words than the latter.

Anna Uhl Chamot and Bruna Genovese, in the third article, describe how project-based learning is employed in a U.S. high school Spanish classroom to reinforce and further students’ knowledge of other disciplines – one of five standards recommended by the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

In the fourth article, Chi Cheung Ruby Yang reports on a study which investigates how a theme-based approach to teaching impacts the level of interest of primary ESL students in a non-school setting in Hong Kong. Drawing on the results of her study, she recommends that, if theme-based teaching is to have a positive impact, the themes must be carefully selected to suit students’ level of proficiency, wants and needs, and be relevant to their daily lives.

This is followed by an article by Shanthi Nadarajan on the effect of instruction and context on second language learners’ vocabulary development. Her study reveals that while explicit vocabulary instruction with focus-on-form activities can be beneficial to second language learners’ vocabulary development, implicit meaning-based instruction appears to be more effective in vocabulary building among the subjects of her study.

The sixth article, by Ming-Yueh Shen and Wei-Shi Wu, focuses on the effect of technical university EFL students’ reading proficiency and instruction in contextual inferencing on their lexical inferencing performance and strategy use. The authors uncover a significant correlation between reading proficiency and lexical performance/strategy use. Instruction in contextual inferencing has a significant positive effect on learners’ inferencing ability but not their strategy use in general.

Georgia Andreou and Ioannis Galantomos, in the seventh article, examine the place of the native speaker ideal in foreign language instruction. They cast doubt on the objective of making foreign language learners approximate monolingual native speakers and call for the re-examination and re-definition of learning goals which should better reflect learners’ actual needs and aspirations.

In the eighth and last article of this issue, Chamnong Kaewpet reviews literature on needs analysis and curriculum development, and presents a framework for investigating the needs of Thai engineering students studying English for Specific Purposes (ESP) with view to the (re )development of the ESP course currently conducted at her university.

In the sole book review in this issue, Cristina Gonzalez Ruiz introduces and evaluates a bilingual (Spanish-Chinese) grammar, “Español Básico para Alumnos Chinos,” written specifically for Spanish beginners of Chinese origin.

In concluding this editorial, I would like to draw the attention of our readers to an upcoming supplement which once again affirms e-FLT’s continued drive to promote and encourage more and better research in the teaching of Asian languages. This is an area which still requires much fundamental work in view of  – or one might be tempted to say, in spite of – the rapidly increasing interest in the learning of Asian languages around the world. This supplement, expected to be published in June 2010, will focus on the teaching and learning of Korean as a foreign language (KFL), which has seen tremendous growth of late, particularly in the East Asian region, not least because of the influence of Hallyu or the Korean Wave.

Finally, allow me to extend the wholehearted thanks of our Editorial Board to you, our readers, as well as to the members of our International Advisory Board and our tireless reviewers who have all generously contributed to the success of our journal. We hope you will continue to support us and to look forward to future issues of our journal, including the supplement on KFL.


Wai Meng Chan
Editor