Volume 2 (3) Editorial

Abstract

Editorial

David Gardner

 The Centre for Applied English Studies, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

This is the first time that the Asian Journal of Applied Linguistics has run to a third issue of a volume. It has been done on this occasion because of an abundance of good quality papers which arrived in a flood during the summer of 2015. There were too many papers for the previous issue to accommodate but holding them over unnecessarily to the next volume would have created an unreasonable wait for the authors. As a result, this third issue has been added. Although it creates more work for the editor, it is an admirable situation to receive too many good papers rather than too few, and for that I am grateful to the authors who continue to submit their work.

This issue contains papers from three countries and two educational levels. The papers fall quite comfortably into two areas of focus. Three papers are concerned with different aspects of English language education in Japanese high schools. The other two papers concern tertiary level L1 speakers of Chinese as learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL).

We begin with the focus on Japanese high schools. Simon Humphries, Anne Burns and Takako Tanaka start by writing about Japanese high school students’ capacity to speak in English language classrooms. Using the reflections of over 100 university students about their high school learning, the authors develop a picture of factors which influenced students’ capacity to speak. On the basis of their findings, the authors suggest useful classroom strategies to enhance that capacity.

In the second paper, Jeffrie Butterfield and Baikuntha Bhatta look at how Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) sequences are used in English language classrooms in Japanese high schools where team-teaching is taking place. This study is one of few which look in detail at the before, during and after features of IRF when interaction with the class is undertaken by two teachers. It identifies significantly different roles for the teachers.

The third part of the Japanese high school trilogy is a paper by Fumi Takegami which takes a detailed look at her own professional development. Her study is framed by Gee’s (1990) theory of Discourse.  By looking at personal and social dimensions she identifies the development of her secondary professional Discourse. She concludes with suggestions for enhancements for teacher education programmes.

The second group of papers focus on EFL for Chinese university students. Deanna Nisbet and Jiuhan Huang begin with a large-scale study of the relationship between the use of reading strategies and reading proficiency among university EFL learners in two mainland Chinese universities. Their results show significant positive correlations between certain kinds of strategies and proficiency, and a negative correlation with other strategies. These results have important implications for future research. In the second paper in this section, Marcella Hu examines the enhancement of collocation learning in EFL among tertiary level business students in Taiwan. She found variations in the learning promoted by different kinds of tasks.

The papers in this issue all contribute in different ways to our understanding of Asian learners of English. They also show the variety of research being undertaken. All colleagues with similar interests are encouraged to submit to the Asian Journal of Applied Linguistics (more details at: http://caes.hku.hk/ajal).