The Language Teacher

If you're at all like me, your master's degree was many years ago, and although you try to keep with with what researchers in our field are doing by reading as many journals as you can squeeze time for, you can't shake the feeling that you've fallen behind. To help update us on what's happening in EFL, I've invited a series of distinguished researchers in our field who are knowledgable about teaching in Japan share what, if anything, current second language research has to tell us as classroom teachers across the spectrum of the skills we're required to teach. Each article in the series will also include a reading list of recent publications in its area of focus.

The first article in the series, "State of the Art: Second Language Acquisition Research and Second Language Teaching," was contributed by Peter Robinson of Aoyama Gakuin University, who is one of the organizers of the PacSLRF conference which will take place March 26 to 29, 1998.

Dale Griffee's article, "Using Goals and Feedback to Improve Student Performance on Vocabulary Homework," reports the results of a very well-defined research study which examines the effects of teacher-created vocabulary goals and feedback on the completion of vocabulary homework assignments. Continuing somewhat with our SLA focus this month, the interview of Diane Larsen Freeman, professor at the School for International Training and well-known author, by Craig Sower, gives a fascinating introduction to chaos/complexity theory and what implications it has for second language acquisition theory.

This month we bring you two more articles in our occasional series. As David McMurray, editor of The Region, points out, this month's article by Jay Lundelius on Hong Kong is particularly timely given that Hong Kong reverted to China on July 1st. No one knows what the future will bring, but this article will act as a signpost to refer back to along the way.

Finally, and most important, I'd like to welcome our new associate editor, Robyn L. Najar, and our new assistant editors, Tricia Thornton and Paul Lewis. Robyn is an assistant professor at Kanazawa Institute of Technology and brings a strong background in publishing and in ESL, with an MA in ESL and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology. Both Paul Lewis and Tricia Thornton have strong skills in editing and proofreading which they've demonstrated over the last year, and a knowledge of computers which will help us continue Tony Cominos' efforts to "electronicize" a lot of our work. Paul and Tricia each have complementing strengths in our field which will be of great help to us all working for TLT. I'm very happy to have all three of them on our staff. Steve McGuire, Editor

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Last modified: July 19, 1997
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