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The Language Teacher | ||
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Happy New Year! Many of you will be reading this on your return from winter vacations. I hope you had good ones. The times they are a changin' for JALT and for The Language Teacher. Times have been tough and more competitive than ever for publishers in Japan, and so they are reevaluating the level of support which they can provide to JALT in the form of advertising and conference participation.]What this means for publications in general, and TLT in particular, is that we may have to cut the number of pages which we can run over the course of the year and reevaluate how much space we can allot to articles, book reviews, and JALT-related news (chapter meetings, N-SIG reports, etc.). The post office requires that we have at least as many pages of content as advertising in order to qualify for the lowest postage rate, but fortunately we've been able to bring you a balance of content to advertising above this minimum. Bill Acton, the Publications Board Chair, is working with the editors to find ways to cut corners as much as we can. We've already saved a good deal on postage and phone charges by using e-mail (particularly in our interactions with authors, and we're looking at other ways to cut publication costs. I hope that all members will support us in our endeavors to maintain the level of quality and breadth of coverage which we continue to strive for. The theme for this month's issue is vocabulary. Alan Hunt and David Beglar give us an excellent overview of the state of the art of vocabulary teaching. Paul Stapleton shares only a small piece of an impressive project which tailors vocabulary teaching to the needs of students in various faculties (and includes a World Wide Web link for those who'd like to see more of it). Frank Daulton presents the results of a study on the positive effect of the large amount of foreign words which have been borrowed into Japanese from English on students' English language learning. Finally, Brenda Harris gives us an interview with Sandra Savignon, who has recently published the second edition of her well-known book Communicative Competence: Theory and Classroom Practice. On the TLT staffing front, Bettina Begole is taking over as editor of Job Information Center column, and Laura MacGregor has taken on the Bulletin Board column. Craig Sower is continuing his excellent work as proofreader, and Tricia Thornton is continuing her many duties as assistant editor, which includes her work on the 1997 Index which appears in this issue. Steve McGuire, Editor All articles at
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