The Language Teacher

Earlier this year, all sectors of JALT were asked to tighten their financial belts. The Language Teacher responded by agreeing to a trimmer issue each month, effected through a reduced number of advertisements, and a reorganization of the layout (in progress). While TLT's page count and appearance may have changed, our goal remains the same: to offer readers a selection of well-written articles which address a wide range of pedagogical interests.

TLT is a publication in a class of its own. Of our many distinctive features, two of the most outstanding are that we are a monthly publication and that we have a double staff in our English language and Japanese language editors, proofreaders, and editorial advisors. To maintain our uniqueness, we rely on your support in a number of ways: as dedicated readers, as contributing authors, and as TLTstaff members.

Recently, a number of staff editorial changes have occurred: David Kluge has surrendered the My Share column to Sandra Smith; the Conference Calendar column has been passed from Randy Davis to Lynne Roecklein, and Hamada Morio has retired from the Of National SIGnificance column, with Tom Merner taking this coeditorship. Deep thanks are in order to all of these editors, for the fine work they have done, and are about to do. Steve McGuire deserves very special thanks for devoting his year (through May, 1998) to editing The Language Teacher. This is an enormous job - he made it look so easy! Steve joins the Editorial Advisory Board, as does former JALT Journal Editor, Tamara Swenson.

I am very pleased to introduce this issue of TLT, my first as editor. We open this month with Wayne K. Johnson's interview of Jack Millett, who is well-known in Japan as a teacher trainer and SIT professor. Veronica Makarova and Stephen Ryan report on differences between female and male college English majors' expectations of their language teachers. Sarah Wringer presents a six-week workshop on women's studies. Sugino Toshiko's survey of 70 Japanese children's books presents some interesting gender stereotypes which can be addressed in the EFL classroom. Michael Guest argues the necessity of teaching spoken grammar and demonstrate show how spoken grammatical forms in English often parallel similar forms of Japanese. Masamune Suzuka reports on her implementation of crosscultural understanding and crosscultural communication methodology in a Japanese language program. Finally, Sugimori Noriko reports on the 1997 Boston University Conference on Language Development.

Laura MacGregor