Guest Editorial

This special issue of the RELC Journal on vocabulary learning and teaching is a further signal of a long relationship that I have had with the SEAMEO Regional Language Centre through the journal itself, the RELC seminar, and RELC staff. My first article in the RELC Journal appeared in 1974. This was just after I attended my first RELC seminar in 1973. Several of our staff at the English Language Institute in Victoria University of Wellington (now called the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) were staff members at RELC or were there for limited stays. They included H.V. George, John Honeyfield, John Rogers, Jack Richards, John Read, David Crabbe, and Ian Thomas, all of whom were also contributors to the RELC Journal or Guidelines. I could also try mentioning English Language Institute students who were also students at RELC and in some cases staff at RELC, but this long list would be very inexact.

The RELC seminar has always been one of my favourites for several reasons. First, it is always very professionally organized and run. Second, it is deliberately kept to a manageable size so that it is possible to easily meet people and to get to a wide range of papers. Third, it is located in an exciting city and in a region where I know a lot of people, so it becomes as much a social as a professional occasion.

The RELC Journal has had a strong and enduring effect on language teaching and research both within the region and internationally. Yolanda Beh’s long-running summary of research within the region provided a very useful source of information and encouragement for researchers. The RELC Journal’s companion journal Guidelines provided very practical activities for teachers, while the RELC Journal itself provided research-based articles on both international and regional topics in applied linguistics.

RELC has had to redefine its role in the region as the countries of South-east Asia have developed their own tertiary level courses and degrees in TESOL and applied linguistics. The RELC Journal faces a similar challenge as the number of journals in TESOL and applied linguistics have expanded enormously since it was first set up. Some of these new journals, like Applied Linguistics, Reading in a Foreign Language, Language Testing, Language Learning and Technology and the International Journal of Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, have a strong international focus. Others, like Prospect, the TESOLANZ Journal, the Asian Journal of English Language Teaching, the Asia Pacific Journal of Language in Education and the ALANZ Journal, are more strongly regional. The RELC Journal needs to have a clear vision of what its role is and needs to follow that even though editors may change. For me, both its name (RELC originally stood for Regional English Language Centre) and its history suggest that it needs to have a strong focus on research in the region. It should also have a policy of supporting and encouraging new academics in the field, preferably from the region, as well as keeping an outward looking perspective on the international arena.

I hope this special issue on vocabulary has these three focuses in about the right proportion. Paul Meara could be affectionately called the grandfather of vocabulary studies. Through his publications and research students he has had an enormous impact. His work is always innovative, challenging and strongly research-based. His article in this issue is a good example of this and takes up a theme that has concerned him for many years and where he has always been an exemplary model, namely the importance of having researchers who keep chipping away at a research area, refining their research tools and methodologies, and persistently taking knowledge forward. He is highly and fondly respected and admired by his colleagues and students.

Tran Thi Ngoc Yen and Noriko Shintani have recently completed PhD studies and their articles in this issue use data from their thesis work. Although it may seem unusual to include an article on speed reading in a collection of vocabulary studies, developing fluency with the language features that you know is a very important strand in a vocabulary course. Part of the explanation of speed increases is increase in the speed in accessing vocabulary. It is no use knowing vocabulary if the vocabulary cannot be put to use, and so fluency activities should take up around one quarter of the time in a well-balanced vocabulary course. Tran Thi Ngoc Yen’s article looks at the effect of a speed reading course both within and outside the course.

Natsuko Shintani looks at the role of repeated input tasks with a strong vocabulary focus. A very welcome aspect of her study is the focus on young learners. Another feature of her study is its strong ecological validity. It deals with the kinds of tasks that are particularly suited to young learners.

Hossein Karami trials a Persian bilingual version of the Vocabulary Size Test. There are now several bilingual versions of this test and the use of such versions may lead to better informed planning of the vocabulary component of language programs.

Kevin Parent and Polina Kobeleva look at the nature of vocabulary and their focuses have relevance for corpus studies as well as vocabulary learning. Kevin Parent focuses on homonyms – words that are identical in spoken and written form but which are unrelated in meaning. Such words pose a problem in corpus studies (How can you distinguish a panel of experts from a ceiling panel?) and Kevin’s work looks closely at this issue and is a valuable source of information for both teachers and corpus linguists.

Polina Kobeleva looks at proper names and the role they play in comprehending spoken input. Her study shows the need for some attention to proper names as a preparation for classroom listening activities. Her study also suggests that reading newspaper reports may be a good preparation for listening to the news, and that narrow listening which involves following the same developing news story over several days could be a good way of reducing the difficulty of listening tasks.

John Macalister, Stuart Webb, Anna Chang, Frank Boers, Seth Lindstromberg, June Eyckmans, and Averil Coxhead are all established academics.

John Macalister’s article has a strong regional focus in that he looks at beliefs about vocabulary teaching and learning among pre-service Malaysian teacher trainees. The findings have clear messages for language curriculum design and teacher training.

Stuart Webb and Anna Chang’s article is a rare longitudinal study which looks at foreign language vocabulary growth over a five-year period. The results of their study highlight the importance of monitoring vocabulary growth in a language program.

Frank Boers, Seth Lindstromberg and June Eyckmans are excellent examples of the persistent researchers mentioned by Meara in his article in this issue. Their article builds on their research on the learning of multiword units, and provides useful suggestions for giving deliberate attention to language features.

The focus of Averil Coxhead’s paper is on English medium learners who speak English as a second language – international students in a New Zealand university. She looks at learners’ awareness and use of vocabulary when doing academic writing. Academic writing is particularly challenging because it requires learners to make productive use of vocabulary that may not yet be well established.

This issue of the RELC Journal covers a wide range of aspects of vocabulary studies and reflects the rapidly growing number of publications on vocabulary that have appeared in the last 20 years. I am sure that both teachers and researchers will enjoy reading the articles as much as I did.