Editorial

Approaches to language teaching today are impacted from several different directions. One source of influence comes from outside the profession itself. Governments, ministries of education, tertiary institutions and employers demand that schools and institutions produce learners with better skills in English to fulfill the growing need for English-proficient citizens in many different sectors of society. Changes in learning targets, curriculum frameworks, and tests reflect this top-down approach to change in language teaching. At the same time within the profession itself, researchers and practitioners are constantly exploring issues in the teaching and learning of English. The results of these efforts often permeate through the profession, shaping changes in our approaches to aspects of second language teaching.

The RELC Journal provides a forum for accounts of both kinds of change. On the one hand it enables scholars to describe how changes in language policies at a national level often require a reassessment of goals and practices in teaching and teacher education, and on the other how curriculum planners, materials developers and teachers respond to such initiatives. An example would be when a country decides to introduce CLIL, introduces a proficiency test for English teachers, or decides to teach English at primary school.

Each issue of RELC Journal also contains research-based articles that report on projects researchers have undertaken at a more micro-level as they investigate issues that arise from developments in applied linguistics and other fields, issues that can influence practice and that might lead to improvements in learning outcomes.

In addition the journal also publishes issue-based articles that draw on theory, research and practice and which seek to open up and review topics of wide interest among practitioners.

Articles in this issue of the journal reflect the latter two categories of articles. The issue opens with an issue-focused article in which Randi Reppen and I seek to assess approaches to the teaching of grammar and to describe 12 principles that form the basis for a pedagogy of grammar instruction, one based on the distinction between grammar as knowledge and grammar as ability. In the second article Ramin Akbari and Kobra Tavassoli examine the concept of teacher efficacy – a construct that goes beyond the notion of ‘the effective teacher’ and describe a study designed to tease out the components of teacher efficacy – a construct that is of considerable relevance to understanding both teacher training and teacher development. The paper by Montri Tangpijaikul presents the results of an important and very useful study of important words from the genre of business news found in a Thai corpus of English for business and economic news. Using both a corpus based and intuition based methodology a list of some 134 technical business key words was identified for Thai learners of business English. Suggestions for teaching the vocabulary are also provided. The paper by Jayoung Song and Veronica Sardegna complements the paper on grammar teaching which opens this issue, since it looks at the acquisition of grammar (prepositions) through extensive reading when coupled with an output based activity (enhanced extensive reading). In the final article in this issue Frank Boers, Seth Lindstomberg and Stuart Webb throw new light on an old problem – how can one facilitate learners’ retention of lexical items they have encountered in their reading? Their article provides an illustration of the robust research methodology that was developed for this study. In addition readers will find reviews of three recent books in the field.