Editorial

Dear Readers

In writing the editorial of this December issue of the journal, we cannot help but look back at the articles that we put together in all of the 2016 issues. We started the year with our first issue in April, the Special Issue on the theme Teacher Education in TESOL – Keep Up or Keep On? The research articles in the special issue focused on teacher identity, teachers’ beliefs, and language teacher education. The second issue in August featured articles and reports on a recurrent theme of ‘reconsideration’ by language professionals as they look for different perspectives and innovations in language teaching, teacher training and language research.

This current third issue of the journal features six research articles, two reports on Innovations in Practice, an interview with an expert and two reviews.

The six research articles focus on the theme of oracy, highlighting the importance of listening and speaking skills in language education. Rachel Lee’s article, ‘Implementing Dialogic Teaching in a Singapore English Language Classroom’, shows how classroom talk can be made more dialogic to enhance students’ talk opportunities and further develop their literacy skills. The article concludes that raising teachers’ awareness of the benefits of dialogic talk is the first step towards promoting dialogic teaching in the EL classroom, thereby opening up the space of learning for students.

The second article, ‘*Why you can’t ask a proper question?’ – The Learning Difficulties of Hong Kong ESL Students’ by Jackie Lee, reports on a study of the learning difficulties that are faced by Hong Kong ESL students, in particular the mastery of the wh-interrogative structure. The study identifies several learning difficulties of the students, namely, the word order transfer from the Chinese language, failure to use correct verb phrase structures, and erroneous use of some wh-words (whose, which, and how) and wh-phrases (e.g. how far, whose bag). The article concludes that students of different English proficiency levels showed wide variation in their understanding of interrogative structures.

English has been adopted as the sole official language for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and it is the lingua franca for communication within and across the borders of the member countries. Drawing on a socio-cultural perspective, Sovannarith Lim’s study explored Cambodian teachers’ cognitions about pronunciation instruction and their classroom practices. The four themes that emerged from the data of the study include the teachers’ self-acknowledgement of their own pronunciation, the perceived goal of pronunciation instruction, their approaches to teaching pronunciation, and their attitudes towards ASEAN English as a lingua franca (ELF). The article, ‘Learning to Teach Intelligible Pronunciation for ASEAN English as a Lingua Franca: A Sociocultural Investigation of Cambodian Pre-service Teacher Cognition and Practice’, also discusses the implications for English language teacher education in Cambodia and beyond.

In English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) or ESL contexts, it is important for learners to have Willingness to Communicate (WTC) before they can engage in L2 interaction. Vatsana Vongsila and Hayo Reinders’ article, ‘Making Asian Learners Talk, Encouraging Willingness to Communicate’, reports on a study that investigated teachers’ perceptions of their role in fostering WTC. Teachers believed they played an important role in helping learners to develop WTC and identified various strategies they used in class. The article concludes with practical recommendations for teachers who want to support learners’ WTC.

Anna Chang and Sonia Millett’s article ‘Developing L2 Listening Fluency through Extended Listening-focused Activities in an Extensive Listening Programme’, examines the effects on developing L2 listening fluency through doing extended listening-focused activities after reading and listening to audio graded readers. Ying Zhan and Zhi Hong Wan’s article looks at test-takers’ beliefs and experiences of a high-stakes computer-based English listening and speaking test. The findings of the study reveal insights and information useful for sharpening a computer-based English listening and speaking test as well as for generating positive washback on English learning.

The first report on an Innovation in Practice is on the teaching and learning of vocabulary in EFL classes. The notion of ‘aural vocabulary’ is regarded as an important part of ‘knowing’ a word. The report describes a set of activities used to improve learners’ academic listening abilities. The second report looks at the use of materials such as newspapers and magazine articles, television programmes and films in promoting cultural awareness in EFL teaching in Thailand. The report also incorporates Thai teachers’ understanding of what constitutes culture, the role it plays in language learning and how such an understanding is translated into pedagogical practices.

This issue features an interview with Christine Goh, who shares her insights into the teaching of listening, in particular the strategies teachers can use to help learners improve their listening skills. Among other things, she shares her thoughts on the challenges learners face in L2 listening. She also discusses the importance of learners’ metacognition during the listening process.

Finally, the issue ends with a book review by Zhongbao Zhao of Glenn Fulcher’s book, Re-examining Language Testing: A Philosophical and Social Inquiry and a tech report on Recap, which is a free video response and reflection App developed by the makers of Swivl.

We hope that the collection of these articles and reports will provide you with useful insights and practical strategies, informed by both recent research and innovative practices that have been carried out in various contexts of language teaching and learning.

Looking forward to 2017, we have in the pipeline the release of the April 2017 Special Issue on the theme, The Role of Language Proficiency for Language Teachers. This issue will feature articles that look at the issue of language proficiency of language teachers in the light of the present status of English as a global lingua franca, the impact of teacher talk on language learning, and the role of teacher education in improving language proficiency. The guest editor of this special issue will be Professor Jack Richards.

We would like to thank you for your continued support of the RELC Journal and wish you a Happy New Year.