Abstract
I was intrigued by the first article in this issue: Paul Stapleton’s analysis of the trends in language teaching as represented in 30 years of Japanese Association of Language Teachers (JALT) conferences. It seems to me that it is important to know not just where we are now but where we have come from. The history of language teaching is not just interesting in its own right but crucial for understanding the origins of contemporary issues, as Howatt’s exemplary A history of English language teaching (1984) demonstrated.
Stapleton’s analysis revealed a number of developments in the field of language teaching:
Vocabulary receives increasing attention, while grammar almost disappears. The importance currently attached to vocabulary is also reflected in the fact that Paul Nation emerges as the most cited researcher.
Interest in methods and approaches to language learning was dominant in the early period but non-existent in the later years. However, ‘tasks’ and ‘task-based language teaching’ figure more strongly over the years, as does interest in technology.
There has been growing attention to ‘learner development’ and in particular to motivation and sociocultural theory (Lev Vygotsky was the second most cited author).
There has been an increase in reporting the results of empirical studies of teaching.
The increased reporting of research has manifested itself in a growing preference for qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) research methods.
Motivated by Stapleton’s analysis, I undertook my own small-scale analysis of the articles in the first volume of Language Teaching Research (LTR; published in 1987) and the latest complete volume (2011) at the time of writing this editorial (I excluded issue 3 in Volume 15 as this was a special issue on content-based language teaching). I examined the topics of each article, the country the articles originated from, and the language(s) that were investigated. The results are shown in Table 1. Clearly, a truly representative picture of the changes that have taken place between 1987 and 2011 cannot be gleaned from an examination of just two volumes. Nevertheless, some interesting trends are evident. Many of the topics in Volume 1 are also found in Volume 15: vocabulary, focus on teachers, task-based teaching and textbook analysis. One clear difference is that experimental studies of different types of teaching are absent from Volume 1 but present in Volume 15. Another difference is the presence of articles on cultural aspects of language teaching in the later volume. The majority of the articles in 1987 originated from the UK. In 2011 the articles originated from a wide range of countries. This development almost certainly reflects the internationalization of the journal over this period. The majority of the articles in both volumes report studies investigating English, and there is no study of a non-European language in either volume. Another change – not documented in Table 1 – is the wider variety of research methods deployed in the later volume. In Volume 1 the majority of the studies are descriptive whereas the Volume 15 studies are evenly divided between descriptive and experimental studies.
Analysis of articles appearing in Volume 1 (1987) and Volume 15 (2011) of Language Teaching Research.
A comparison of Stapleton’s analysis of JALT conference papers and my analysis of LTR articles reveals some similarities and differences. The current emphasis on vocabulary and task-based language teaching is evident in both. One clear difference is that the interest in learner development/motivation is not reflected in either of the LTR volumes. However, there is a reason for this. LTR only publishes articles that report studies of some aspect of teaching and, thus, excludes articles that address motivation purely from the learner’s perspective. We do not know from Stapleton’s analysis whether the conference papers on motivation focused just on the learner or also on how teaching affects motivation.
The current issue of LTR includes a similar range of articles to those in Volume 15. Two articles (by Newton and by Gagné & Parks) address task-based language teaching, two (by Hiver & Fenton-Smith and by Torpey) focus on teachers and one (Huang) focuses on literacy learning. The articles originate from different countries: New Zealand, Canada, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. However, they all focus on English. They confirm the growing influence of sociocultural theory in studies of language teaching.
Stapleton was reluctant to make predictions about where the field is going. I am too. But as editor of a journal that handles an increasing number of submissions each year I am confident that language teaching will continue to be the focus of empirical enquiry (both quantitative and qualitative) and, as a consequence, will become increasingly research based.