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| The Journal of Asia TEFL |
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| Volume 7 Number 3, Autumn 2010, Pages 1-187 |
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From the Editor-in-Chief
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Bernard Spolsky
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For the first time, the Journal has started to have a back-log: two of the papers that were considered to be of a satisfactory standard have been help over for the next issue. Back-logs are not unusual; most academic journals have them, and for some, the wait is very long. We hope this will not happen, but it is an inevitable result of the editors being required to stick to a limited number of pages per volume and so a limited number of papers per issue. One good effect will be that we will be able to raise our already high standards for acceptance. What is less happy is that authors will have to be patient to see their papers in print, although they will know when their paper is accepted.
One other result is that this note from the Editor-in-chief will need to be edited when the Editor sees which papers are ready for publication first, but I regularly ask Professor Jeon to feel free to edit my writing too!
Again, the issue includes a fine selection of solid research and pioneering thoughts relevant to English teaching in Asia (and elsewhere as well of course).
Alex Henry and colleagues from Universiti Brunei Darussalam report on a study of the difficulties that secondary school pupils have with collocation and idioms in writing English. Kitcha Thepsiri and Punjaporn Pojanapunya of King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, Thailand have studied science and engineering students to learn about their attitudes and in particular how they explain their success and failure in learning English. Junhong Xiao (Shantou Radio and Television University, China) and Stella Hurd (The Open University, UK) also study motivation and attitudes, but this time in the case of students engaged in distance learning in an open university in China. Returning to a study of the EFL classroom, Nasser Rashidi and Mahshid Rafieerad of Shiraz University, Iran analyze patterns of interaction.
Mahmood Reza Atai and Mohammad Bagher Khatibi, Tarbiat Moallem University, Iran, look for the effect of tasks which raise EFL students' consciousness of genre on their performance on listening comprehension. Turning to a culturally sensitive issue that is a special problem for editors of an international journal, Tomoyuki Kawashima (or should it be Kawashima Tomoyuki) of Public high school, Japan finds differences in the preferences of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese high school students for the use and order of family and given names (I have proposed to fellow editors of linguistic journals that we clarify the issue by always giving the family name in capitals). Danbin Wang of Foreign Languages College, Shanghai Normal University, China shows the differences between allowing students to choose their own topics for writing and setting a specific topic.
Once again, then, we have had the privilege of selecting from a good number of contributions offered a set of high quality that show the best research of Asian TEFL.
Jerusalem, September 2010
Bernard Spolsky,
Editor-in-chief and Asia TEFL Publications Executive Director |
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The Journal of Asia TEFL
