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| The Journal of Asia TEFL |
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  Past Issues |
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Go List
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| Volume 12 Number 3, Autumn 2015, Pages 1-147 |
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From the Editor-in Chief
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Andy Kirkpatrick
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Dear Readers and Colleagues,
Welcome to the latest edition of the Journal of Asia TEFL. In this issue we publish five articles. The first two address the vexed issue of teacher feedback and correction, and the final two deal with contrasting aspects of vocabulary development. The middle article explores how students view their experiences of language learning through the use of the metaphors they adopt to describe them.
In the first article, Salteh and Sadeghi compared the preferences of 30 EFL teachers and 100 EFL students with regard to both error marking and feedback techniques, and to the linguistic features that they felt were the most important to identify in correction and feedback. Interestingly, they found significant differences in the respective preferences of teachers and students, a result which should provide EFL teachers with plenty of food for thought.
The second article on teacher feedback considers how teachers of writing alter their perceptions about the role of feedback while taking a class which explored this very subject. In her findings, Sookyung Cho notes that all the teachers engaged in the course did indeed alter their perceptions and shifted from focussing on the written text to the writers themselves.
Su Fang, the author of the third article in this use, investigated how a group of EFL students based in Inner Mongolia viewed their experiences of learning English by asking them to complete the sentence 'learning English is like...'. The results showed that the students used similes and metaphors likening the learning of English to 'hard work, perseverance, patience and a positive attitude'. This result can only encourage English language teachers, although do doubt, context is a crucial variable here.
The fourth article explored the contributions, both direct and indirect, of LI and L2 derivational morphological awareness to EFL students' reading comprehension skills. In a rigorous study using structural equation modelling analysis, Yeon Hee Choi shows that L2 derivational morphological awareness makes a significant contribution both to L2 reading comprehension and to the development of vocabulary knowledge. She also found that L1 derivational morphological knowledge made a contribution, but not to the same extent as the L2 knowledge did. She concludes that developing both L1 and L2 derivational morphological knowledge among students has potentially significant benefits.
In the final article of this issue, three authors, Nowbakht, Moinzadeh and Dabaghi investigated the comparative effects of massed vs. distributed implicit focus on form (FonF) on students' short-term and long-term receptive acquisition of L2 vocabulary items. Three groups of students were selected. One received massed implicit FonF, one received distributed implicit FonF, and the third group was a control group. The results revealed the following: (a) both massed and distributed groups outperformed the control group in their immediate and delayed post-tests; (b) there was no significant difference between the massed and distributed group in short-term receptive acquisition of words; and (c) the distributed group outperformed the massed group in their abilities to remember more words in the delayed post-test.
In closing, the board of the Journal of Asian TEFL would like to remind all members of the upcoming conference to be held in Nanjing in November and look forward to welcoming you all there.
Beijing, September 2015
Andy Kirkpatrick
Editor-in-Chief |
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The Journal of Asia TEFL
