Editorial

Threading through the eight articles in this issue are a number of recurrent themes. Five papers, for example, focus on language teaching in primary schools. Nathalie Gagné and Susan Parks and Jennifer Ann Foote and her colleagues look at aspects of the ‘intensive’ English courses offered to francophone 10–12-year-olds in Quebec, Canada, while Ruth Fielding’s paper presents research on English–French bilingual classes for 10–12-year-olds in Australia. María Pilar Agustín Llach, meanwhile, compares the progress in English vocabulary learning of similarly aged young learners in Spanish and German primary schools, and in a UK classroom, Alison Porter considers the role of gesture in the teaching of French to pre-literate 5–7-year-olds.

Central to Porter’s study on gesture is the second theme, that of the modalities used to present target language (TL) input and their differential impact on learning. Touching on this theme is Jasaman Rafat’s research on how orthography can influence L2 auditory perception and production, while Agustín Llach finds that orthography can hinder positive transfer of cognate vocabulary. Both Rafat’s and Agustín Llach’s studies also contribute to a more fine-grained understanding of how transfer works between languages – the third theme. The fourth theme is the nature and impact of teacher feedback in communicatively focused classes, touched on by Foote et al. and central to the research presented by Muhammad Rahimi and Lawrence Zhang. Both of these papers contribute to the debate on the relative value of more implicit ‘recasts’ versus more explicit ‘prompts’.

Finally, pervading at least three articles in this issue is the theme of ‘culture’, in the broad sense of the social psychological context in which a second language is used and experienced. In Fielding’s study, different classroom cultures contribute differently to the way in which young learners negotiate their potential French–English bilingual identity. Gagné and Parks depict a cooperative micro-culture in one class of young Canadian francophones learning English and highlight how it contributes to learners’ effective group work. Serena Daly shows how anglophone undergraduate students can develop their awareness of Italian work cultures through discussion of carefully selected films.

Daly starts her article by reviewing the arguments for ‘employability’ to be integrated into UK university teaching. Employability is an elusive, if highly prized, quality. Daly outlines it as a set of achievements – skills, understandings and personal attributes – that make graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations. A recent International Labour Organisation publication (Brewer 2013) defines it more specifically in terms of four broad areas of skill – learning to learn, communication, teamwork and problem-solving – while a 2015 study from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI/Pearson 2015: 37) points to ‘a readiness to take part, openness to new ideas and activities, and a desire to achieve’ as the key attributes that UK employers look for in new recruits. Certainly, employability seems to be about developing personal insight into the world of work, understanding the expectations of the work culture and how to respond appropriately to them.

In this light, ‘employability’ can be seen as part of intercultural competence (Byram 1997) and this is the perspective that Daly adopts in her paper. From this point of view, films representing how TL speakers experience various aspects of their working life become a particularly valuable resource in triggering students’ personal awareness of TL work cultures. The CBI/Pearson report reiterates calls from UK employers for school and university students to experience the world of work through direct personal experience in work placements. As many university language teachers know, organising and preparing students for successful work placements abroad is often challenging. Daly’s article shows how films depicting TL work settings may serve as a vicarious awareness-raising device to help undergraduate learners develop their international employability skills in the classroom. On this note, UK language graduates overall do appear to be more successful than UK humanities graduates in finding jobs. The CBI/Pearson report confirms that for UK employers, skills in foreign languages may not be considered an ‘essential core competence’ but a sizeable proportion of the employers surveyed (45%) do believe them to be ‘beneficial’, particularly in terms of building relationships with overseas contacts (36%) and in enabling staff mobility (CBI/Pearson 2015: 41–42). It is pleasing that these positive evaluations of language skills for the workplace have increased since the previous survey in 2014.

Identity, rather than culture, is the stated focus of Ruth Fielding’s paper, but it becomes clear in the course of her discussion that identity cannot be seen as simply self-defined; it is also about how others in a group define you. Fielding investigates how two different bilingual programmes offered in an Australian state primary school functioned to develop students’ sense of being ‘bilingual’. The so-called ‘immersion’ classes were taught entirely in French by one native-speaker teacher, while the ‘bilingual’ classes were delivered by two teachers, one using English and the other using French. The ‘immersion’ classes were primarily designed for students with a TL background (those, e.g. with at least one French-speaking parent, and/or experience of living in a French-speaking environment) while the ‘bilingual’ classes brought together both those with, and those without, a TL background. Using classroom observations and teacher interviews, Fielding focuses on how the teachers’ behaviours in their respective classrooms served to promote their learners’ confidence and pride in being bilingual. She highlights how the two different classes developed rather different sociolinguistic ‘norms’, requiring distinct identity positioning from the French-background students attending both; in the bilingual class, the ‘safe norm’ for them was to identify primarily as English speakers, while in the immersion class, they were ‘safe’ enacting French identity through speaking French. Fielding develops her analysis using her Bilingual Identity Negotiation Framework, which foregrounds the key themes of socio-cultural connection, interaction and investment.

Fielding’s research reminds us how the group dynamics of a classroom influence who speaks, when and in what language. This is the focus of research by Natalie Gagné and Susan Parks, which investigated how upper primary learners functioned in group work when undertaking L2 tasks carefully designed using Kagan’s (1994) cooperative learning approach. The groups of four were deliberately set up to bring together learners of different TL abilities, and the researchers recorded their interactions in order to ascertain whether all learners participated equally and whether they stuck to communication in the TL. The study is set against existing research on task-based language learning (e.g. Storch 2001) that has found that not all members necessarily participate equally in group work, and this can undermine the value of task-based language learning for some students. Parks and Gagné, however, argue that the very explicit ‘structures’ or task design features advocated by cooperative learning, provide the means to off-set this danger. In particular, the principles of ‘positive interdependence’ (where roles and resources are explicitly allocated to different members of the group, such that all members’ contributions are required to complete the task) and ‘individual accountability’ (where all team members are held accountable for completion of the task) were seen to be important.

Gagné and Park’s results confirmed that in the two groups studied, all members participated fairly equally and that communication took place almost entirely in the TL. They conclude by highlighting the key features of classroom management that they believe contributed to this positive result. These included the very clear specification of roles based on the principles of cooperative learning, but also the way in which the classroom teacher in this study established an L2 ‘space’ with explicitly stated norms for language use; for example, a line of red tape on the classroom floor indicated a linguistic border, ‘yellow cards’ sanctioned non-TL use, but also ‘time out’ requests were allowed if learners wanted to pursue a conversation in L1. The article provides a particularly useful discussion of different ways of ‘designing in’ learner cooperation.

The following two articles are also based in Canada, and both focus on pronunciation, an area typically neglected by language teachers. This is indeed the conclusion of the longitudinal research undertaken by Jennifer Ann Foote and her colleagues, based on observation of over 40 hours of Grade 6 English teaching in francophone schools in Quebec. They found that the teachers of this communicatively focused course devoted only 10% of all language-related episodes to pronunciation, and language-related episodes as a whole comprised only 17% of the total teacher input. Most of the pronunciation input comprised feedback on errors, no doubt as appropriate to teaching following Long’s (1991) Focus on Form model, and the errors targeted were exclusively segmental elements, such as individual vowel errors or the omission of final /s/ on verb forms. Two of the three teachers involved predominantly used recasts (simply responding to an error by giving the correct form), while the other teacher did demonstrate more explicit feedback which sometimes had the advantage of involving the whole class in correction. In concluding their study, the authors highlight the limitations of the prevalent approach to pronunciation and call for ‘the inclusion of proactive, rather than just reactive, approaches to L2 pronunciation teaching would provide learners with richer opportunities for working on challenging features of L2 pronunciation’.

Yasaman Rafat’s study was also based in Canada but investigated aspects of L2 phonological learning rather than teaching. Her participants were anglophone adults with very little foreign language experience and her objective was to assess whether orthographic input (i.e. seeing the written form) would influence their ability to reproduce Spanish words accurately from auditory input. Orthographies using the Roman alphabet can differ considerably in letter-to-phoneme correspondence. Teachers of French, for example, know that the plural articles pronounced /le/ and /de/ but spelled les and des, can suddenly be transformed into /lϵz/ and /dϵz/ the moment anglophone students see them written down. It is not that the French vowel /e/ or either of the consonants is particularly problematic for anglophones to pronounce; quite the contrary. The orthographic input, however, seems to override auditory input and results in transfer of the L1 letter-to-phoneme correspondence. Rafat sets out to explore whether this phenomenon would be seen with a range of Spanish words and whether slightly different combinations of orthographic and auditory input would influence the results.

Her findings confirmed that orthographic input did indeed trigger L1 transfer, and predictably transfer was more prevalent where the letter-to-phoneme correspondence was different in the two languages. Intriguingly, however, there was sometimes what looked like orthographic transfer even where participants were not exposed to the written form; for example, the Spanish word vigota, pronounced /biɣota/, was pronounced /vigota/ by participants who did not see the written form. Rafat concludes that TL sounds that are prone to L1 transfer will show even stronger transfer effects when learners are exposed to orthographic input. Teachers thus need to think carefully about how they balance auditory and orthographic input in presenting TL items; while orthographic input can support retention, it can also distort phonological perception and production. Rafat’s research makes an interesting contribution to the debate on the relative impact of auditory and visual input in L2 phonology learning; see Erdener’s (2015) overview in a recent issue of The Language Learning Journal.

María Pilar Agustín Llach’s study also considers transfer but this time in the area of vocabulary. She sets out to compare the receptive vocabulary knowledge of upper primary learners of L2 English with, respectively, L1 Spanish and L1 German. Both groups of learners had undergone around 400 hours of English instruction. Her results, using a version of Nation’s (1990) Vocabulary Levels Test, show that both groups were estimated to have roughly the same vocabulary size – just over 50% of the 1000 most frequent words in English and just under 20% of the 2000 most frequent band – and thus, there was no strong evidence of differential L1 influence. Llach hypothesises nevertheless that knowledge of German and Spanish respectively could have different benefits; German would help with English cognates of Anglo-Saxon origin while Spanish would help with cognates of Greco-Roman origin. Her results bear this out, but only partially. Her Spanish learners seemed to have a slight advantage over their German counterparts in acquiring less frequent vocabulary items, as these were more likely to have a Greco-Roman origin. Cognates of Anglo-Saxon origin, conversely, are typically among the more frequent words in English, and therefore learners of both language backgrounds may well have benefitted from the effect of frequency. But there also seemed to be evidence in Agustín Llach’s data of a limiting factor on positive transfer; she suggests that learners at this age were not necessarily able to recognise cognates successfully because of differences in spelling, particularly between English and German (e.g. English daughter v. German Tochter).

Alison Porter’s article explores practical ways to support very young learners’ retention of orally cued L2 phrases and she presents positive evidence for the use of ‘enactment’. This is the association of vocabulary items with gestures that learners ‘enact’ when repeating phrases forming a very simple story. Porter tests her 5–7-year-old learners’ ability to retell two stories in French, one presented and rehearsed with just line drawings as a support, and the other one presented with both the drawings and enactment of taught gestures. The learners recalled significantly more of the gestured story, though this advantage was somewhat attenuated at delayed post-test. Porter situates her classroom research within cognitive theories of memory, arguing that the association of target words with gestures enables elaborated processing of the TL input in a way that is appropriate to the young age of the learners. However, she also stresses that consistent repetition of TL material is important. Porter’s research, like that of Kirsch (2015) in our previous issue, points to the value of stories, with their opportunities for chorused repetition and retelling with gestures, in the teaching of young learners, particularly where there is limited time available, as is the case in UK primary schools.

The final paper in this issue returns to the theme of teacher feedback in communicative classes, and in particular, the impact of teacher recasts as compared with prompts. Rahmini and Zhang explain that they are looking at ‘incidental, unfocused’ teacher feedback on grammatical errors; in other words, feedback constituting Long’s (1991) Focus on Form, given incidentally as errors occur in student production. The classes involved were ‘Free Conversation’ classes of advanced-level adult students in Iran and the impact of the different teacher feedback conditions was measured by students’ grammatical accuracy scores on the TOEFL written test and in an oral interview, similar to the IELTS speaking test. Rahmini and Zhang’s results show an overall positive impact for teacher feedback on learners’ grammatical accuracy, compared with the control group where there was no form-focused feedback. There was also a clear advantage for prompts compared with recasts. These findings confirm that the Focus on Form approach can bring about improvements in grammatical accuracy, at least with advanced adult students and particularly where prompts are used. Prompts encourage students to ‘notice the gap’ between their own production and the correct form, and the overall focus on meaningful communication provides a context and a motivation for the error correction. The authors are nevertheless at pains to point out that there is no foolproof recipe for corrective feedback; yes, current research suggests that prompts are more frequently associated with learning gains than recasts, but they point to Ellis’s (2009) guidelines on error correction which highlight a range of factors which can influence the impact of feedback.

Our forthcoming issue (September 2016: 44, no. 3) will be devoted to the theme of the internationalisation of higher education in Europe, a context which has figured frequently in articles published by The Language Learning Journal (cf. our 2012 special issue on Teaching Languages in Higher Education: 40, no. 3). The specific focus will be on the policy and practice in universities in Catalonia, Spain, where research on mobility programmes has been particularly strong. The issues of intercultural competence, ‘employability’ and ‘European citizenship’, and the complexity of students’ cultural experiences while studying abroad all feature in the timely collection of articles brought together by Professor David Block.