Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research
Volume:1 Issue: 1, Jan 2013

The title of this new journal provides opportunity to review the many contexts which need to be taken into account in reflecting upon foreign language teaching. These contexts include the educational, the fact that much language teaching takes place within general educational and often compulsory educational settings and institutions. Learners thus encounter foreign languages alongside other languages – their language of the home, the official language of the country, languages of minorities and others – and this needs to be part of the thinking about learning and teaching. Furthermore, since language is the tool for learning throughout life and especially in educational institutions, where the languages of other subjects are languages in themselves which learners have to learn if they are to be successful in education, teachers of all subjects need to be aware of language as the tool of learning. Yet another issue is the relationship of language teaching with citizenship education and the development of ‘intercultural citizenship’. The title of the journal also refers to ‘research’ and here too there is potential for reflection on the modes and paradigms of research which are relevant to investigating language teaching and learning. Distinctions of quantitative and qualitative research are misleading and need to be reviewed. The higher order distinctions are between research which seeks explanation, that which seeks understanding and that which involves advocacy.

I continue here the long-standing discussion on the familiar topic of whether subconscious language acquisition is more powerful than conscious language learning, with a focus on vocabulary, adding recent studies as well as older ones I missed in previous publications on this topic (e.g. Krashen, 2004).

For many centuries people who speak more than one language, that is to say second language (L2) users, have been admired. In the 16th century an advisor to Elizabeth I of England said: ‘For even as a hawk flieth not high with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellency with one tongue.’ Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, 1570 In the 21st century the education minister for Elizabeth II proclaimed: ‘It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.’ Michael Gove, UK Education Secretary, 2011 Yet, despite these public statements, bilingualism is more often seen as a problem to be solved than an asset to be developed. Second language (L2) users indeed have problems, whether social, psychological or economic – like everyone else. But few of these stem from their bilingualism itself.

In foreign language education, the teaching of culture remains a hotly debated issue. What is culture? What is its relation to language? Which and whose culture should be taught? What role should the learners’ culture play in the acquisition of knowledge of the target culture? How can we avoid essentializing cultures and teaching stereotypes? And how can we develop in the learners an intercultural competence that would shortchange neither their own culture nor the target culture, but would make them into cultural mediators in a globalized world? This paper explores these issues from the perspective of the large body of research done in Australia, Europe and the U.S. in the last twenty years. It links the study of culture to the study of discourse (see, e.g., Kramsch 1993, 1998, 2004) and to the concept of translingual and transcultural competence proposed by the Modern Language Association (e.g., Kramsch, 2010). Special attention will be given to the unique role that the age-old Persian culture can play in fostering the cultural mediators of tomorrow.

Teachers can reflect on their practices by articulating and exploring incidents they consider critical to themselves or others. By talking about these critical incidents, teachers can make better sense of seemingly random experiences that occur in their teaching because they hold the real inside knowledge, especially personal intuitive knowledge, expertise and experience that is based on their accumulated years as language educators teaching in schools and classrooms. This paper is about one such critical incident analysis that an ESL teacher in Canada revealed to her critical friend and how both used McCabe’s (2002) narrative framework for analyzing an important critical incident that occurred in the teacher’s class.

Traditionally, many studies of second language acquisition (SLA) were based on the assumption that learning a new language mainly involves learning a set of grammatical rules, lexical items, and certain new sounds and sound combinations. However, for many second language learners, learning a second language may involve contact and interactions with new systems of conceptualising experience. Many learners bring the conceptual system that they have developed while learning their L1 into the learning of an L2, assuming that every single unit of conceptualisation in their repertoire has an equivalent in the conceptual system associated with the L2. This is never the case. In this paper, I will explicate some cultural conceptualisations that speakers of Persian may bring into the task of learning English as an L2 and discuss some possible implications of this process for intercultural sense making. The chapter begins with a background on the notion of cultural conceptualisation and then moves into the discussion of Persian cultural conceptualisations in L2 learning.

First language (L1) transfer has been a key issue in the field of applied linguistics, second language acquisition (SLA), and language pedagogy for almost a century. Its importance, however, has been re-evaluated several times within the last few decades. The aim of this paper is to examine current research that has investigated the role of L1 transfer in second language (L2) writing. The paper begins by discussing the different views of L1 transfer and how they have changed over time and then reviews some of the major studies that have examined the role of L1 transfer both as a learning tool and as a communicative strategy in L2 writing. The paper concludes with a number of suggestions for L2 writing instruction and future research.