Welcome to the most recent issue of Applied
Research on English Language that
completes two years of publication. Since
the publication of the first issue, Applied
Research on English Language has been
receiving submissions from around the
globe. In this respect, I would like to put on
record, one more time, my profound
gratitude to the Editorial Board Members
and also to the referees who went out of
their way to provide us with constructive
feedback.
In this issue, the first article by Naoko
Taguchi examines the effects of individual
difference factors on changing pragmatic
abilities among L2 learners of English. Her
participants were 48 Japanese EFL students
in an English-medium university in Japan
who completed a pragmatic speaking test
that assessed their ability to produce two
speech acts: requests and opinions, in high-
and low-imposition situations. Speech acts
were evaluated for appropriateness and
fluency. The results of the study reveals
significant effects of individual factors on
pragmatic change, but the effects appeared
differently between appropriateness and
fluency.
The next study belongs to Thomas Payne
and is a qualitative study. The author
investigates the uses of be in Contemporary
English. Based on the study, one easy claim
and one more difficult claim are proposed.
The easy claim is that the traditional
distinction between be as a lexical verb and
be as an auxiliary is faulty. The harder claim
is that there is a syntactic distinction
between lexical-be and auxiliary-be, but that
distinction does not coincide with the
copular vs. non-copular usages. Rather, the
syntactic distinction between lexical and
auxiliary be has an entirely different,
semantic motivation based on stativity vs.
activity. In this connection, the author
challenges a major assumption of traditional
grammar – namely that every English
sentence requires a lexical verb. As the
author argues, the proposals in the paper
bridge the gap between theoretical and
applied linguistics and have the potential to
simplify significantly the conceptualization,
teaching and learning of English grammar.
The third study by Marefat and
Mohammadzadeh is a genre analysis of
literature research article abstracts. The
authors analyzed 90 English and Persian
abstracts written in the field of literature
based on the IMRD (Introduction, Method,
Results, and Discussion) and CARS (Create
A Research Space) models. The results
demonstrated that literature RA writers
generally focus on Introduction and Results,
neglect Method and Discussion, and do not
mention the niche in previous related work.
Further to this, the study shows that
literature abstracts generally matched CARS
more than IMRD. Next, the authors show
that abstracts written by Persian native
speakers have minor deviations from both
the Persian and the international norms.
Roohani, Rahimi and Alikhani’s study
focuses on the effects of captioning on L2
listening comprehension and vocabulary
learning. To these ends, the authors designed
a computer software program and asked 200
EFL learners (100 high-intermediate and
100 low-intermediate level students) to
participate in their experiment. The
participants were randomly divided into four
groups: captioned (listening to texts twice
with captions), non-captioned (listening to
texts twice without captions), first-captioned
(listening to texts first with captions and
then without captions), and second-captioned (listening to texts first without
captions and then with captions) groups. The
authors argue that captioned stories are more
effective than the non-captioned ones.
Moreover, as the authors argue, caption
ordering have no significant effect on L2
listening comprehension.
In the fifth study, Gooniband Shooshtari,
Jalilifar and Khazaei examine the impact of
the application of mobile devices for
teaching English vocabulary items to 123
Iranian semi-illiterates (70 female, and 53
male learners; age range 35-55). The authors
intended to see if the way of presenting
materials and guidelines (formal vs.
informal) through cell-phone would have
any significant effect(s). The results show
that the succinct nature of today's short
message service (SMS) texts allows for a
more successful application of a more
informal style of language in the realm of
teaching English to semi-illiterates. The
study also shows that annotated materials
can help semi-illiterates.
Taleb and Fotovatnia’s study sets out to test
a basic prediction made by the Revised
Hierarchical Model (RHM). The prediction
is that at early stages of language
acquisition, strong L2-L1 lexical links are
formed and these links weaken with
increasing proficiency, although they do not
disappear even at higher levels of language
development. Two groups of highly
proficient and two groups of elementary L2
learners were tested on noncognate stimuli
with episodic recognition tasks in both
forward (L1-L2) and backward (L2-L1)
directions. The pattern observed for the
elementary L2 learners in both directions
was consistent with the prediction of the
RHM. The results showed the existence of
strong lexical links in the backward
direction at the elementary level but no such
links were found in the forward direction.
Contrary to the predictions of the RHM,
however, L2-L1 lexical links were found to
be lost at higher levels of proficiency.
Shahnazari-Dorcheh, in the next study,
develops and validates an L1 Persian
reading span test for measuring working
memory of L1 Persian EFL learners. The
test is used in a study with 140 participants
at three different proficiency levels. The
results of an item analysis, as indicated by
Cronbach’s Alpha, display an internal
reliability of .844 and .790 for the RST
processing and recall scores, respectively.
Accordingly, the author suggests that the
newly developed test is reliable and can be
used to measure working memory capacity
in future studies.
As the next study by Adams-Goertel shows,
the usefulness of teaching pronunciation in
language instruction remains controversial.
Though past research suggests that teachers
can make little or no difference in improving
their students’ pronunciation, current
findings suggest that second language
pronunciation can improve to be near native-like with the implementation of certain
criteria such as the utilization of prosodic
elements. With the emphasis on meaningful
communication and the understanding that
speech production is affected by speech
perception, the author argues that there is a
need to integrate prosodics with
communicative activities.
Finally, Nemati and Azizi describe how a
new technique called Draft-Specific Scoring
(DSS) was devised in order to use grading as
a motivating rather than demotivating
device. The technique works in this way:
The score the learners receive improves as a
result of the improvement in the quality of
the revisions they make. The experimental
study the authors discuss was an attempt to
check the effect of the use of this technique
on three measures of fluency, grammatical
complexity and accuracy. As reported by
Nemati and Azizi, DSS helped learners
improve in all these measures while the
control group receiving only error feedback
without DSS only improved in fluency.
We thank all the contributors who submitted
their articles to Applied Research on English
Language. Although we had to turn many of
these insightful articles down for various
academic reasons, we will be looking
forward to receiving any future paper they
may want to submit to the journal.
Summer has come again and we wish you a
wonderful season! We would be glad to
receive your comments and suggestions!
Our email is: jare@res.ui.sc.ir.
Warmest regards,
Saeed Ketabi (PhD, Editor-in-Chief)
)