Language Teaching最新文献

Second language acquisition (SLA) or second/foreign language teaching has been influenced to various degrees by key linguistic theories, including structural linguistics (Bloomfield, 1933; Saussure, 1959), generative linguistics (Chomsky, 1957, 1965), systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1973), and, more recently, contemporary Cognitive Linguistics (CL; Goldberg, 1995; Lakoff, 1987, 1993; Langacker, 1987, 1991; Talmy, 1988, 2000), a theory composed of several related linguistic approaches often viewed as a response or complement to generative linguistics. While structural linguistics, generative linguistics, and systemic functional linguistics have each provided a theoretical impetus for one or more of the prominent language teaching methods or approaches over the past century (such as the Audiolingual method, the Natural method, and the Communicative Language Teaching method), CL, as a newcomer, has begun to exert a growing influence since the early 1990s. Given that the purpose of this research timeline article is to present a historical overview of the key thoughts and studies on CL-inspired approaches to instructed second language acquisition (ISLA),1 a brief discussion of CL's main differences from the other linguistic theories and its key theoretical tenets is in order.

Research on digital multimodal composing (DMC) in second language (L2) classrooms has proliferated considerably in recent years, to a large extent in response to the changing digital and multimodal communication landscape. This article offers a research agenda on DMC in L2 classrooms. We begin with a theoretically oriented overview of DMC scholarship. We then examine seven research themes for future research inquiry, from which we draw seven research tasks. The seven themes are: (1) the effectiveness of DMC for L2 writing development; (2) DMC task design; (3) L2 teacher education/training for implementing DMC; (4) feedback practice for DMC; (5) DMC assessment; (6) collaborative DMC as a translanguaging space; and (7) the deployment of DMC for critical digital literacies. Throughout the article, we refer to interdisciplinary scholarship and methods from multimodality, L2 writing, composition studies, new literacy studies, language teacher education, and computer-assisted language learning. The seven research tasks represent what we see as the essential next steps for understanding DMC, which is a young domain that has great potential to advance L2 language and literacy education in the digital age.

I read Carol Griffiths' article with great interest. This is due in part to being in what I feel is a privileged position as book reviewer for a UK journal, the EL Gazette,1 for whom I have read several titles by authors she references on teacher wellbeing, such as Mercer and Gregersen (2020). I wondered, however, why Brierton and Gkonou (2022) was not listed there as it also deals with issues raised by Griffiths such as how academic managers can help create an environment that reduces stress and mental health problems. It was also interesting to note that Griffiths, like myself, has spent most of her working life involved in English language teaching, almost all of which has taken place in Turkey. Her article also resonated with my own experience as a teacher-educator as it draws upon research carried out in a Turkish context (Griffiths & Sönmez, 2020).

The steady expansion in qualitative research in the area of language education over the last two decades indicates the growing recognition of its importance to investigating issues of language teaching and learning. Along with this recognition, understanding and assessing the quality of qualitative studies in this area has gained increasing significance. Addressing this concern, in this research synthesis, we qualitatively explore how 236 qualitative language education studies published in seven leading journals explicitly foreground the issue of ‘research quality’. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of how authors of these studies addressed the main quality concepts proposed by well-known frameworks of qualitative research quality. Our findings, presented as ten major themes, show that qualitative researchers' overt treatment of research quality is realised based on three distinct orientations: no explicit quality criteria, positivist views of quality, and interpretive quality conceptions. We discuss aspects of these orientations and their implications for qualitative research in language education.

Reproductive aging is one of the earliest human aging phenotypes, and mitochondrial dysfunction has been linked to oocyte quality decline. However, it is not known which mitochondrial metabolic processes are critical for oocyte quality maintenance with age. To understand how mitochondrial processes contribute to C. elegans oocyte quality, we characterized the mitochondrial proteomes of young and aged wild-type and long-reproductive daf-2 mutants. Here we show that the mitochondrial proteomic profiles of young wild-type and daf-2 worms are similar and share upregulation of branched-chain amino acid (BCAA) metabolism pathway enzymes. Reduction of the BCAA catabolism enzyme BCAT-1 shortens reproduction, elevates mitochondrial reactive oxygen species levels, and shifts mitochondrial localization. Moreover, bcat-1 knockdown decreases oocyte quality in daf-2 worms and reduces reproductive capability, indicating the role of this pathway in the maintenance of oocyte quality with age. Importantly, oocyte quality deterioration can be delayed, and reproduction can be extended in wild-type animals both by bcat-1 overexpression and by supplementing with Vitamin B1, a cofactor needed for BCAA metabolism.

Increased work connectivity and study mobility over national boundaries in recent decades has led to a shift in the kind of English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction implemented in many educational institutions. Instruction to develop learners’ general English language proficiency may appear as a time-consuming and abstract endeavour. Instead, many institutions implement English for Specific Purposes (ESP), including English for Academic Purposes (EAP) type instruction. In ESP, the aim is to help students develop the specialized academic and work-related linguistic registers they need to function in target settings where English is used as a medium of instruction or in businesses and workplace communication. A great deal of ESP research has now been conducted to build linguistic descriptions of specialized registers. Rather less research has focused on the learning of such specialized registers. This article identifies areas for a research agenda to develop an understanding of learning a specialized register. It sets out two sites for enquiry, namely, learning in a target workplace or disciplinary study setting and learning in instructed ESP, and four topics for enquiry, namely, processes of learning, conditions for learning, learning trajectories, and transfer of learning. Example tasks are suggested for research into learning in target settings.