The scope of language teaching studies

Abstract

The scope of language teaching studies is wide and varied. This is because language teaching is complex and involves an array of interacting factors. Similarly, studies in this field have been addressing diverse issues, ranging from describing and understanding what goes on in the classroom to the examination of the effects of various types of instruction on learning to the study of the qualities and characteristics of the teacher and the learner as well as the various classroom settings in which instruction takes place. Studies of language teaching also include examination of strategies that aid not just learning but also processing or retaining various forms of linguistic knowledge obtained through instruction, including both written and spoken knowledge. Language Teaching Research has been publishing studies in all these domains. The six articles published in this issue of the journal fall into two of the categories described above. While three of them examine the effect of instructional strategies on learning outcomes, the other three focus on specific techniques that help learners process or retain information. In what follows, I will briefly summarize and then comment on the results and contributions of these studies. Hinenoya and Lyster report a quasi-experimental study that investigates the effect of instruction on learning the English definite article the by Japanese second language (L2) learners. They compared two types of instruction, one that was more linguistic, focusing on the as a grammatical structure to identify a referent, and the other that was more conceptual, drawing on the notion of schemata and mental space in interpreting the meaning of the article. Overall, the results showed an advantage for the more conceptually oriented instruction. The effects of the two types of instruction were also mediated by the nature of the article used. This study demonstrates the potential effectiveness of an approach to teaching English articles not typically used by teachers, but this type of instruction merits further investigation. Nakata’s and Rassaei’s studies focus on the role of feedback. Feedback is an important aspect of second language classroom instruction, and its examination has recently attracted the attention of many researchers. Nakata addressed the important issue of the timing of feedback (immediate versus delayed) and its effect on L2 vocabulary learning among Japanese learners of English. The study also examined whether the effect of timing was mediated by the frequency of practice and also lag to test (i.e., the period between the final 591391 LTR0010.1177/1362168814591391Language Teaching ResearchNassaji research-article2015