Welcome to this issue of the MEXTESOL Journal. We have seven contributions and they come from Colombia, Costa Rica, Iran and Mexico. The first article is titled “Creating a Culture of Faculty Empowerment through Professional Development” by Mónica Rodríguez-Bonces and Carlo Granados Beltrán.
This refereed article presents the design and evaluation of a five-stage model for teacher development in a teachers’ college in Colombia. The model includes needs analysis, action plan, teacher development, creation of academic community, and evaluation.
Next Nuria Villalobos Ulate has contributed the refereed article “Notions of Non-native Teachers in Costa Rican Language Schools”. The native speaker fallacy is examined through an analysis of perceptions of native and non-native teachers of coordinators, teachers, and students in Costa Rican language schools offering Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, and Italian.
The third article, “Email and its Effects on Iranian EFL Learners’ Writing Ability”, is written by two authors (A. Majid Hayati and Mozhgan Gooran) of the Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz in Iran. This refereed article investigates the effect of email as a communication tool on EFL learners writing ability.
Karim Sadeghi and Elmira Taghav from Urmia University (Iran) provide our readers with the refereed article “The Relationship between Semantic Mapping Instruction, Reading Comprehension and Recall of Iranian Undergraduates Reading English Texts”. This article deals with the interactive reading strategy of semantic mapping and it examines the strategy’s effectiveness in relationship to reading comprehension and recall of Iranian undergraduates.
To continue we offer our second vintage article from twenty years ago. Jack C. Richards wrote the article “Teacher Thinking and Foreign Language Teaching” which addresses a number of terms such as teacher thinking, teacher cognition, decision making, expert teachers, novice teachers, and reflection.
Dixie Dixit: New Trends with Technology is a new column that the MEXTESOL Journal offers for readers. Josefina C. Santana V., or better known as Dixie (Universidad Panamericana in Guadalajara), has written “Six Standards for Including Technology in the Language Classroom” which brings up interesting advice on how, when, and how much technology teachers should use in their foreign language classes. Based on the standards given by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), the author gives examples on how she has used different websites and what the benefits have been to take into consideration these standards to make her teaching practice more interactive and meaningful.
Last but not least, Benjamin Stewart of the Universidad de Aguascalientes in Mexico submitted “Book Review of Big Questions in ELT” (Thornbury, 2013). Thornbury’s book uses a Socratic method –hence the chapters are introduced by questions. Stewart points out the benefits of the method as an invitation to reflective teaching and critical thinking development for both novice and experienced teachers. An interesting feature is the interactive nature of its chapters which combine text and technology by introducing blog entries as an integral part of the chapters.
We hope you enjoy reading this issue and our new columns. Please send in your articles to us!
This article presents a model for professional development at a teachers’ college in Bogotá, Colombia. Based on the methodology of curriculum development, researchers proposed a five-stage model which consisted of needs analysis, action plan, teacher development, creation of academic community and evaluation. Data was gathered through questionnaires, interviews, and document analysis. Results of each one of the phases indicated that faculty may be empowered through on-going professional development enhanced by implementation of academic dialog through collaborative groups. However, some work needs to be done to guarantee a follow-up of its different modes. The evaluation of this model let researchers propose a Professional Development Policy for Institución Universitaria Colombo Americana (ÚNICA).
Keywords: curriculum, professional development, policy, empowerment
A detailed analysis is provided of the perceptions towards native and non-native teachers of different languages. The attitudes of academic coordinators, teachers and students of different Costa Rican language schools offering Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, and Italian classes were examined. These insights were gathered through questionnaires completed by 272 people at Intercultura, Centro Panamericano de Idiomas, INTENSA, Instituto San Joaquín de Flores, Alianza Francesa, Dante Alighieri and the Fundación de Cultura, Difusión y Estudios Brasileños. In these institutes there was a variety of teachers: native, non-native. However, not all of them hold the necessary degrees or certifications to be language teachers. In general, the native speaker fallacy notion exists in these schools’ populations because most coordinators, teachers and students still believe the ideal language teacher is a native speaker of that language. Therefore, it becomes necessary to create awareness regarding this issue so there is more justice in hiring practices and the treatment towards non-native teachers of various languages.
Today is the age of cyber-tech with which students as members of this technological age must be familiar. Being as one of the most popular cyber-products, email is understood as the device people use to interact on the net. Promoting its use in the classrooms can improve students’ cyber-literacy. The effect of email on EFL learners’ writing ability has scarcely been examined within the context of Iran. This study is thus concerned with examining the relationship between using email as a communication tool and students’ writing achievement. Following a pre-test, one group was taught the procedures of writing a paragraph in class while another group received instruction via email. The results of the study indicated a significantly positive relationship between using email and students’ writing performance.
Keywords: academic writing, email, Computer Assisted Language Learning
This study investigated the effectiveness of semantic mapping, an interactive reading strategy, on reading comprehension and recall of Iranian undergraduate students (non-EFL majors) reading texts in English. It also examined whether there is an interaction between gender and the effect of teaching semantic mapping strategy on reading comprehension and recall. The subjects in this study were 120 male and female lower-intermediate undergraduate students taking a general English course at Urmia University. A Certificate in Advanced English (CAE) reading test was administered to measure students’ proficiency at the beginning of the treatment. Afterwards, the subjects were semi-randomly (Mackey & Gass, 2005) divided into experimental and control groups. The experimental group was instructed on how to apply semantic mapping strategy to their reading process, while the control group received normal reading instruction. After administering two post-tests and a delayed recall post-test based on the General English text book, quantitative and qualitative findings supported the findings of earlier research on the benefits of the application of semantic mapping in the experimental group, but failed to show a significant difference between males and females.
Introduction from M. Martha Lengeling, Editor-in-Chief of the MEXTESOL Journal
It is with great pleasure that we publish our second vintage article: “Teacher Thinking and Foreign Language Teaching” by Jack C. Richards. This article was published in 1994, twenty years ago. As a student in a master’s TESOL program in the United States, I remember reading Professor Richards’ work and now years later I read it again and can see how research in teacher education has progressed. His article shows a part of our history of ELT. Terms such as teacher thinking, teacher cognition, decision making, expert teachers, novice teachers, and reflection are part of the discussion in this vintage article and are related to teacher education. Also during this year of 2014, Professor Richards’ book Key Issues in Language Teaching will be coming out and the third edition of Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Both of these books also show this evolution in the area of teacher education. We hope you enjoy reading or rereading Professor’s article on teacher thinking. Download PDF Supplementary file: Original article Supplementary file: Letter from Jack C. Richards
MEXTESOL Journal, vol 38, núm. 1, 2014, es una Publicación cuadrimestral editada por la Asociación Mexicana de Maestros de Inglés, MEXTESOL, A.C., Versalles 15, Int. 301, Col. Juárez, Delegación Cuauhtémoc, C.P. 06600 Mexico, D.F., Mexico, Tel. (55) 55 66 87 49, journal@mextesol.org.mx. Editor responsable: M. Martha Lengeling. Reserva de Derechos al uso Exclusivo No. 04-2015-092112295900-203, ISSN: 2395-9908, ambos otorgados por el Instituto Nacional de Derecho del Autor. Responsable de la última actualización de este número: Asociación Mexicana de Maestros de Inglés, MEXTESOL, A.C. JoAnn Miller, Versalles 15, Int. 301, Col. Juárez, Delegación Cuauhtémoc, C.P. 06600 Mexico, D.F., Mexico. Fecha de última modificación: 31/08/2015. Las opiniones expresadas por los autores no necesariamente reflejan la postura del editor de la publicación. Se autoriza la reproducción total o parcial de los textos aquí publicados siempre y cuando se cite la fuente completa y la dirección electrónica de la publicación.
