We have just finished the MEXTESOL 41st International Convention in Puebla. It was great to see authors, readers and friends who go to this conference. To finish off this event, we provide our readers with the last issue of the MEXTESOL Journal for this year. This issue has eight contributions: Bertha Gómez Maqueo’s obituary, four refereed articles, a vintage article, our Tech Column (Dixie Dixit), and a book review.
Bertha Gómez Maqueo was one of the founding members of the MEXTESOL organization and she continued active, attending conventions almost to the time of her death. On August 23rd of this year she left us, less than a month from her hundredth birthday. This Memoriam is to honor her for her great love of our profession and to recognize the tremendous influence she had on all who knew her.
The refereed articles come from authors in Iran, Mexico and the United States. Our first refereed article, Students’ Beliefs and Expectations of Native and Non-Native English Teachers by María Nelly Gutiérrez Arvizu (Universidad de Sonora and Northern Arizona University), researches EFL students’ perspectives and beliefs of native and non-native English teachers in Mexico using a Likert scale as a data collection technique. Her conclusions reveal that students appeared to not have a definite preference for a native or non-native English teacher but a few tendencies were found concerning the skills, vocabulary, and culture.
Brian D. Bresnihan (University of Hyogo, Japan) and Myles MacAuley (Kansai University of International Studies, Japan) have submitted the article An Integrated Approach: Four Skills, Not One and One Content, Not Four. This refereed article explores the students’ perceptions of a classroom approach involving students in a variety of integrated activities which provide input, output and interaction. Using student surveys, the conclusions demonstrate that the students were able to identify the value of this teaching approach in regards to their language performance and development.
The Impact of Pair Work on EFL Learners’ Motivation, by Sasan Baleghizadeh (Shahid Beheshti University, G.C.) and Shima Farhesh (University of Nebraska), looks at how pair work has an effect on EFL learners’ motivation in Tehran, Iran. This study employed teacher interviews, observations and student questionnaires of two groups of students: a Pair-work Oriented (PO) group and an Individual Oriented (IO) group. The results show that the use of pair work is helpful in improve the motivation of students.
The last refereed article is written by Masoumeh Mehregan (Isfahan University) and Davood Jafari Seresht (Bu-Ali Sina University) and its title is The Role of Teacher Feedback in Enhancing Learner Self-efficacy and Motivation in Computer-assisted Environments. This quantitative study explore how learners in Iran view different types of teacher feedback of vocabulary learning in relation to learner self-efficacy and motivation.
For our vintage article, Professor Andrew Littlejohn revisits his article Language Teaching for the Future which was published for the 25th anniversary of MEXTESOL more than fifteen years ago. See how he reflects on his original article and specifically the characteristics of a “futures curriculum” for language teaching. Also check out his website (www.AndrewLittlejohn.net).
Using Twitter to Teach Vocabulary is the central topic of the Dixie Dixit-New Trends with Technology written by Dixie Santana. She gives details about an experiment she conducted with her students using twitter to learn vocabulary. The column discusses the different steps followed to learn vocabulary and, in an interesting way, the author links these to the stages of her experiment where twitter was used to communicate with her students. She ends the column by sharing the results of her experiment and inviting other teachers to join the twitter experience if interested!
For the book review, Irene Alice describes The ELT Daily Journal: Learning to Teach ESL/EFL (Houston, 2013) as a useful resource that can contribute to English teachers´ education and professional development as it offers a practical guide to EFL/ESL teaching. According to Alice, the compilation of journal entries is of interest as it goes from tips for effective teaching given by renown authors to reflective teaching entries that invite the readers to write about their own experiences. All in all, this work is highly recommended as a companion and guide for both beginning and experienced teachers.
One important innovation begins in this issue. Online articles which receive the highest number of visits will be designated “highly accessed”. This designation was impossible before journals went online. How could one know how many people accessed a print article? However, now viewing statistics allow us to recognize those articles which have a wider influence in the field. This status can appear in the authors’ CVs. We would like to congratulate our first two articles to reach this status:
Performance-Based Assessment: Rubrics, Web 2.0 Tools and Language Competencies. W. I. Griffith, Hye-Yeon Lim. Vol. 36, No. 1, 2012.
Elaboración de historietas para la enseñanza del ingles por medio de computadora. Renee Denisse Munguía Vasquez and José Luis Ramírez Romero, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2011.
To conclude, we would like to invite people to browse this issue and any other articles from our archives. We are an open access journal and we firmly believe that our journal should be free to all of our readers here in Mexico and other parts of the world. Also our call for papers is open throughout the year and authors are encouraged to submit their contributions. The MEXTESOL conference will be held in Cancun, Quintana Roo from November 5-8, 2015 and the conference theme is “Building the future today: English language teaching and learning breakthroughs”. We close this year with this issue and look forward to seeing you in 2015.
This study analyzes students’ preferences for the nativeness of their English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. The beliefs of 167 students in a northwestern university in Mexico were explored through a thirteen-item Likert scale survey. The results showed that students seem not to have a preference of native English speaker (NS) teachers over non-native English speaker (NNS) teachers to teach them English in general. However, the participants showed a tendency to prefer NSs to teach them speaking, listening, vocabulary, and culture; and NNSs to teach them reading.
This article is concerned with the important roles that input, output, and interaction play in language development. After reviewing related literature, the paper explores an EFL classroom approach that seeks to engage the students in a combination of integrated activities, based on the same content, that together provide abundant and wide-ranging input as well as opportunities for output and interaction. The article then describes a survey of university students’ perceptions of this approach, which was being applied in their classes. The survey investigated to what extent the students felt that each of the components – input, output, and interaction – helped to improve the performance and development of their language skills. The results of the study show that the students involved in the survey recognized the importance of all three components in developing their language proficiencies.
The use of pair work activities has been advocated by communicative approaches to foreign language pedagogy for the past forty years. However, there is very little evidence to suggest whether or not these activities promote learners’ motivation. This study aimed to investigate the effect of pair-work on EFL learners’ motivation. Moreover, it reports two teachers’ ideas concerning this. The study was carried out in a language institute in Tehran, Iran. A Pair-work Oriented (PO) group and an Individual Oriented (IO) group were selected for teacher interviews, class observations, and students’ motivation questionnaire. An independent samples t-test and descriptive statistics were employed via SPSS version 18. The results of the observations followed by some extracts of the teachers' interview were subjectively analyzed. The conclusion indicates that the class in which the teacher included a greater amount of pair-work improved the students’ motivation more.
The purpose of the present study is to investigate how teachers create different proficiency level male and female learners’ motivation and self-efficacy beliefs in vocabulary learning through different corrective feedback types. A total of 130 intermediate to upper-intermediate EFL learners participated in the study, 70 (males=28, females=42) of whom received summative feedback (N=35) and formative feedback (N=35) and the other 60 learners (males=25, females=35) were exposed to norm-referenced (N=30) and self-referenced feedback (N=30) types. The results showed that participants in the self-referenced and formative feedback groups experienced an enhancement in their self-efficacy and motivation compared to the norm-referenced and summative feedback group learners. However, the impact of gender and level of proficiency of the learners on evaluative feedback types was found as non-significant.
While going through the archives of the MEXTESOL Journal, I came across Andrew Littlejohn’s article titled “Language teaching for the future” which was published in 1998. At first I was curious to find out what his perspectives of language teaching for the future were during that period of time. Within his article, Littlejohn created a dialogue as to what the future would hold and how we, as teachers, should prepare our students for the future. When I read it, it seemed like it was written at this moment in 2014. I became more curious to find out how Littlejohn would react to revisiting this article that was based upon a plenary given at the 1997 MEXTESOL Convention in Veracruz. With great pleasure Littlejohn accepted to take on this task for our vintage articles. I hope you will enjoy reading his points of view of language of teaching in 1998 and 2014.
M. Martha Lengeling
Editor-in-Chief of the MEXTESOL Journal
MEXTESOL Journal, vol 38, núm. 3, 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.
