MEXTESOL Journal: Vol. 42 No. 2, 2018

From the editor:

With this issue, Josefina C. Santana (hereinafter Dixie) and I begin our tenure as Editors of the MEXTESOL Journal. For now, while we make some administrative adjustments, there will just be two of us, but soon we will be sending out Calls for additional Editors. This isn’t my first term as Editor. I was Editor from 1991-1999…many years ago when both the Journal and I were much younger. If you are at all interested in the history or MJ, check out our Archives. Volume 40 celebrated our 40th Anniversary with a series of articles recounting our history.

Dixie and I have a great issue for you. There are three refereed articles, two invited papers, a book review and an interview. Three of the authors are Mexican and the remainder are in the United States.

The first article (Writer-Reader Interaction in Economics Abstracts in English and Spanish: Implications for Teaching and Translation) is by Moisés Damián Perales-Escudero from the Universidad de Quintana Roo. Based on discourse analysis, specifically Systemic-Functional Linguistics, it studies abstracts of professional articles in both English and Spanish published in journals dedicated to economics to determine different forms of interaction between the writer and the reader. The article immediately following this one is also by Dr. Perales-Escudero (Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) and its Applications in ELT). In this invited paper we asked him to kindly write about the origins of Systemic-Functional Linguistics and provide some links to other articles in the same area for those who might be interested in following up on this kind of research.

The next article is about humor (Humor in the Foreign Language Classroom and the Evasive Second Script). Brita Banitz from the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla has written an article about understanding humor in authentic texts. She has done this using the General Theory of Verbal Humor, which she clearly explains in the article. She also gives ideas on how this theory can be used in the classroom.

Not all of us teach in urban environments and we probably rarely reflect on the problems teachers who work in rural schools face every day. Shannon M. Hilliker from Binghamton University has sent us an article about rural ESL teachers with few English language learners. While basing herself on rural teachers in the United States, she also has included references to other similar situations in various parts of the world.

While we were at the MEXTESOL Convention in Monterrey in November of 2017, Neil Anderson from Brigham Young University in Hawaii approached us and offered to write up the plenary he had just given as an article for the Journal. In this issue we are proud to present it. Dr. Anderson describes different roads to effective professional development in his article The Five Ps of Effective Professional Development for Language Teachers. The suggestions he gives will be useful for even the most experienced teachers.

We also have a book review about adult immigrants (The Language of Adult Immigrants: Agency in the Making by Elizabeth R. Miller) and, finally, an interview with Randall Davis who talks about assessment.

We hope each and every one of our readers finds something of use in this issue and we look forward to putting our next issue together for its August 1st publication date. Until then, we wish you happy reading.

JoAnn Miller
Editor-in-Chief