RELC Journal current issue

Editorial

Chan Yue Weng, — 2009-06-10

Buddy Reading in a Singaporean Primary School: Implications for Training and Research

Shegar, C. — 2009-06-10

Buddy Reading, a peer tutoring programme, is popularly adopted in Singapore schools to increase the reading proficiency of lower primary children who are not reading at age appropriate levels. However, this programme is rarely subjected to systematic evaluation. In view of this, the present study undertakes an evaluation of the programme as it is implemented in a Singaporean primary school. The evaluation brings to the fore some of the shortcomings inherent in the programme and proposes how the training could be enhanced. The final part of the paper evaluates the effects of the newly proposed training programme and concludes with implications for training and research in the area.

Peer-Assessing Peers' Contribution to EFL Group Presentations

Saito, H., Fujita, T. — 2009-06-10

The aim of this study is three-fold: (1) to examine the similarities and differences between instructor and peer assessments of EFL group presentations; (2) to understand the utility of peer assessment for discriminating each group member's contribution to group presentations in college EFL classrooms; and (3) to investigate the relationship between the quality of a group product and group cooperation, each of which were measured by peer assessments. Eighty-three Japanese freshmen worked in groups to create TV commercials. They then completed two types of peer assessment. Results indicated an overall similarity between peer and instructor assessments, along with some notable differences in item difficulties. Most group members succeeded in differentiating the degree of each member's contribution to the group project. Strong support, however, was not found for the assumption that groups with high cooperators produced quality group presentations. Although these results are encouraging for using peer assessment for EFL group presentations, some caution is advised.

English Educational Policy for High Schools in Japan: Ideals vs. Reality

Kikuchi, K., Browne, C. — 2009-06-10

The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology issues a document known as the Course of Study Guidelines on average once every ten years. This document states the overall and specific goals for English education in Japanese junior and senior high schools including specifying the contents of ministry approved textbooks. This study looks at the influence these guidelines have had on classroom pedagogy from the point of view of the student. For this study 112 college freshmen were surveyed shortly after they had been admitted into several private universities in the Tokyo area, responding to both closed-response and open-response questions about their perceptions of classroom practice in each of the six English courses defined in the guidelines. In the closed-response questionnaire, students were asked to rate various items related to teaching. In the open-response questionnaire, students were asked to describe the teaching practice of their English teachers. Standard descriptive statistics were used to analyse the quantitative data. The study gives insights into the successes and failures of the guideline's curriculum revisions. It is a response to call for the further study by Nunan (2003) and helps to show the complicated gap between educational policies and actual teaching practice in Japan.

A Tale of Two Texts: Tracking Developments in Learner Writing

Cullip, P. F. — 2009-06-10

This case study analyses two written texts produced by an ESL learner either side of a five-week genre-based teaching intervention. The second text was judged to be of a much higher quality by two independent markers in a previous study. The question arising is: what exactly has improved? The analytical tools of systemic functional linguistics are used to identify the major areas of generic, discourse and lexico-grammatical development in the learner's writing of an argument. These developments are discussed in relation to the theoretical foundations of the genre-based approach and the classroom practices associated with it.

A Cross-cultural Analysis of English Newspaper Editorials: A Systemic-Functional View of Text for Contrastive Rhetoric Research

Ansary, H., Babaii, E. — 2009-06-10

It is true that analyses of English language texts dominate the literature. It is equally true that a flourishing field of Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) research has begun to address the way various text types and/or genres may differ across cultures and languages (see Connor 1996, 2003). Very much in line with these developments, this study was an attempt to first characterize the global and/or macro-rhetorical structure of English newspaper editorials and formulate what Halliday and Hasan (1989: 64) call `the Generic Structure Potential' (GSP) of a genre. Secondly, this study attempted to cross-examine whether there is significant macro-structural variation from one culture to another within the same genre. To this end, a total of 90 editorials culled from three English newspapers (30 editorials each) published in three different socio-cultural environments by native speakers of English (The Washington Times), and non-native speakers (The Iran News, and The Pakistan Today) were text-analyzed. The results of a GSP analysis of texts indicated that, in terms of the rhetorical elements of structure, there is `statistically' no significant difference ( = .05) between editorials written by (non-)native editorial writers, in whatever socio-cultural and socio-political context they are produced and disseminated. In plain words, results revealed that an `unmarked' English newspaper editorial, published either in Iran or Pakistan or the USA, typically consists of four obligatory and two optional generic rhetorical elements.

Book Review: COHEN, Andrew D. and Ernesto Macaro, Language Learner Strategies: Thirty Years of Research and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. viii + 336. ISBN 978-0-19-442254-3 (pbk)

Pang, A. K.M. — 2009-06-10

Book Review: SCHELLEKENS, Phillida, The Oxford ESOL Handbook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 236. ISBN 978-0-19-442281-9

Nicholls, C. — 2009-06-10