AJELT: The First Quarter Century

It gives me great pleasure to introduce volume 25 of AJELT.

In last year’s issue, my predecessor as editor, Gwendolyn Gong, predicted that the Year of the Horse would be a “time of change,” and she has certainly been proved correct. This is my first volume as editor, and, I regret to say, the last for my co-editor, Ali Shehadeh, who has decided to step down as co-editor after many years in the role. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ali for his meticulous and unstinting work for AJELT during the past several years. In particular, I owe him a debt of gratitude for the tireless assistance he gave to me throughout the past year. As a novice editor, I had to seek Ali’s help and advice on very many occasions. On each occasion, his response was patient, timely, and constructive.

I must also acknowledge the assistance of Gwendolyn Gong, whose retirement has done nothing to diminish her enthusiasm for AJELT and for quality in academic publishing. Even after her retirement, Gwen has been working behind the scenes at AJELT, and has been a constant source of support to me throughout the past year.

I have also been very fortunate in the assistance given to me by our book reviewers, Derek Chan and Helen Zhao, and in the meticulous work of editorial assistant Rong Xiao.

The papers in this volume examine topics in English language teaching across a very wide geographical spectrum. Martin J. Endley’s paper looks at the use of reading strategies among students in the United Arab Emirates, while the paper by Baburhan Uzum looks at the effectiveness of written recasts as corrective feedback among Asian and Arabic students studying at a university in the United States.

The next three papers are concerned with vocabulary acquisition. The paper by Roger W. Gee and Le T. C. Nguyen examines the reliability of the Bilingual Vocabulary Size Test for Vietnamese Learners (BVSTV) as part of placement testing. The results of their experiment indicate that even a shortened version of the test is reliable and could be used as a viable option for vocabulary assessment during placement testing.

The next paper, by Kudo, Mizumoto and Kumazawa, also deals with vocabulary assessment and vocabulary test scores, this time in the context of English language teaching in Japan. Their paper looks at a Vocabulary Learning Strategy (VLS) scale, and the relationship between self-regulated use of the scale and vocabulary size.

The final paper shows how corpus data can be used to generate vocabulary lists tailored to the needs of students in specific disciplines. In their paper, Ping Wang and Michelle Picard use a corpus of music textbooks to produce a word list of high-frequency items that Music majors will encounter in their studies. They suggest that a similar technique could also be applied to the needs of students in other disciplines, including Drama, Art Design, and Art Management.

We conclude this volume with two book reviews: Shogo Sakuri’s review of Ken Hyland’s Academic Publishing: Issues and Challenges in the Construction of Knowledge, and Nha T. T.Vu’s review of Needs Analysis for Language Course Design: A Holistic Approach to ESP, by Huhta, Vogt, Johnsom, and Tulkki.

Gerald NELSON
January 2016