EDITORIAL WELCOME FOR VOLUME 11 ISSUE 2 (OCTOBER 2017)
On behalf of the Editorial Team, I would like to extend a very warm welcome to the readership of the journal Novitas-ROYAL, and I would like to thank the authors, editors and reviewers for their hard work and dedication. In this issue, the articles touch on aspects pertaining to reading and writing skills, learner motivation, and EFL teaching practices. With such diverse content, we hope there is something for everyone in this issue.
The first three articles in this issue examine language skills of EFL students and researchers. In the first article, Hazaea and al-Zubi examine the effectiveness of Critical Discourse Analysis in reading practices in English as a Foreign Language through a quasi-experimental research design. The results indicate that there is a statistical significance gathered via the practices applied by Preparatory Year students at Najran University. The second article by Nişancı focuses on the reading skill as well. The study investigates the role of extensive reading in the development of implicit phonological knowledge of identifying phonotactic constraints. The control group of students at the beginner level differs significantly in word recognition abilities. In the next article, Yılmaz and Ertürk compare the research studies written by native and non-native researchers to identify the difference in the use of reporting verbs. It is reported that there are some differences in the use of such verbs in relation to the rate of preference of some items and syntactic patterning.
In the fourth article, Selçuk and Erten, examine tertiary level language learners’ motivational changes of two cases identified via Retrodictive Qualitative Modelling. The findings report that the case with a highly intense goal-directed motivation displays stable levels of motivation and affective states whereas the other case is without a clear aim or focus.
The final three articles endeavor to add to the literature by examining teaching practices. In the fifth article, Bulut shares the findings of a case study carried out with five pre-service teachers to denote their changes in teaching practices during their practicum and the related experiences in the actual school environment. In the following article by Üstünbaş, the findings of a quasi-experimental study are reported to highlight the explicit and implicit teaching of pragmatic routines. Explicit teaching is found to be more effective according to the results of the post-test and the participants’ reflections. In the final article, Gürsoy and Hüseyinoğlu reveal the teacher trainees’ self-perceptions toward the pronunciation skill, attitudes toward its instruction, and their awareness in relation to its difficulty and importance. The participants consider suprasegmental phonology more important and difficult when compared with segmentals.
In closing, I would like to look back and thank those who have supported Novitas-ROYAL, our authors, editors, reviewers, and readers, without whom we could not continue to build on the body of research on youth and language, and we encourage those within the scientific community to submit their research for future publications.
We hope you enjoy the articles within this issue.
Sezgi Sarac, PhD
Editor-in-Chief