EDITORIAL WELCOME FOR VOLUME 8 ISSUE 1 (APRIL 2014)
Welcome to volume 8(1) of Novitas-ROYAL (Research on Youth and Language). Once again, we would like to thank our contributors for their submissions, and we also would like to thank our referees for the critical feedback they provided to make this issue a better one. This issue features six articles from authors working in different parts of the globe including the USA, Turkey, Japan, and Taiwan. The diversity of contexts in addition to the employment of a number of research methodologies makes this issue a rich and varied one, which has potential to inform further research at international level.
Our new issue features three articles that employ Conversation Analysis to reveal interactional phenomena in daily conversations and in ESL classroom settings. Drew Fagan investigates an under-researched phenomenon in adult ESL classrooms in the USA: positive feedback turn construction. Fagan successfully shows how an ESL teacher systematically constructs her positive feedback turns, and illustrates the factors found in the discourse to influence her real-time decisions. The second conversation analytic paper, by Li-Fen Wang, reports findings on a very unique interactional phenomenon, namely language use patterns in bilingual Taiwanese families. Wang’s sequential analysis reveals that the languages used, Mandarin and Taiwanese, serve as contextualisation cues and framing devices in the Vietnamese participants’ self-initiated admonishment sequences. In the last conversation analytic paper, by also employing membership categorization analysis, Aki Siegel investigates English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) interactions between female graduate students from Korea, Japan, Germany and the USA while watching TV. She showed that television affected not only the conversation topic but also the positioning of the participants in the group, resulting in the “othering” (Spivak, 1998) of a particular participant through the interaction.
On another study focusing on the phenomenon of ELF, Peter I. De Costa investigates the concept of Willingness to Communicate (WTC) from a conversation-based ELF perspective in order to bridge the socio-cognitive divide. His theoretical and methodological position has great potential to inform future WTC studies and second language research in general. In his paper on pre-service English language teachers’ motivations for choosing to teach, Ismail Hakkı Erten presents very important findings based on a content analysis of data collected from 96 teacher candidates. He showed that participants have more intrinsic reasons, and unlike those reported in the field, altruistic reasons were much fewer than other types of reasons. In the last paper of this issue, Servet Çelik and Bilal Karaca, through document analysis, try to answer a long debated question in EFL research: “Does early instruction in EFL lead to greater achievement?”. Their findings indicate that although early onset of EFL instruction may be beneficial in many respects, it is not, in itself, a guarantee of success.
Continuing its support for postgraduate students, our journal sponsored the 9TH Newcastle Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics. Please visit the conference website for further details: http://conferences.ncl.ac.uk/pglinguistics/.
We thank all the contributors who have submitted their articles to Novitas-ROYAL.
We look forward to our meeting again in October 2014.
On behalf of the Editors,
Olcay Sert
Associate Editor
Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey