A 10th ANNIVERSARY NOTE
The year 2006 marks the 10th anniversary of Language Learning & Technology. We want to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have made this anniversary possible. Your support has enabled us to compile a solid record of 23 issues, to go from two issues to three issues per year, and to grow in scope and diversity. Since 2003, Language Learning & Technology is indexed in the exclusive Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)'s Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), ISI Alerting Services, Social Scisearch, and Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences. Our contributors now come from 26 countries and our readers from over 145 countries around the world. In 2005, we received a record 118 submissions.
As always, we wish to thank the National Foreign Language Resource Center of the University of Hawai‘i and the Center for Language Education And Research of Michigan State University for their continued financial support that allows Language Learning & Technology to remain free to our readers and free from advertisements.
We thank our contributors who have provided us with the interesting, timely, and high-quality content that makes Language Learning & Technology a leading publication in the field.
We thank all our hard-working and dedicated reviewers who have taken the time to provide our authors with insightful and constructive comments. Their contribution makes it possible for Language Learning & Technology to bring high-quality research reports to our readers. We acknowledge our 2005 reviewers in this issue.
We are grateful to our Editorial Board for their continued support and guidance.
We are commemorating our 10th anniversary with a new look and would like to thank Carol Wilson-Duffy, our webmaster at the Center for Language Education And Research of Michigan State University, as well as Min Mo and Stephen Fleming of the National Foreign Language Resource Center at the University of Hawaii.
Happy New Year to all!
FROM THE EDITORS
Paginated PDF Version
This regular issue of Language Learning and Technology includes four articles. In the first article, “Future Foreign Language Teachers’ Social and Cognitive Collaboration in an Online Environment,” Arnold & Ducate examine transcripts from a semester-long asynchronous discussion between foreign language methodology classes at two different universities. Their findings indicate that students not only progressed in their cognitive understanding of the pedagogical topics but also employed social presence to aid their discussions.
The second article “Internet Use of Polish by Polish Melburnians: Implications for Maintenance and Teaching” by Fitzgerald & Debski examines the use of the Polish language by Polish-Australians with modern communications technologies. Their study identifies several factors interacting with Internet use in the community language and makes recommendations for applications of modern technology in ethnic language schools and for home language maintenance.
The third article “Discourse and Participation in ESL Face-To-Face and Written Electronic Conferences” by Fitze compares two types of conferences in terms of textual features and participation. His findings indicate that discourse in written electronic conferences displayed greater lexical range, and students in these conferences produced more discourse demonstrating interactive competence.
In the fourth article “Negotiating Common Ground in Computer-mediated Versus Face-to-face Discussions,” Vandergriff compares learner use of reception strategies in traditional face-to-face and in synchronous computer-mediated communication. Her study showed that the medium alone had little impact on the use of reception strategies, and that participants adapted the strategies to the goals of the communicative interaction, as they used them primarily to negotiate and update common ground in their collaborative activity rather than to compensate for L2 deficiencies.
Our regular editor of "Emerging Technologies," Godwin-Jones, is taking a much-deserved break. In place of his regular contribution, we are pleased to present “Going to the MALL: Mobile Assisted Language Learning” by Chinnery who examines the practical advantages as well as challenges involved in the use of mobile technologies for language learning.
In “On the Net,” Leloup and Ponterio describe the Digital Dante Project, an online, multimedia Dante-related academic resource that presents traditional elements of scholarly research through digital technology.
We want to welcome Sigrun Biesenbach-Lucas, our new Reviews Editor, who brings us four reviews. Evans reviews S. Fotos, & C.M. Browne (eds.) (2004). New Perspectives on CALL for Second Language Classrooms, a practical handbook for teacher trainers, students, and professionals interested in exploring the foundations of successful technology-based teaching and learning. Horst & Cobb review the Oxford Dictionary of American English and its accompanying Genie CD-ROM software. Ari reviews N-Gram Phrase Extractor, kfNgram and WordsmithTools, software programs used to search for lexical bundles in a text, in terms of their user-friendliness and efficiency. Wahba reviews Mastering Arabic with two Audio CDs, a software package that aims at providing the novice learner with a general understanding of the overall structure of Arabic as well as the means for basic communication.
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Sincerely,Irene Thompson and Dorothy Chun
Contact: Editors or Editorial Assistant
Copyright © 2006 Language Learning & Technology, ISSN 1094-3501.
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors.