Asian EFL Journal: English Language Teaching and Research Articles

Volume 6. Issue 3

September 2004 Articles

We present 10 articles in this September 2004 edition. We thank both the authors for their outstanding work and our Editorial team for their dedicated efforts enhancing and promoting the TEFL profession. Articles can be read in up to three formats, MS Word format, and PDF format and some in HTML format. You need Adobe pdf reader to read the pdf files, and always run a virus scan of all MS Word files before opening any file.

The first article is presented by Kyung-eun Yoon. This study investigates the theories and practices of communicative language teaching (CLT) in the EFL curriculum in Korea. Based on recent research on second/foreign language learning, CLT has been widely accepted as an effective way of teaching in ESL/EFL contexts.

The second article is presented by Kim Sung-Jin who argues that the Korean government's attempt to introduce CLT methodology has almost insurmountable obstacles and can not work in the Korean cultural context. This presents in contrast to the 1st article and gives a valuable indication of the theory and practice of CLT in Korea.

The third article is presented by Miss. Yi-hui Chui. This study explores the acquisition of the most commonly used coordinating conjunction "and" in essays written by three groups of college students in high- , mid-, and low-proficiency levels in Taiwan and shows that a number of error patterns can be traced when analyzing the misuse of this coordinating conjunction.

The fourth article is presented by Chang Chi-yu of Taiwan. This paper mainly concerns, first, why America has long been considered an easy target criticized as cultural imperialism/hegemony; second, whether the correlation between the process of globalization and American culture has decisively perpetuated the gap that distinguishes winners/dominators from losers/the oppressed or gradually ensured the realization of a global utopia; and third, what lessons are worth learning in a view that American culture has been imagined as culturally imperialistic no matter how acceptable or convincible it appears.

The fifth article is by Mr. Peter Dash. This work gives better insight into both what exactly pragmatics is and how it might be important - or in contrast how it might be rather amorphous and indistinct to semantics (and other linguistic fields). It more importantly demonstrates the complexities of separating cross-cultural pragmatic failure from other types of communication breakdown and the resultant implications for classroom instruction.

The sixth article is by Hasan Ansary and Esmat Babaii of the Shiraz University in Iran. In terms of methodology, to date most genre-based studies have employed one or the other of Swales's move-analytic models of text analysis to investigate whether or not the generic prototypical patterns that he has introduced exist universally.

The seventh article is presented Linda Martine. Her paper focuses on the problems faced by international students studying abroad at English speaking universities. In particular it looks at the difficulties Asian students have in small group work activities and offers some recommendations on how these can be overcome

The eighth article is by Abdallah Ahmad Baniabdelrahman of Jordan. The author addresses the question; "Are there significant differences in the performances of the student-teachers of the three groups in teaching English due to the method of supervision they receive or to their gender?"

The ninth article is by Saeed Mehrpour and Abdolmehdi Riazi, Ph.D. Their work reports that based on their findings, language teachers do not have to limit themselves to using short passages or simplified readers when they teach and test reading comprehension.

The tenth article is by Meiling Wang and Sirkku Aaltonen provides data and information on a Sino-Finnish business e-mail project. Intercultural communication in the contemporary business world relies increasingly on e-mail, the language of which is predominantly English. The project provides significant implications and research direction for teaching Business Communication in English across the Sino-European divide.

Op Ed. Editor Pedro Luis Luchini examines issues of Pronunciation training and application of appropriate methods and approaches