We are delighted to welcome you to the seventh volume of the Annual Review of Education, Communication and Language Sciences.
With this volume we have so far published the work of 76 research students within the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences.
In this volume, we host seven articles.
In the first paper Alenezi investigates the effects of code-switching on students' learning experience in a university setting in Kuwait.
In the second paper, using a Critical Discourse Analysis methodology, Bayram discusses the realisation of identity and background by means of language use in a political discourse. He specifically analyses the discourse of a political speech, namely the short speech of the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a debate with Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, in the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009.
The third paper, by Donald, examines the issue of reticence from the perspective of both teacher and learner by using video recordings, a focus group and stimulated recall.
In the fourth article, Ergul explicates how two facets of Membership Categorization Analysis suggested by Schegloff (2007) – 1) being protected against induction, and 2) category-bound activities – can be applied to gender and language research by using data from a Turkish marriage show. She reveals how this Turkish TV show perpetuates the perceptions on gender, expectations about gender roles and gender-related behaviors in Turkish society.
The fifth paper, by Jackson and Huddart, focuses on the internationalisation of undergraduate home students in Newcastle. In order to determine students’ perspectives on their needs for internationalising the curriculum, they use a two-phased, mixed-method approach.
The sixth article is a comprehensive review of literature that examines learning in second language classrooms from a sociocultural perspective. Kao argues that the central concepts of sociocultural theories (e.g. mediation, ZPD, scaffolding and self-regulation) offer a comprehensive framework to analyse, interpret, and examine the interaction language learners may be involved in while constructing the language learning processes from multiple angles.
The final paper by Lee presents an overview of language learning strategies and calls for further research. As Lorimer & Lindsay (2003) put it, “the online environment restructures access to research, bridging it to the desktops of users rather than confining it to the upper reaches of a vast building at some distance from one’s home or office, where one might, or might not, find the volume, issue and article for which one is searching” (p. 41).
ARECLS has contributed to online academic publishing for almost 7 years now, has gone beyond being a postgraduate journal and has become a useful resource for both academics and students. We thank all the contributors who have submitted their articles to ARECLS.
We look forward to our meeting again in October 2011. Olcay Sert 25.10.2010 References Lorimer, R. & Lindsay, A. (2003). Online Publishing and Canadian Social Science and Humanities Journals: Financial and Publishing Survey and the SYNERGIES Project. Canadian Journal of Communication, 28 (5), 1-44. Schegloff, E. A. (2007) 'Categories in action: person-reference and membership categorization', Discourse Studies 9: 433-461.
