Welcome to the eighth volume of the Annual Review of Education, Communication and Language Sciences.
This volume includes five research articles, one literature review article, and an interview with Dr Steve Walsh.
The wide range of the studies in this volume, both methodologically and contextually, reflect the diverse research backgrounds of the academics and postgraduate students at the school of Education, Communication and Language Sciences.
In the first article, Hadeel Al Shatti investigates parents’ perspectives on government and private kindergartens in Kuwait. Combining both qualitative and quantitative data, she shows that there are significant differences between the government and private kindergartens in terms of curriculum, quality of the teachers, and school policies.
The second study, by Christopher Leyland, applies a micro-analytic approach and investigates mutual intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) talk. The findings reveal that ELF users achieve mutual intelligibility through negotiating their own variety of ELF depending on each others’ “proficiency level, use of code-mixing, degree of pidginasition etc” (Gramkow Anderson, 1993: 108) as well as various discourse strategies.
The third paper, by Olga Pykhtina, reports on a study which aims at extending the existing paradigm of understanding what makes leaders successful by exploring the perceptions of successful leadership held by researchers, principals, managers, middle managers, teaching and administrative staff in language schools in the North East of England. Using statistical and thematic analyses, she identifies leadership skills mostly attributed to a successful leader.
In the fourth paper, Emma Elise Roberts investigates teachers’ perceptions of anti-bullying interventions and the types of bullying each intervention prevents. Her findings indicate that ‘non-teaching staff who implemented global interventions’ are the most helpful in preventing bullying.
In the fifth article, Shanru Yang reviews previous research on discourse markers and emphasizes their role and functions in pedagogical settings, especially in teacher talk in classroom talk-in-interaction.
The last paper, by Shane Donald, is an interview held with Dr Steve Walsh on the role of critical reflective practice in teacher education and development. ARECLS has contributed to online academic publishing for almost 8 years now, and has been an inspirational source for postgraduate students at Newcastle University.
The impact of the journal has now extended beyond the limits of Newcastle, and even the UK, since the journal is now indexed by four international indexing agencies: EBSCO, DOAJ, Index Copernicus and Open J-Gate. As the chief student editor, I am very glad to have experienced the growth of this impact both as a reader, a reviewer and an editor.
I am sure that the quality of the journal will continue to grow in the following years. We thank all the contributors who have submitted their articles to ARECLS. We look forward to our meeting again in October 2012. Olcay Sert 25.10.2011 Reference Gramkow Anderson, K. (1993). Lingua franca discourse: An investigation of the use of English in an international business context. Unpublished master’s thesis, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark.
