Editorial to Issue 9
Bee Bond and Martin Ward
Welcome to Issue 9 of the Language Scholar, the culmination of the work and collaboration of our editorial team and the first issue co-edited by our new joint chief editor, Martin Ward. In this issue we continue to publish works demonstrating the pursuit of pedagogical excellence from across the world. As well as offering honest reflections, acknowledging the reality that things often do not go as planned, these pieces demonstrate that every experience reflected on provides an opportunity for development and growth. The issues discussed by our featured authors in this issue offer many valuable lessons from which we can all benefit, irrespective of our focus within language pedagogy.
We start off this issue with two research papers examining pertinent issues impacting English-language acquisition for Arab English Foreign Language learners (EFLLs). Hira Hanif’s paper examines ways to raise scores in the IELTS writing component for EFLLs learners in Saudi Arabia, proposing an IELTS writing course based on a genre analysis approach. Meanwhile, Reem Roghailan M. Alshammari argues for a corpus-based approach to teaching collocations to better support Arab EFLLs in producing conventional collocations.
We then move on to our ‘Scholarbits’, featuring two excellent critical reflections on practice. Catherine Mildred reflects on the dynamic and interactive approach of using drama to teach English to a mixed proficiency class in the UK, and her piece serves to highlight also the value of collaboration and pooling resources in the pursuit of excellent outcomes for students. Marc Jones examines ways to improve the online teaching of listening in a world of rapidly evolving understandings of, and approaches to, digital learning, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. He offers insights from Japan that are valuable for all practitioners irrespective of location or language being taught.
Our final section in this issue is devoted to narratives of scholarship, which aim to provide wisdom for us all to glean from accounts of the processes and even failures of scholarship. Deak Kirkham presents us with a fly-on-the-wall view into the dynamics of the author’s developing and ongoing scholarly journey through a discussion of some of the dichotomies encountered by the language scholar. Then Milada Walkova paints an insightful picture of the ‘bumpy road’ of scholarship in her reflection on scholarship in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), offering encouragement for any who have faced the disappointment of rejected papers, as well as underlining the gains to be made from the oft experienced but despised ‘accept with revisions’.
We trust that all will find encouragement and valuable takeaways from this issue. Our website continues to undergo a transformation to increase the visibility and impact of the peer-reviewed scholarship we publish. Finally, we would like to thank all of our valuable reviewers for their support as we continue our exploration of excellence in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).