Foreword (2018)
After a three-year hiatus, we are happy to announce the relaunchof Working Papers (now renamed Literacies and Language Education:
Research and Practice). This renaming and relaunch are the end of one
journey, but the start of another which we hope to be long and fruitful.
Working Papers was initially designed to provide an opportunity forteachers, particularly those new to research, to publish papers based onwhat they were actually doing in the classroom, and/or to report on
in-progress research they were undertaking with the goal of perhaps
publishing finished works elsewhere. While we still strongly encourage
new researchers to submit their work, the new title, Literacies andLanguage Education: Research and Practice, hints at our aim to be evenmore ambitious than before.
The new title emphasizes a slightly new focus. The recent primacy of‘Literacies’ in the ELI curriculum is recognized, while it also
acknowledges work being done in the broader language field. Additionally,
the title mentions both Research and Practice – the latter term suggestinga penchant towards action research and teaching practice related to theKUIS/ELI context, with the former term allowing for the inclusion ofmore holistic research. This edition’s papers bear testament to both thisbroad range of research and the emphasis on the ELI context.
Where the classroom is concerned, Scott Sustenance’s paper looks at theeffectiveness of a particular vocabulary teaching technique that can easily
be used in any context, while Dan Hooper’s literature review challenges
the assumption that students should not be using dictionaries in theclassroom. Phoebe Lyon takes an evaluative look at the potential benefitsof student-developed dialogue and drama, and Charlotte Lin argues thatthe creation of learner corpora can usefully inform teachers of theirstudents’ relative strengths and weaknesses. Looking more atpedagogy, James Owens’ article evaluates the effectiveness of a course
based on Multiliteracies principles, and Rachel Manley looks at thepossibilities for game-playing in facilitating various skills in a CLTcontext.
The revamping of the journal has been a time-consuming process, but one
that we feel justifies the effort. It has involved a title change, a move to anew domain, and a shift to become a blind and (fully) peer-reviewed,open-access publication. We wanted to guarantee that the final
publication features articles that have undergone a thorough review andediting process, while also providing opportunities for professional
development to those wishing to further participate in the academiccommunity. To that end, we are enormously grateful and indebted tothe editing team (peer reviewers, copyeditors, tutors, and designers) andto the authors themselves for making this issue possible.
We sincerely hope that teachers, especially, but not only, those working
here at KUIS, find these papers useful in both explaining some of thehistory behind our context, and also inspiring them to try new things. We
also hope this issue encourages colleagues to submit their work for thenext edition of Literacies and Language Education: Research andPractice in the 2019 academic year.
James Owens
Jennie Roloff Rothman
Editors