Language is magic. This magic happens when new ideas come to our minds or when we come across notions which are new to us, i.e. when we use language productively and construct our own world. The magic (in the productivity) of language works in various linguistic areas, e.g. phonetics, lexicology, phraseology, pragmatics, languages for specific purposes and multilingualism. In language teaching and learning, this magic comes into effect when language meets content, when we try to adapt our teaching to our learners’ needs or when we need to leave our comfort zone to take risks.

With contributions by Lizeta Demetriou, Bessie Dendrinos, Olga Dobrunoff, Rashit Emini, Douglas Fleming, Thomas H. Goetz, Ourania Katsara, Bernd Klewitz, Katrin Menzel, Torten Piske, Lea Pöschik, Ronald Kresta, Nikolay Slavkov, Anja Steinlen, and Brikena & Gëzim Xhaferi, this edited volume features articles that cover a diversity of research findings which deal with the magic of language in various contexts and linguistic settings in Europe, America and Asia.

Editor: Thomas Tinnefeld

Dr. Thomas Tinnefeld is a full professor of Applied Languages at Saarland University of Applied Sciences in Saarbrücken, Germany. He is the editor of the international Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching and the chair of the biennial Saarbrücken Conferences on Foreign Language Teaching. He has authored and edited multiple publications in the field of applied linguistics and language methodology. His main research interests are languages for specific purposes, grammar and grammaticography, and interculturality.

With the Collaboration of Martin East and Ronald Kresta

Dr. Martin East is a full professor of Language Education in the School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, the University of Auckland, New Zealand.  His research interests include innovative practices in language pedagogy and challenges for additional language learning in English-dominant contexts. He is the author of numerous publications in the field of language pedagogy and assessment.

Dr. Ronald Kresta is a professor of English for Specific Purposes and the director of the Language Centre at THM University of Applied Sciences in Giessen, Germany. His major research interests include error analysis, pronunciation research and pronunciation teaching as well as the application of these areas to EFL teaching.

Preface

Language is magic, and what makes it most magic is its productivity. Productivity is a fundamental feature of language itself, but also of language teaching, which is more or less impossible unless any kind of outcome, i.e. results and progress, is “produced“. Any kind of communication, be it oral or written, entails producing text, meaning, action, or a certain influence. Just as it is impossible not to communicate, it is impossible not to „produce“ when using language. This is the topic of the present volume, and it comes in various facets, which point to this phenomenon from different angles.

In the first place, the magic of language refers to what makes language, as a highly resourceful tool and one which creates meaning, magic. Moreover, it has magic power which, especially in its use and usage, can have immediate effects on our social and even political lives. And it has power and enables creativity in the field of language teaching, especially with regard to the phenomenon of multimodality (Bessie Dendrinos – Athens, Greece).

Language can also be magic when it comes to mastering the challenges communication entails. When turning to other people for information, advice or help, we often run risks: the risk of being rejected, the risk of being misunderstood, the risk of being criticised or even laughed at. These risks are especially high when we communicate in a foreign language whose social and linguistic conventions we may not know as well as the ones of our mother tongue. Overcoming such risks, and, even more, overtly confronting them, generally means we are compelled to leave our comfort zone, and this is exactly what is necessary for learners to improve their mastery of the foreign language and gain self-confidence, which is shown by the Linguistic Risk-Taking Initiative, which represents a promising path to this direction (Nikolay Slavkov – Ottawa, Canada).

A special manifestation of language magic is the appropriate method of setting up classes in such a way that learners are attributed to the learning group which best reflects their proficiency. In this vein, a study about a newly developed placement test in which the weighting of questions was modified so as to attain this aim, hints to opportunities for students to benefit most, for teachers to have more homogeneous groups and for administrators to save time. Thus, if utilised at a larger scale and in more than one institution, win-win- situations for all parties concerned can be created (Thomas Goetz – Sapporo, Japan).

The interplay between language and content is another domain in which teaching can be ‘magic’. This is the case when CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning)-Building Blocks lead to innovative language teaching. In spite of the tensions that generally exist between language and content orientation in teaching languages (for specific purposes), the strong points of CLIL offer realistic chances for it to be included in TEFL, both with regards to theory and practice. Uniting the language and the content approach may then represent a fruitful opportunity of lifting the teaching of foreign languages to a higher level (Bernd Klewitz – Jena, Germany).

In foreign language teaching, the notion of native speaker may represent an obstacle rather than a helpful concept. In this context, the influence of this notion on a project for English-as-a-Second / English-as-a-Foreign-Language teachers is of interest, and reflections on Deleuze’s understanding of the concept of becoming are of relevance, as this concept may offer us a better understanding of the language teacher’s role (Douglas Fleming – Ottawa, Canada).

The intensity of language learning as a factor of success has not been attributed the importance it actually deserves both in research, in universities and at schools. In this context, a new study by Lea Pöschik, Anja Steinlen & Thorsten Piske – Erlangen Nuremberg, Germany) reveals that the intensity of language programmes offered to learners may be even more important than their L1 or (if any) L2 language background – a result which, if verified in further studies, would confirm what experienced language teachers have always advocated, but which is oftentimes not understood by politicians or administrators, namely that contact time with a given foreign language is a crucial factor of learner success, which outweighs potentially suboptimal factors that learners bring in. This result would also mean that a quantitative extension of language programmes and courses at schools and universities would be much more promising than any other measures possibly taken into account. Consequently, this would also mean that the higher amount of money which would then (have to) be spent on learners’ language education and training would be an excellent investment.

Apart from the intensity of learners’ language exposure, the adaptation of teaching styles is undeniably of high importance, but rather rarely implemented in practice. This is true for any level of instruction. An empirical study of this subject, referring to primary education (Rashit Emini – Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia) stresses the link between teachers getting adapted to their pupils’ individual learning styles and the latter’s learning outcomes, which should motivate instructors to get to know their students as well as possible so as to offer them the best possible benefit in the process of language learning. The surplus of time to be spent on students would represent another rewarding investment for teachers. In a similar context, a study about Greek university students’ adultness in an English for Specific Academic Purposes class (Ourania Katsara – Patras, Greece) found that students saw themselves as emerging adults. Instructors teaching this age group of students often experience the fact that this transitional phase between being a teenager and a real adult represents a challenge of its own, which is confirmed for the Greek context by this study. As is also documented there, the situation becomes even more complex when orientation is about diverse or intercultural education. Some of the factors to be taken into consideration in this context are also discussed in the above-mentioned article.

A linguistic domain which is highly relevant to language teaching and unfortunately often neglected in English for Special Purpose classes at the university level is pronunciation. In this context, Ronald Kresta (Giessen, Germany) presents his findings of an investigation into pronunciation errors of German(-speaking) college students, which is based on an empirical error analysis and which, over the years, has turned more and more into a longitudinal study. The author’s classification of errors in terms of their scope, source, frequency and severity is highly functional and gives English instructors the opportunity to apply the study to their own teaching and, thus, improve learners’ pronunciation efficiently. It would be highly beneficial for many foreign language learners if this type of study, which tends to yield fruitful results, as is shown by the example of German learners of English, were systematically applied to a lot more L1s than has so far been the case.

It is a matter of fact that in foreign-language instruction, some grammatical or lexical features are more difficult to teach than others. In English, this is true for phrasal verbs, which are often considered as being characteristic of native speakers’ use, but which are rarely used adequately by non-natives. A study examining the mastery of phrasal verbs by Greek students is presented by Lizeta Demetriou (Colchester, United Kingdom). On the basis of a form recall and a form recognition test, the author found that the frequency of phrasal verbs in relevant corpora as well as in textbooks can determine how well and  how quickly they are mastered by students. The time spent reading and writing in English and periods spent in English-speaking countries also contribute to students’ adequate use of phrasal verbs. These results, which admittedly do not really come as a surprise to the informed reader, are, however, of high importance as they indirectly point to the fact that phrasal verbs may oftentimes be neglected in practical teaching, as there are more urgent grammatical chapters to be dealt with. Phrasal verbs thus need to be taken into consideration in advanced teaching as they clearly reflect a learner’s highly proficient language mastery.

It is not only the verb, but also the adverb that poses potential problems in the process of language learning. In Russian, for example, epistemic modality expressed by adverbs or adverbials is difficult for learners to master. In the present volume, Olga Dobrunoff (West Point, NY, USA) illustrates this problem with respect to American intermediate-level students, focusing on situations in which they have to express their points of view both in classroom interaction and interaction with Russian natives. Basing her reflections on constructivism, motivation and communicatively significant language material, the author presents concrete exercises and activities which can be used in any classroom setting.

Expressing one's point of view in discussions logically entails disagreement, which may counteract the basic rules of politeness, especially when utterances are made in a foreign language. This shows that contrastive analyses of politeness strategies may represent a workable way to teach language learners how not to offend their interlocutors. In their study, Brikena & Gëzim Xhaferi (Tetovo, North Macedonia) analyse disagreement strategies employed by native speakers of English on the one hand and Albanian native speakers on the other, pointing to fundamental differences between these two groups. Consequently, the authors suggest that politeness strategies be taught in the English language classroom for learners to avoid misunderstandings when interacting with English natives. Even if this claim is not made for the first time, this study underlines the necessity of including politeness in the foreign language curriculum even more.

Not surprisingly, the magic of language also extends to linguistic corpora. This is especially true when Academic English is concerned. Both domains – Academic English and linguistic corpora – are combined in the article by Katrin Menzel (Saarbrücken, Germany), who investigates teaching strategies and learning activities on the basis of the Royal Society Corpus (RSC). The author points to how learners can use the RSC to better understand the linguistic strategies that are commonly used in English for Academic or Specific Purposes so as to improve their communicative competence in this field. Her particular focus is on classroom activities related to scientifically relevant patterns of word formation. As the RSC represents an invaluable source of (linguistic) information, it should definitely be used by even more teachers and learners of academic or scientific English than may be the case now.

We see, then, that the chapters in the present volume hint at different forms of magic which language can take. For language teachers, learners and interested readers, this means to walk through the realm of language with our eyes wide open so as to understand our basic means of communication a little bit better every day and to cultivate the idea of treating it as well as possible to keep it in good shape. This is all the more necessary for language teachers and professors, who work as multipliers in the best possible sense of the word.

Thomas Tinnefeld (Saarbrücken, Germany)

with the collaboration of

Martin East (Auckland, New Zealand) and Ronald Kresta (Giessen, Germany)