In her review of second-language syllabus and curriculum design, Kathleen Graves examines curriculum from both a contextual perspective – how curriculum is shaped by the multiple contexts in which it is situated – and from a classroom perspective. After defining curriculum from a specialist standpoint, she presents a further view of curriculum wherein enactment – the teaching and learning processes that take place in the classroom – is at the heart of education. She argues that curriculum must be enacted to exist. A further section looks at curriculum planning and syllabus design. The final section of the review describes the importance of learning communities inside and outside the classroom for curriculum design and evaluation. The article is accompanied by an extended book review by Lyn Bray and Anne Swan.
The focus in our series of survey articles looking at recent language teaching and learning research in specific countries is on the Netherlands. Marjolijn Verspoor and Marjolein Cremer select from over one hundred papers and over twenty journals, conference proceedings, books and reports edited during the period 2002–2006 to review work on redefining multilingualism, trying to find ways to help minority children achieve at school, keeping a critical eye on current teaching practices, and finding specific ways to improve second- and foreign-language teaching.
Two of the three plenary speeches published in this issue were presented at the 2007 American Association of Applied Linguistics conference in Costa Mesa, California – an event LT will be covering again this year in Georgetown, Washington. Andrew Cohen begins his paper offering a rationale for explicit teaching of pragmatics to second-language learners and focusses on questions of material selection and teacher preparation, arguing for a methodology which sees teachers give initial guidance and then leave the actual learning of pragmatics to the students. Finally, the author introduces and reviews recent work on virtual environments for practising Spanish pragmatics. Ann Johns' address reviews her own search for a pedagogy drawn from genre theories for novice academic students. After critically addressing the definition of genre, she discusses the three genre ‘schools’ and critiques their approaches to pedagogy. The final section explores two pedagogical possibilities that appear to be promising in this search for genre awareness and rhetorical flexibility. The third plenary paper is by Alison Wray, who explores the reasons underlying the belief that children can ‘naturally’ learn another language if they begin young enough, and considers reasons why classroom learning may not always tap into whatever natural language learning skills children have. She argues that care is needed to avoid primary-age children being encouraged into adopting an adult-style learning approach, which they are too immature to handle.
This issue sees the start of another research survey feature: a country-by-country overview of recent doctoral theses on mainstream topics within the field of second-language teaching and learning. The inaugural contribution is by Anne Burns, Brian Paltridge and Gillian Wigglesworth discussing recent work in Australia.
In the Research in Progress section, Ute Smit presents the activities of a research network concerned with furthering research into content and language integrated learning (CLIL) and immersion classrooms.
