Christoph Haase

The volume is a result of the latest conference in a series of ELT conferences at Purkinye University, Ústí nad Labem. It contains submissions by national and international scholars with contributions relevant to applied linguistics and education, ELT methodology, TEFL/TESOL and cultural studies. This volume reflects, on the one hand, the international spectrum of activities, and, on the other, the more locally focused research projects of individuals which are displayed in the various articles in this volume. Further, this volume represents a comprehensive companion piece to the 2011 volume ELT: Converging Approaches and Challenges, edited by Christoph Haase and Natalia Orlova. The volume contains 18 chapters that are organized in four main sections dedicated to broad fields in ELT. The first, “Issues in Grammar Teaching and EAP,” starts with a paper by David Newby on his very individual take on a cognitive-communicative grammar. This important contribution sketches a hybrid grammar model with underpinnings in recent findings in cognitive linguistics. The second section, entitled “Teaching Expressivity and Culture” offers a diverse array of studies that include, among other contributions, a systematic survey of English address forms used by non-native speakers by Josef Nevařil and Blanka Babická, and a paper on the heterogeneous situation of English and French as competitors in Cameroon by Samuel Atechi. Section number three is the most technical with studies on “Methodology, Technology and ELT.” This section also spans across all levels of language teaching. In it, Natalia Orlova for example analyzes the self-perception of teachers. The final section collects shorter contributions, including, for example, reflections on a networked teaching of tenses by Stanislava Kaiserová.

Harmony and Diversity

This volume underlines the relevance of an empirical, data-based and scientifically informed approach to the teaching of a second or foreign language, even though the contributions gathered here carry out this task through very different means and with various theoretical underpinnings. This is evident especially in the different and versatile perspectives on academic issues in the linguistic and methodological sections of the volume. The contributions here are assembled according to their disciplinary categories of linguistics, methodology of teaching English, and cultural and literary studies.

Voices of Creativity and Reason in English Language Teaching

Natalia Orlova

The focus of this volume in our ongoing series has shifted from the technological advances that were the topic of numerous papers in the previous book to more rigorous and empirical research, especially in the linguistics and methodology section. While the former is represented by the majority of papers, methodology still manages to surprise with new findings in often-overlooked areas, such as how to address students with impairments in English Language Teaching (ELT), the use of gesture, and the development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The linguistics section starts out with a look at academic English as a lingua franca (ELF) practices, native and non-native English varieties and ELT, pragmatic markers and hedging, and corpora. The compact literary section correlates with the diversity inherent in the field and concerns ethnic writing, indigenous storytelling, animality and elaborations on postmodernist fiction. As such, this collection of research papers will bring topics and approaches to the attention of a wide spectrum of practitioners as both an impetus and inspiration.

Christoph Haase

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