Editorial

Editorial

Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, 2007-09-00 vol: nro:9 pág:262-271

Álvaro Hernán Quintero Polo
Guest Editor

I would like to thank Dr. Amparo Clavijo Olarte, Director of the Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, for the invitation to write this editorial. I am very pleased to start the presentation of the ninth issue by sharing with you all the result of the collaborative effort of the Editorial Committee and a group of twenty five national and international article evaluators. We would like to welcome Sarah Hudelson from Arizona State University, Janeth Velasquez, Judith Castellanos, and Luz Mary Quintero from Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas; and Luz Dary Arias from Universidad Pedagógica Nacional as new members of the Editorial Review Board.

The scheme of intellectual production has changed rapidly. Through educational research and academic reflection, classic transmissionist models have evolved into understanding, production, dissemination, and socialization of knowledge. The concerns of teachers as intellectuals no longer remain as theoretical precepts in classrooms or as senseless research studies, but their academic production is transformed into useful information that fosters human development with social pertinence. Teachers' role within the teacher education programs has been extended through networking where exchange with colleagues in disciplinary communities and others of other professions complement the participation in the society of knowledge. This is how in this ninth issue of the CALJ, we are showing consistency with this tendency by presenting research-based and reflection-based articles for our readers to take as an invitation to publicize projects carried out in their varied settings.

In this issue you will find a number of twelve articles distributed in three sections as follows: Research reports, seven articles; theoretical discussion papers, three articles; and pedagogical projects, two articles. The first article reports on the process of construction of the concept of culture which was built by a group of children from different types of knowledge about the world, the practices, and the artifacts embedded in a community. The second article is an ethnographic study that uses critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to describe the way a Latino woman develops her identity of mother, student and citizen in an adult ESOL and computer literacy class. The third article relates to the findings of an experiment about the influence of hypertext and continuous formats on reading comprehension. The next article describes, based on tools of CDA, the way elementary English language learners (ELLs) used intertextuality to compose informational texts. The fifth article is an analysis based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) of theme markedness and theme progression in Chinese college students' expository essays written in a nationwide English examination in China. The following article reports the findings of a study about the use of Presentation, Practice, and Production model (PPP) by group of language institute teachers. The seventh article accounts for the issues associated to intercultural understanding of a group of adult EFL learners.

In the section of theoretical discussion papers, one article shows a broad literature review on the topic of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as related to the design of multimodal texts and multimodal learning models. Another article presents some reflections upon the implementation of curriculum as inquiry that informs a conceptualization of culture. The last article of this section discusses mediation, a Vygotskian concept, as found in SLA research literature.

In the section of pedagogical projects, the two articles are about EFL learners' self-assessment practices as a strategy to make sense of teaching and learning experiences and the use of literature circles as a way to encourage students to explore and construct their responses to literary texts.

The final section presents the abstracts of research in progress that second year graduate students from the M.A. in Applied Linguistics to TEFL are developing in educational settings as one of the requirements for graduation.

We hope you enjoy reading the variety of articles that we, with the collaboration of the Office of Publications, have put together for this issue.

Álvaro Hernán Quintero Polo
Guest Editor