WoPaLP

Welcome to the 10^th volume of WoPaLP − Working Papers in Language Pedagogy. We are celebrating the contributions of the past ten years: 60 research articles by 68 authors from ten countries, as well as the help and support we have received over this decade from the members of our Editorial and Advisory Boards, our reviewers and proof readers. We are also celebrating our readers and fellow researchers, without whom this publication would not make sense. It is a reward to know that our articles are being referred to and have inspired or served researchers, who find them useful for their own purposes. WoPaLP has proved to be a publication forum for researchers in and out of the PhD Programme in Language Pedagogy at Eötvös Loránd University. Novice researchers have used this forum as a springboard to write up a particular stage of their research before continuing their work, and well-established colleagues have also honoured us with their work. Apart from fostering the professional development of individuals or serving to highlight important issues in language pedagogy, several of the articles are used – as we have heard – as models in teaching research methods in language pedagogy at MA and PhD levels. These were our aims at the outset of this journal. We hope we can carry on providing the spirit of motivation in the years to come.

This issue contains five articles. In the opening piece, Miklós Kontra gives an overview of English language teacher education in Hungary, and argues that it is time to leave the Humboldtian tradition of teacher education behind, i.e., abandon the training of scholarly teachers and adopt a pragmatic approach to English teacher training, focusing purposely on areas that classroom teachers need. The second article by Juliana Llanes goes somewhat against this path in foreign language teacher training as she discusses ways how cultural elements can be integrated in the current setup of Spanish teacher development in a PhD course in Hungary. She shows how various strands of a literature course contribute to developing inclusive and multidisciplinary approaches in teacher education. In the next study Katalin Piniel, Kata Csizér, Sevda R. Khudiyeva, and Yuliya Gafiatulina describe the language learning profiles of Hungarian and Kazakh English major university students. Having examined the target population’s language learning motivation, learning anxiety and self-efficacy beliefs they conclude that the individual differences displayed by the participants seem to be context dependent. The following article by Ágota Szűcs and Ármin Kövér draws attention to the importance of explicit instruction in reading strategies in the framework of TEFL. The authors examined Hungarian English major BA students’ summarization skills and found that writing a good summary requires a number of reading skills and sub-skills, which proves the necessity of teaching these in English classes. In the final article Mehri Izadi and Mohsen Zare deal with the evergreen topic of EFL learners’ (un)willingness to communicate. They focus on the relationship of reticence, vocabulary knowledge and anxiety in the context of Iranian EFL students. The surveys they conducted showed that mostly negative attitudes and anxiety were responsible for reticence, while good lexical knowledge may be helpful in lowering anxiety.

As usual, we would like to express our thanks to everyone who helped realise this volume: We owe gratitude to the authors, reviewers and proof readers. And we are looking forward to working with all the colleagues and students who have honoured us with their contributions already or who will be sending us articles in the future as well!

We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue of WoPaLP - and many more to come.

The editors

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Articles

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Miklós Kontra: Ups and downs in English language teacher education in Hungary in the last half century

Juliana Patricia Llanes Sanchez: The emergence of cultural content in the professional development of in-service teachers of Spanish

Katalin Piniel, Kata Csizér, Sevda R. Khudiyeva, and Yuliya Gafiatulina: A comparison of Hungarian and Kazakh university students’ language learning profiles

Ágota Szűcs and Ármin Kövér: Reading skills involved in guided summary writing: A case study

Mehri Izadi and Mohsen Zare: Reticence in EFL speech production: A study of learners’ anxiety and vocabulary knowledge

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