WoPaLP

It is our pleasure to introduce the eleventh volume of WoPaLP − Working Papers in Language Pedagogy. It offers research articles that we hope will serve as inspiration to future authors of original work in the area of applied linguistics and language pedagogy as well as a source of information to practitioners of language teaching and testing interested in areas of inquiry that have received scant attention so far.

The current volume of WoPaLP presents six research articles, from a variety of themes ranging from business English teaching, the teaching of dyslexic learners, in-service teacher training, reading skills development and the testing of listening comprehension to the study of political discourse.

Eszter Sándor’s paper explores business English teachers’ perceptions of their professional role in a Hungarian business school and shows that creating a safe learning environment and offering emotional scaffolding are the two main areas where participating teachers assume to play a key role in order to bridge the gap between what they are compelled to do and what they feel they should do. Orsolya Szatzker investigates what makes dyslexic language learners successful and demonstrates that in fact three main factors play a role: practical learning strategies, learning environment and motivation. The effect of short term Erasmus+ teacher training courses are investigated in Ildikó Furka and Borbála Johnsen’s paper, assuming that spending time abroad in a different cultural and professional environment may serve as a certain kind of input, more precisely a stressor in FL teachers’ lives. They find that such courses in fact seem to cause changes in the coping preferences and emotional intelligence tendencies of the participants. Ágota Szűcs focuses on metacognitive reading strategies and argues that first-year university students lack the necessary reading strategies for their studies and that therefore explicit reading strategy training should be part of the curriculum of their first semester at the university. The next study, by Ármin Kövér, turns to the field of testing and offers an empirical validation of C1 level test scores for measuring EFL listening comprehensions skills. He shows that applying Many‑Facet Rasch Measurement for the empirical validation of test-scores might be beneficial not only for validating listening comprehension test scores but also for validating other types of test‑scores, especially in large‑scale testing. The last study, by Kata Vadai, contributes to the use of critical discourse analysis in language education by exploring three elusive concepts, power, ideology and manipulation in English political discourse and proposing a new integrative problem-oriented analytical tool, the Power, Ideology and Manipulation Identification (PIMI) instrument, created for the analysis of political discourse, through adapting the most recent theories and methods of Critical Discourse Analysis.

We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to the members of the Advisory and Editorial Boards and to our external referees, who always offer their time and expertise so selflessly to evaluate and comment on the submitted manuscripts, whose work guarantees the standards of WoPaLP. For the first time this year we have also enlisted the help of PhD students to check the documentation in the articles. We are very grateful for their work. Thanks go also to the authors of the articles; without their ideas, conscientious research and efforts in writing up the articles we could not offer these good reads to our readers. We hope you will enjoy this new volume of the journal.

We wish you happy reading!

The editors

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Articles

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Eszter Sándor: Business English teachers’ perceptions of their professional role in a Hungarian

business school

Orsolya Szatzker: What makes dyslexic language learners successful in the long run?

An exploratory study

Ildikó Furka and Borbála Johnsen: The effect of short term Erasmus+ teacher training courses on foreign language teachers’ personal and professional competences – The case of four teachers

Ágota Szűcs: The metacognitive reading strategy awareness of first year EFL BA students: A mixed-methods study

Ármin Kövér: Investigating EFL listening comprehension skills: An empirical validation of C1 level test scores

Kata Vadai: Critical discourse analysis for language education: Unveiling power, ideology and manipulation in political discourse

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