Editor's Note

Editor's Note

Ricardo Augusto de Souza

Dear BJAL readers,

I introduce you to the second number of our journal published this year. This is a special issue, as it brings a specific theme, covered in the introduction and through the subsequent six papers. These papers are then added by three general papers. Therefore, the issue brings you ten high quality studies.

The thematic section addresses the question of "language teaching in multilingual settings". This theme comes as a response to the new challenges brought out by the recognition that multilingualism is a social fact that must be properly acknowledged in language teachers' education and in the planning of adequate educational interventions. The works selected to compose this section are the paper by Antunes, Dornelles and Irala on bilingualism in a school setting on the Brazilian-Uruguayan border; the paper by Branco on the integration of intersemiotic translation activities into EFL teaching for higher education; the paper by Gazzotti and Liberalli about multicultural conflict resolution in child bilingual education; Gorete Neto's work on the perceptions of an indigenous community about a bilingual school; Pessoa's report about implementation of a critical approach to EFL teaching; and Schmitz's critical review of Kachru's model for the expansion and presence of English worldwide.

This thematic section is presented in further details in the introduction authored by our guest co-editor: Dr. Luciana Oliveira, from the Teachers College at Columbia University, USA. We manifest to her our most sincere thanks for her contribution to the present issue of our journal.

This issue ends with three papers. Lima-Lopes brings an analysis of the green discourse presently emerging in Brazil based on systemic-functional linguistics and corpus linguistics. This study also contributes with further descriptions of transitivity (in the Hallidayan sense) in Brazilian Portuguese. Presbianca, Finardi and Weissheimer's contribution is a study with relevant psychometric implications. They report data suggesting that L2 working memory capacity measures may be confounded with subjects' L2 proficiency levels. Villas-Boas reports a case study of the learning of L2 writing based on a process-oriented approach, suggesting that such learning experience has positive effects on the learning of L1 writing as well.

We are convinced that the present issue gathers important reports for contemporary studies in Applied Linguistics.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  26 June 2014
• Date of issue
  June 2014