Prólogo

ELIA 16, 2016, pp. 9-12 9 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2016.i16.01 Estudios de lingüística inglesa aplicada PRÓLOGO / FOREWORD DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2016.i16.01 The editors of the ELIA Journal work constantly to maintain its position as an international journal for the publication of academic papers on different aspects of Applied Linguistics, to continue to appear in important indexes and to enhance its international visibility and reputation. This issue presents five research articles. Two of them deal with the teaching of pragmatics and the identification of pragmatic errors, two others tackle the topic of corrective feedback from different perspectives and finally our key concept section is devoted to technology mediated L2 teaching. ELIA 16, 2016, pp. 9-12 10 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2016.i16.01 The issue opens with an article by Alicia Martínez-Flor entitled “Teaching apology formulas at the discourse level: Are instructional effects maintained over time?” where the author analyses the effects of teaching apologies at a discourse level on a group of Spanish learners of English as a foreign language both in the short- and the long-term. Using an interactive discourse completion test to analyse learners’ performance when apologising in different contrasting scenarios it examines the effectiveness of a pedagogical model on learners’ appropriate use of apology formulas, not only after immediately receiving instruction, but also five months later. The results demonstrate the benefits of instruction to improve learners’ pragmatic knowledge both in frequency and variety of apology formulas. In her article “Comparing the effects of two types of output-pushing feedback on adult EFL students’ oral accuracy” Hanne Roothooft compares the effects of two different types of prompts: metalinguistic feedback and elicitation. The author uses two groups of intermediate university students (n=31) and a statistical analysis of students’ gain scores. Her results showed that metalinguistic feedback had greater effects on students’ accuracy and helped them more to correct their errors during the classroom intervention. With “Pragmatic error identification in a computer-adaptive test of English as a Foreign Language” María Luisa Carrió Pastor and Beatriz Martín Marchante analyse the reasons why a group of students fails the specific items that assess pragmalinguistic competence in English in the Oxford Online Placement Test (OOPT). The authors try to determine what deficiencies in their linguistic competence are involved in their production of errors on these items. From a cognitive and meta-linguistic perspective, they study their students’ own perceptions using a retrospective questionnaire designed and administered to forty-four students of the Facultat de Magisteri, Universitat de València (Spain). The results showed that the most frequent source of errors in the pragmatic comprehension part of the OOPT was lack of familiarity with some vocabulary contained in the dialogues corresponding to this part of the test. María Fernanda Aranguiz and Angie Quintanilla Espinoza in their article “Oral corrective feedback strategies in Chilean EFL classroom” ELIA 16, 2016, pp. 9-12 11 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2016.i16.01 study Chilean teachers’ use of corrective feedback strategies and their efficacy in students’ performance. The authors audio-recorded two lessons of 90 minutes each from five teachers. Their results show that Chilean teachers use corrective feedback strategies to correct pronunciation, vocabulary, grammatical and content errors. The teachers used explicit correction as the most frequent strategy. In terms of effectiveness, most of the corrective feedback provided followed repair from the learner. They found repetition, elicitation, clarification requests and metalinguistic feedback to be the most effective strategies. This volume ends with its traditional section “Key concepts in Ap plied Linguistics” where a recognised scholar in the field explains the basics of a topical concept in Applied Linguistics. On this occasion, Marta González-Lloret explores technology-mediated L2 teaching and distinguishes it from both CALL and technology-enhanced L2 teaching. She reviews how technology has changed the way we learn and teach languages and predicts the repercussions of innovation for a whole new generation of students and teachers. The ELIA editorial team hopes you find this 16th ELIA volume interesting and instructive. María del Mar Torreblanca López [email protected] ELIA 16, 2016, pp. 9-12 12 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2016.i16.01