Language Value
December 2019, Volume 11, Number 1 pp. i-iii
Copyright © 2019, ISSN 1989-7103
From the Editor
DIVERSITY IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: RAISING AWARENESS
Access to education should be universal in all cases; however, bureaucracy and policy
conventions sometimes divert unconsciously from this objective. Although educational
institutions have been rowing in the right direction in the last decade, still a lot remains
to be done to make education accessible to everyone.
Accessibility to education in most cases goes hand in hand with new technologies and the
concept of e-learning accessibility (Phipps and Kelly 2006), since information and
computer technologies (ICT) are present in all levels of the educational sphere. To
achieve this, the European Union and governments worldwide have advanced in the
publication of directives and requirements that advocate for equal access to education
technology, for example access to websites and applications for the public sector. This
means that education can be adapted to students’ needs according to their functionality
(Batanero et al. 2014).
The current issue includes contributions that delve into the educational sector with
practices and pedagogical accommodations to students’ needs. The issue, structured in
two differentiating sections includes four full articles in the main section and two book
reviews.
The issue opens with Ögur Çelik’s article on genre analysis applied to the field of ESP.
The author explains how the digitalisation has resulted in the generation of new digital
genres and their subsequent study. The article analyses biography texts on the Internet
Movie Database (IMDb) website, the texts under analysis include biographies of the last
20 Oscar-Winning actors and actresses. Çelik proposes a genre-based instruction on EAP
after the biography texts analysis.
Copyright © 2019 Language Value, ISSN 1989-7103.
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Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
From the Editor
The next article, written by Anna Kuzio, faces the problems of translating medical reports
from English into Polish, taking into account language diversity. The analysis shows
various linguistic difficulties when translating medical terms.
Next article is an attempt to provide useful professional training to students by gaining
communicative competences. The authors, Oksana Polyakova and Ruzana Galstyan-
Sargsyanr, depart form a students’ needs analysis to deepen into an ESP course on
technical and professional environments. They propose a scale for measuring training
outcomes and provide some results from their piloting study emphasizing the importance
of a customized syllabus.
Last full article, written by James Rock, presents a think-aloud protocol to explore
vocabulary learning strategies of ten adult learners. Deliberate vocabulary learning tasks
are studied. The results reveal some regular patters of strategy use especially in strategies
that require less mental effort. Less emphasis was also found on mechanical repetition.
In the Book and Multimedia Review section we can first read a detailed review done by
Dámaso Izquierdo Alegría of the book Disability and World Language Learning:
Inclusive Teaching for Diverse Learners by Sally S. Scott and Wade A. Edwards (2019).
The book essentially explains the process of adopting inclusive instructional practices to
address diverse students’ needs.
In the review that follows, Ana-Isabel Martínez-Hernández revises the publication
Assistive Technology in Special Education: Resources to Support Literacy,
Communication, and Learning Differences by Joan L. Green Prufrock (2018). This book,
addressed to teachers, schools, speech-language pathologists, therapists and also families
is an attempt to explain how to use technologies to improve the learning process of
physically and mentally challenged students in order to help them overcome learning
difficulties.
I would like to close the editorial by thanking all the scholars that have collaborated in
the peer-review process of the articles that make up this volume. Their time and work are
very valuable and makes this journal possible. I am also grateful to the members of the
Language Value Editorial Board and Book and Multimedia Review editors for their
assistance.
Copyright © 2019 Language Value, ISSN 1989-7103
ii
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
Language Value
December 2019, Volume 11, Number 1 pp. i-iii
Copyright © 2019, ISSN 1989-7103
Begoña Bellés-Fortuño
Editor
Universitat Jaume I, Spain
REFERENCES
Batanero, C., Karhu, M., Holvikivi, J., Otón, S. and Amado-Salvatierra, H. 2014. “A
method to evaluate accessibility in e-learning education systems”. In IEEE 14th
International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (pp. 556-560).
Phipps, L. and Kelly, B. 2006.
“Holistic approaches to e-learning accessibility”.
Research in Language Technology, 14 (1), 69-78.
Copyright © 2019 Language Value, ISSN 1989-7103
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Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
