Eurasian Journal of Language Teaching and Linguistic Studies

Research Trends in Foreign Language Enjoyment

Abdullah Yıldız , Selami Aydin — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0300

Research on foreign language enjoyment (FLE) tremendously increased after 2017, while no review studies appeared on research trends in enjoyment in a holistic and retrospective view. This study aims to explore research trends in enjoyment in the foreign language learning context. Within the scope of the retrospective scientometric approach, 175 research papers from the Web of Science (WOS) database were analyzed. The results showed that studies mainly focused on the relationship between enjoyment and anxiety in the foreign language learning context. It was also concluded that the trend topics were anxiety, enjoyment, achievement, and the validation of the tools used for the measurement of enjoyment. The study ends with implications regarding several critical points within the scope of research on foreign language enjoyment.

What Competencies are Required in the Present-Day Translation Market?

İsmail Erton — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0300

The steadily globalizing world today is in need of more translators and interpreters to keep up with the pace of development. Yet, the issue remains as to the right skills and competencies to respond to the new technological and cultural requirements along with cognitive and professional capabilities among the field professionals. The present paper – novel in terms of bringing together a set of requirements and comeptencies – suggests that in order to develop cross-cultural communcation skills in translation and interpretation, practitioners in the field are required to discover the humanistic nature of the source and target languages as a reflection of their sociocultural identity. To do so in the present-day market, they are expected to use the stuructural aspects of language properly, conduct research, develop technical skills, and frame an understanding of professionalism to bridge the source and target cultures. Such efforts will result in establishing a set of competencies which, when reflected in translation/interpretation, are the much-needed qualities in this market today.

Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition through Watching Subtitled Movies: The Mediating Role of Working Memory Capacity

Hossein Kargar Behbahani, Naser Rashidi — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0300

Interlingual subtitled audiovisual content is a potent educational tool that can enhance second-language learners' vocabulary learning. This classroom-based quasi-experimental study mainly focused on how watching subtitled video programs and working memory (WM) can facilitate receptive and productive knowledge of vocabulary. To shed the light on these, 60 EFL students from two intact classes were recruited and divided into two experimental and control groups with an equal number of subjects in each. Through administering a reading-span test, 14 subjects in the experimental group and 16 individuals in the control group were identified with high WM and the rest with low WM. A pretest posttest control group design was used. The experimental subjects watched a subtitled cartoon about Robin Hood, while the subjects in the control group did not watch any subtitled program. Firstly, a one-way between-groups MANOVA was run to determine treatment's impact on receptive and productive knowledge of vocabulary. The outcomes disclosed that experimental subjects outstripped the control group on both receptive and productive vocabulary measures. A further one-way repeated-measures ANOVA revealed that experimental subjects gained significantly more receptive items than productive ones with a large effect size. Additionally, to determine the contribution of WM to incidental acquisition of lexicon, a one-way within-groups MANOVA was conducted. The statistical analysis results indicated that high WM learners can incidentally gain more words than low WM ones. However, regarding the receptive test of vocabulary, the results were not significant, but regarding the productive test of vocabulary, the difference between WM high vs. low spanners was significant with a moderate effect size. The theoretical and pedagogical implications of the study are discussed.