John Macalister

Victoria University of Wellington · School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies

When Timor–Leste became the first new nation of the 21 st century in 2002, one of the many decisions that needed to be made concerned language. Timor–Leste is a country of around one million people, with at least 16 indigenous languages and three foreign languages contributing to its multilingual character. For reasons related to its 400-year colon...

This study was conducted to understand issues related to the current practice of English teacher education development in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic with a focus on reading. It recognizes that what pre-service teachers experience both prior to and during their teacher education are important and need to be understood if the goals of teach...

This narrative inquiry focuses on two Malaysian novice English language teachers whose pre‐service teacher education had included two years of study abroad. The experiences of novice language teachers remain an under‐investigated area and this study furthers our understanding of that experience. Furthermore, while research on the effectiveness of p...

One of the challenges for the successful implementation of extensive reading (ER) programmes, especially in Asian contexts, stems from curricular factors where class time is often prioritised for tasks requiring the presence of a teacher. This paper investigates the role of extensive reading online (ERO), an alternative approach to traditional ER,...

One avenue for developing second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge is through Extensive Reading (ER). ER can provide opportunities for incidental learning to occur. Class time is often too restricted for sufficient attention to deliberate learning (Hunt & Beglar, 2005) meaning ER is important for L2 vocabulary development. This article builds on i...

Professional development is an activity in which language teachers should have ongoing and sustained involvement. There are many ways in which language teachers can pursue professional development, and reading journals is one of these ways. This article reports on a survey of 465 English Language Teaching (ELT) professionals, largely drawn from the...

In multilingual Malaysia, the place of English has been debated at various times since independence in 1957. An initiative to address concerns about levels of English language proficiency in the country through teaching Science and Mathematics in English was launched in the early 21st century. For some teachers, a trans-national component was intro...

Through case studies from around the world, this book illustrates the opportunities and challenges facing families negotiating the issues of language maintenance and language learning in the home. Every family living in a bi/multilingual environment faces the question of what language(s) to speak with their children and must make a decision, consci...

For many teachers the course book is the curriculum. Furthermore, because of contextual constraints such as those imposed by an external examination, the course book becomes an unexamined curriculum. Yet in such circumstances the learning outcomes may not be optimal because teachers are not applying principles; principles, in this sense, refer to r...

Language teacher education programmes can be viewed as ‘change’ programmes, particularly in their endeavours to re-shape cognition. However, often such programmes are found to be relatively ineffective in this regard. As a means of facilitating the desired change, trans-national language teacher education programmes, in which students study abroad...

In Timor-Leste four languages are recognised in the constitution and compete for space, both in education and in society generally. While the adoption of Portuguese as the co-official language (with Tetun) is understandable in light of the country’s recent troubled relations with Indonesia and with a wish to distinguish itself from English speaking...

The diversity of language teaching contexts around the world is immense. One variable that contributes to that diversity is the amount of control teachers have over what they teach. Many teachers work in a situation where the curriculum, the materials, and the assessment are centrally imposed; this is often the case in national education systems (s...

The effectiveness of teacher education courses in preparing pre-service teachers for the classroom is, naturally and unsurprisingly, an area of interest for those involved in the delivery of such courses. It is, after all, very reasonable that stakeholders — such as teachers, administrators, and sponsors — should want to know whether the course is...

In pre-service and in-service language teacher education, and in curriculum-related projects in second and foreign language settings, a recurrent issue is the failure to relate the teaching of reading to reading as a meaning-making activity. In this paper, I will consider what current research on second language (L2) reading has actually succeeded...

The researchers completed a corpus-driven analysis of 688 texts written for children, language learners, and older readers to determine the vocabulary size necessary for comprehension and the potential to incidentally learn vocabulary through reading each text type. The comparison between texts written for different audiences may indicate their rel...

The knowledge and beliefs that teachers hold are an important determiner of what happens in the classroom. Ideally teacher cognition should be informed by research and theory about effective language learning. This paper examines the beliefs related to vocabulary teaching held by a cohort of 60 Malaysian pre-service teachers engaged in a multi-year...

Needs analysis plays an important role in curriculum design. In particular, needs analysis largely determines the goal and content of the course being designed. When selecting among the many tools available to analyze needs the course designer must consider practicality as well as validity and reliability. In this paper, I report on the novel use o...

Timor-Leste is a nation where three exogenous languages (Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, English) and one of many endogenous languages (Tetun) compete to be heard in public spaces. The constitution names both Tetun and Portuguese as co-official languages, and English and Bahasa Indonesia as working languages in the civil service; but official and de...

Awareness of gender bias in the depiction of children has been well-established in educational circles since the 1970s, and robust attempts to address this bias have been made in many parts of the world. Corpus linguistics has, however, made a limited contribution to our understanding of this field, with early studies of the depiction of children i...

This paper reports on interviews conducted with 36 teachers involved in university preparation courses at language teaching centres in New Zealand. The interviews were designed to investigate teacher attitudes to extensive reading in higher educational contexts, and current practice in such contexts. While teachers expressed positive beliefs about...

Most learners experience the teaching of reading in the classroom in the form of intensive reading activities, where learners are provided with support, typically by the teacher, to make sense of texts that are too difficult for the learners to read successfully by themselves. After reading, learners are usually expected to answer a series of compr...

The monolingualism of New Zealand has often been remarked on, but statutory and demographic changes in recent years suggest a shift away from the dominance of the English language. New Zealand now has two official languages, the indigenous Maori language and New Zealand Sign Language, and census data report a decreasing proportion of monolingual En...

Fluent reading is essential for successful comprehension. One dimension of reading fluency is reading rate, or reading speed. Because of the importance of reading fluency, fluency development activities should be incorporated into classroom practice. One activity that meets the fluency development conditions proposed by Nation (2007) is speed readi...

This paper reports on the inclusion of extensive reading in three separate 12-week courses taught by different teachers on an EAP programme at a New Zealand university. The inclusion of extensive reading was experimental and sought answers to two questions: would students respond positively to the extensive reading component, and how could extensiv...

  This paper considers the factors that may incline a language speaker to use a loanword when an equivalent first language term is already available. The paper begins by drawing evidence from New Zealand English, where words of Maori origin are an increasing presence, to demonstrate that a diachronic shift from English language to Maori language sy...

For more than twenty years the benefits of extensive reading have been proclaimed to the ELT community, but the inclusion of extensive reading in ELT programmes is far from universal. Extensive reading appears to be particularly absent in higher educational and English for Academic Purposes settings. This paper reports on the implementation of an e...

There is a considerable body of work that suggests that the presence of Maori words in New Zealand English has been growing since the 1970s. Some of this work is based on observation and impression (Deverson, 1984, 1991) whereas other evidence comes from empirical studies (Macalister 2006a). The main conclusions are that not only is the total numbe...

This paper reports on the construction of a corpus designed to measure changes in the presence of Maori words in New Zealand English over the 150-year period from 1850 to 2000. It begins with a brief introduction to the variety, describes issues identified prior to the commencement of the corpus's construction, and discusses ways in which those iss...

The presence of words of Maori origin in contemporary New Zealand English is regularly commented upon both by linguists and in the popular press. Such commentary is, however, generally based on intuition and observation rather than empirical analysis. This paper begins with a review of published comment from the late nineteenth century to the prese...

In an earlier article (Macalister, 1999),I discussed some of the changes in the presence of words of Maori origin in the New Zealand English lexicon from the 1960s to the 1990s. That discussion was grounded in a corpus-based study of the SchoolJournalsl. The analysis revealed both established and changing patterns of use. The use of Maori proper no...