October 2010 Volume 6 Issue 2
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Foreword

Foreword
Prof. Winnie Cheng, Chief Editor

Welcome to the Autumn 2010 issue of The Asian ESP Journal! It is our pleasure to publish six selected papers reporting on the results of a range ESP studies from authors from Iran, China and Taiwan. The studies have examined a wide range of topics. Genres studied include research articles and textbooks for Medical Sciences students. ESP contexts studied include university entrance examinations and web-based instructional environment.

The first paper ‘The status of theme in applied linguistic articles’ by A.R. Jalilifar is a corpus-based study that compares the themes in 16 articles published in a local ELT journal and 16 in an international ELT journal. While similarities are found the in the theme types and thematic progression patterns, significant differences are found in the number and the context of use of different patterns of thematic progression in two sections of the articles: Introduction and Results and Discussion.
  
Chun-Chun Yeh’s ‘Citation practices in TESL research articles: A comparative study’ is also concerned with research writing and corpus-based. It compares citation practices in TESL research articles published in a Taiwanese journal and an international journal, and finds both similarities and differences in the frequencies of citations, the types of citations used, and where in the articles that they tend to be used.

The third paper ‘Authenticity in ESP/EAP selection tests administered at Iranian universities’ by Gholam Reaz Kiani, Reza Ghafar Samar, Ramin Akbari, and Goodarz Alibakhshi is interested in finding out the extent to which Iranian university entrance examinations for MA/MSC and PhD students are authentic in terms of target language use situation tasks and learners’ language needs. The findings of their survey research have important implications for the design of similar tests in other parts of the world.

Also from Iran, ‘The impact of personality traits on the writing performance of Iranian EFL learners’ by Mohammad Mehdi Soleimani and Mahmoud Reza Daryabari describes the relation between the test-taker’s personality type and degree of success at accomplishing writing tasks. The findings, which show that extroverted language learners outperform introverted learners, are different from those of a previous study.

‘Evaluation of SAMT ESP textbooks for the students of medical sciences’ is a contribution from Iran by S.A. Razmjoo and Reza Raissi. Questionnaire surveys for students and instructors were administered to find out their respective views on the Medical Sciences textbooks produced by The Center for Studying and Compiling University Books in Humanities (SMAT) based on six criteria. The study shows no significant difference between students and instructors, who view the textbooks rather negatively in many of the criteria.

The sixth paper is by Zhu Ming entitled ‘A case study of technology integration in an EFL classroom’. Using survey methods, the author finds that students in an EFL classroom are in favour of web-based instructional environment, and perceive benefits in developing their writing skills, communication skills, and learner autonomy, and  in becoming self-dependent responsible learners. The positive results will boost the adoption of web-based learning in China, where this mode of instruction is still quite new.

We hope you will enjoy reading the six papers and find the wide-ranging research findings and pedagogical implications useful for your academic and research pursuits!

Last but not least, we are grateful to a number of fellow colleagues for the generous contribution of their valuable time and effort in the review and proofreading of the six papers. They are the Associate Editors and Editors of the Asian ESP Journal. The proofreaders are:
1. Dr. Stacia Levy, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California, USA
2. Dr. Julia Penelope, USA, Unaffiliated 
3. Dr. Cuijun Hu, Burnaby, Greater Vancouver, Canada 
4. Mae Hurley, Language Analyst, Plain English Foundation, Sydney, Australia  
5. Peyman Ghassemi Pour Sabet, Curtin University 
6. Prof. Samir Diouny, Professor of Linguistics, Département de Langue et Littérature anglaises, Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Université Chouaib Doukkali  
7. Norman Fewell, Associate Professor, Foreign Language Center, University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, Japan