Listening as the field of language teaching speaks to itself - 5

Editorial · Hu & Hashim · Ellis · Machida

Reviews of Reviews · 1 · 2 · 3 · 4  ·  Roundup

This is the fifth in a series reading a single issue of JALT Journal, the May 2026 number, for what the field shows about itself when it speaks in its own pages. This article explains how the four reviews of the four book reviews in the journal have been approached.

Approaching Reviews of Reviews

Reviewing books is commonplace, and responding critically to journal articles is also a familiar practice. But I have never seen book reviews read as I am reading them here: not for what they say about the books alone, but for what they reveal about the thinking of the field itself.

I have not read the four books that are being reviewed. Anything I say that sounds evaluative is therefore not a judgement of the books but of what I think the reviews reveal about the field. A great deal is being said through the way the reviewers read these books and report on them.

A few questions guide my reviews of these reviews.

• Is the reviewer drawn unconsciously into the world of the book, or able to stand a little apart from it?
• Are the field's terms as presented in the reviewed book taken as already settled, or does the reviewer stop to ask what they mean?
• Does the reviewer's writing stay inside the vocabulary of the field, or reach beyond it so that a person not steeped in the field can recognise their own experience?
• Does the reviewer identify areas of interest in the book that may also appear, in other forms, elsewhere in education or language teaching, or does the discussion stay sealed in its own corner?
• Which passages do they choose to quote, and what does that choice reveal not only about the field but about the reviewer's way of seeing?
• Does the reviewer appear in the writing as a person, and if so, what is brought forward and what remains held back?
• Does the review gather its observations into a coherent perspective, or set them down as a list?