Vol. 1 No. 1 (2021): Januari 2021

Dear readers.

Welcome to the first volume of English Language and Education Spectrum (ELECTRUM), an academic journal of language education and applied linguistics. This journal is published by the English Education Department (EED) of Universitas Nasional Karangturi (UNKARTUR) located in Semarang, Indonesia.

Universitas Nasional Karangturi is a new university founded in 2017 and the EED is also a new department starting its operation in 2018 under the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education. The university vision is to become a crucible for outstanding entrepreneurship. To that end, the EED strives to develop English education programmes oriented towards the work place. Therefore, ELECTRUM welcomes any articles that do not only address topics in English education, but also those applied linguistic topics addressing language use in various registers and contexts in this multimodal and modern era of communication.

As a start, we have tried to do some research portraying the initial language competence of our new students in order to obtain useful information regarding their English profile so that the EED can take the necessary steps in developing the curriculum, syllabus, teaching materials and other resources. In this volume, we present five research articles addressing language knowledge and skills. Barans Irawan Palangan has managed to systematically describe our freshmen’s linguistic competence; Allvian Ika Fitri Susanto writes about the learners’ listening skills; Daud Jiwandono, reports on the fresmen’s speaking skills; Afi Normawati addresses the students’ reading skills whereas Aziza Restu Febrianto investigates the students’ writing skills.

Some other topics have been listed in our research agenda and, in the future, we would like to invite articles from colleagues working in the same field to submit papers that fit into certain themes. We will try our best to send call for papers/articles through different media to keep you posted.

We do hope that ELECTRUM will be a good addition to the list of language journals so that we can contribute to the conversations of the world for the development of language education in Indonesia and beyond.

Best regards,

Helena I. R. Agustien

Editor in chief