Bilingualism is a complex life experience. Second language (L2) learning and bilingualism take place in many different contexts. To develop a comprehensive account of dual-language experience requires research that examines individuals who are learning and using two languages in both the first language (L1) and second language (L2) environments. In this article, we review studies that exploit the presence of an international research network on bilingualism to investigate the role of the environment and some the unique characteristics of L2 learning and bilingual language usage in different locations. We ask how the context of learning affects the acquisition of the L2 and the ability to control the use of each language, how language processing is changed by the patterns of language usage in different places (e.g., whether bilinguals have been immersed in the L2 environment for an extended period of time or whether they code-switch), and how the bilingualism of the community itself influences learning and language use.

Compared to research on language acquisition, research on the maintenance and loss of language skills is a relatively recent development. There is, of course, a longstanding sociolinguistic tradition of research on language shift, but work in the field of attrition really started in the US in the late 1970s (Lambert and Freed 1982). Since then, research on language attrition has grown rapidly in different countries, as is witnessed by special issues devoted to the topic in the journals Applied Psycholinguistics in 1986, ITL-Review of Applied Linguistics in 1989 and Studies in Second Language Acquisition in 1989, as well as by three recent volumes: Weltens, de Bot and van Els (1986), Weltens (1989), and Seliger and Vago (1991).

The majority of empirical studies that have so far investigated task features in order to inform task grading and sequencing decisions have been grounded in hypothesis-testing research. Few studies have attempted to adopt a bottom-up approach in order to explore what task factors might contribute to task difficulty. The aim of this study was to help fill this gap by eliciting teachers’ perspectives on sources of task difficulty. We asked 16 English as a second language (ESL) teachers to judge the linguistic ability required to carry out four pedagogic tasks and consider how they would manipulate the tasks to suit the abilities of learners at lower and higher proficiency. While contemplating the tasks, the teachers thought aloud, and we also tracked their eye movements. The majority of teachers’ think-aloud comments revealed that they were primarily concerned with linguistic factors when assessing task difficulty. Conceptual demands were most frequently proposed as a way to increase task difficulty, whereas both linguistic and conceptual factors were suggested by teachers when considering modifications to decrease task difficulty. The eye-movement data, overall, were aligned with the teachers’ think-aloud comments. These findings are discussed with respect to existing task taxonomies and future research directions.

This review focuses on the nature of language recovery in bilingual individuals poststroke and on the effectiveness of treatment. I consider neuropsychological and neuroimaging articles on bilingual aphasic individuals in the period 2003–2007. I examine the extent to which current evidence supports the notion that different languages are represented in distinct processing areas or are distributed in shared areas with common organizing principles. I argue for the second possibility with the extent of recovery affected by prior proficiency and current usage. I also argue that certain patterns of deficit indicate a problem in controlling the language in use rather than a representational deficit per se. Most studies concern chronic aphasic patients, and detailed studies of the effects of treatment and any plastic changes in response to such treatment remain sparse. I conclude with suggestions to further the understanding of recovery and treatment. To advance further, we need to understand the range of pathways in normal bilinguals that support a given language task, so that neural patterns associated with task performance poststroke can be properly interpreted. Imaging regional changes in blood flow immediately poststroke can help identify the regions and pathways associated with the recovery of function. Functional imaging studies of recovery and treatment in the chronic stage are also critical.

This article provides an overview of the ways in which concurrent verbal reports, sometimes referred to as think-alouds, have been used in cognitivist second language acquisition (SLA) research. It addresses two issues related to the validity of verbal reports—reactivity and veridicality—and reviews studies that have examined the validity of verbal reports in SLA. On the basis of the results of a meta-analysis of studies comparing the performance of silent and think-aloud groups (Bowles, 2010), this article concludes with suggestions for further research into the issue of validity and recommendations for the careful use of think-alouds in research.

This article starts from the assumption that education is a process of “people shaping” designed to help learners extend and perhaps in some ways modify their identity while exploiting and developing their agency. This view is harmonious with the approach to language education that the Council of Europe has developed since the 1970s, and especially with its early commitment to learner autonomy and self-assessment. The approach adopted by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (CEFR) to the description of language proficiency clearly implicates the user-learner's identity and agency, which are also central to the CEFR's companion piece, the European Language Portfolio (ELP), in which self-assessment plays a key role. The article proposes that taken together, the CEFR and the ELP imply an assessment culture in which learning and assessment are reciprocally integrated. From the perspective thus established, the authors review some current trends in language assessment and their potential impact on learner identity and learner agency, focusing in turn on self-assessment, peer assessment, teacher assessment, and large-scale testing and assessment. The article concludes by arguing that although recent developments in language assessment pay significantly more attention to the learner than was previously the case, a great deal of work remains to be done to further increase the engagement of learner agency in processes of self-assessment and peer assessment and to align them with other forms of assessment.

It has long been apparent to scholars that gender exerts an influence on language change. Recently, however, the patterns of gender differentiation attested in empirical studies have been reinterpreted in the light of current social constructionist understandings of gender. Drawing on recent work in variationist sociolinguistics, sociology of language and linguistic anthropology, this chapter focuses on new approaches to explaining gender differentiated patterns of sound change and language shift, the success or failure of planned linguistic reforms, and changes in the social evaluation of gendered speech styles.

This article reviews recent research on the roles of formulaic language in language socialization theory and research from the point of view that formulaic language is a chunk of language (e.g., one word, string of several words) repeatedly used in verbal routines and other contexts. Although the notion of formulaic language is not always explicitly discussed in the literature of language socialization, previous research suggests that formulaic language is indeed an important notion within the theory of language socialization, for it often plays a crucial role in socializing novices to social dimensions such as politeness, hierarchy, and social identities including social roles and statuses, and relationships. This article first provides a brief introduction of language socialization theory, its research methods, and recent developments. It then reviews recent language socialization research on formulaic language in first and second language (L1, L2) and heritage language environments, including how novices are socialized to use formulaic language, how they are socialized through its use, and how they actually use it in normative and novel ways in participating in social interaction with experts and/or peers. Finally, the major findings of recent studies are summarized, and the article concludes by suggesting several directions for further research on formulaic language in language socialization.

Acceptance of the claims made by researchers in any field depends in large part on the appropriateness of the methods used to gather data. In this chapter I focus on two approaches to research in second language acquisition: (a) various types of acceptability judgments or probes aimed at assessing acquisition of syntactic structure; and (b) various types of stimulated recall designed to gather learners' accounts of their own thought processes. Both methods attempt to overcome a principal problem in psycholinguistics: the desire to describe a learner's knowledge about a language based on the incomplete evidence stemming from learner production. Refinements in acceptability judgments have come from some newer multiple-choice or truth-value story tasks that allow researchers to determine the level of learner knowledge about particular syntactic structures (in the examples here, reflexives). Stimulated recall offers some additional perspectives, but its usefulness can be greatly affected by the temporal proximity of the recall to the original task; the amount of support provided to prompt the recall; and the nature and amount of training given to both interviewer and interviewee. While these newer research methods can improve the accuracy and variety of data available to SLA investigators, research methods drawn from L1 acquisition or L1 research cannot necessarily be assumed to be equally valid when used to examine L2 acquisition.

The colonial history of many English language teaching (ELT) contexts has shaped how the concept of language is understood, how language policies are constructed, and how language education is organized. Various aspects of ELT in countries that were colonized continue to promote the imperialism of English (Motha, 2014) through the naming (i.e., labeling of linguistic phenomena as distinct languages, dialects, and language varieties), separation and hierarchization of languages, and the dominance of monolingual policies and practices in the classroom. Translanguaging, a theory and pedagogy that challenges colonial understandings of language and monoglossic norms in language teaching, has the transformative potential to liberate language practices that have been rendered invisible by abyssal thinking in ELT (García et al., 2021). Translanguaging as a theory posits that multilingual learners do not possess two or more autonomous language systems but rather that they select and deploy linguistic features from a unitary linguistic repertoire (Vogel & García, 2017). Translanguaging as a pedagogy urges educators to leverage learners’ entire linguistic and semiotic repertoires to support their learning instead of requiring them to keep certain languages outside the classroom. However, in educational contexts that respond to socially and politically imposed boundaries between languages, there are ideological and systemic challenges to the enactment of translanguaging as a pedagogy. This paper discusses these challenges with reference to the Malaysian language education context and draws on data from a collaborative translanguaging pedagogy designed through teacher-researcher collaboration and implemented in two Malaysian elementary English classrooms to offer recommendations for how ELT can be decolonized.

The purpose of this review is to assess whether recent scholarship on language-literature instruction—the deliberate integration of language development and literary study at all levels of the foreign language curriculum—within the context of U.S. institutions of higher education reflects shifts in thinking regarding the role of literature in foreign language curricula. These shifts have come in response to the 2007 Report of the Modern Language Association Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, which recommended replacing the traditional two-tiered program structure with more coherent curricula that merge language and content, and to the general questioning of communicative language teaching as a viable method for language instruction and adequate preparation for advanced-level work in a foreign language. Current approaches to language-literature instruction and foreign language curriculum design favor multimodal language development that places equal importance on oral and written language and interpretative interaction with literature to construct textual meaning and establish form-meaning connections. This review surveys empirical and classroom practice research on literature in language courses and language in literature courses and concludes with a consideration of larger curricular issues and areas for future research.

French was a prestige lingua franca for centuries. Although it is now declining in this role, the French government and French elites have mounted a campaign to promote and defend French in international settings. This chapter examines three basic misconceptions in the arguments advanced in this campaign: (1) The intrinsic qualities of a language are factors in the promotion of a language as a lingua franca; (2) language policy making at national level can affect language practices in international contexts; and (3) language diversity is served by the promotion of another prestige lingua franca. It concludes with a review of some of the pragmatic decisions taken by French nationals to confront the new linguistic situation.

This article discusses some of the current research on technology in relation to learner autonomy, outlining major findings on the relationship between technology and learner autonomy in formal and informal learning contexts. Extant literature has discussed both teacher-initiated technology-enhanced formal learning environments and learner-constructed self-directed learning experience in informal learning contexts. Although valuable in the insights it provides into how technology aids learner autonomy, the two bodies of literature have largely been independent from each other, which may constrain our understanding.

Second language (SL) speaking has not been recognized as a research area as readily as have reading, writing, or listening. For instance, the 25th anniversary volume of TESOL Quarterly had papers on reading, writing, and listening, but apart from a paper on pronunciation, not a single one on speaking. This may be due to assumptions such as the following: 1) SLA studies in any case focus on oral language production (e.g., the morpheme acquisition studies in the 1970's, the input-interaction studies of the 1980's for which oral interaction was only a way of acquiring new target language items, and the task-based learning studies of the 1990's);

This chapter begins with a careful look at a sample conversation and examines the many layers of interpretation that different academic traditions have constructed in order to interpret it. These layers of interpretation include linguistic forms, nonverbal communication, linguistic context, situational context, and the embodied histories that participants bring to interaction. All are incorporated into a rich definition of discourse. The chapter then reviews recent studies that have compared the discourse of oral interaction in assessment with oral discourse in contexts outside assessment to show how different they are. The next section discusses studies that have related ways of speaking to the cultural values of communities of speakers with a view to understanding the cultural miscommunication that occurs in assessment of speaking in a second language community. The review concludes by stressing the wholeness of face-to-face interaction, listing the layers of interpretation of interaction that have not thus far been considered in oral testing, and setting out a potentially fertile area for future research.

All of the issues dealt with in the preceding sections of this volume clearly carry with them implications for language teaching and call for a reconsideration of the teacher role, the nature of pedagogic competence which such a role requires, and how people might be most effectively prepared to enact it. In the case of national curricula, as discussed in Section 1 of this volume, whatever proposals are made at the macro-level of educational policy depend for their effectiveness on the interpretation by teachers at a micro-level of pedagogic practice and their abilities to carry out the proposals. So whatever is proposed for language education as policy carries clear implications for language teacher education as well. This might seem to be all too self-evident, but it is easy to cite instances where policy decisions have been made and proposals imposed without taking such implications into account.

We review major issues in research on reading, including theories of word reading, cross-writing system comparisons, comprehension, reading difficulties, learning how to read, and cognitive neuroscience studies of reading. Each of these topics has psycholinguistic components that reflect the language foundations of reading. These foundations lie in two facts: (1) a writing system connects to a linguistic system at one or more levels, meaning that word reading is partially a psycholinguistic process; and (2): reading comprehension shares processes (e.g., parsing) with general language comprehension. One trend of recent research is the development of models of word identification that rely on single rather than dual mechanisms and their extension to explain reading difficulties. Another is the conclusion that phonology plays a role in reading that cuts across writing systems. Reading comprehension research continues to reflect two different traditions, sentence parsing and text comprehension. Both show increasing influence of general cognitive explanations, as opposed to strictly linguistic explanations, for comprehension phenomena. Studies of brain activation bring converging evidence on reading processes and provide neuroanatomical correlates of reading problems. In one area, the acquisition and teaching of reading, advances come from increasing consolidation and practical use of previous research gains.

At present, mastery of English for educational and professional purposes contributes significantly to expansion of the role of English as a language of world communication. In this context, the teaching—and, consequently, the assessment—of EFL/ESL writing is receiving more attention than ever before. This chapter argues that, although this renewed interest in the evaluation of writing has resulted in advances in the field of language testing, it has by and large failed to incorporate insights gained from recent developments in text analysis. There is a considerable gap between current practices in writing assessment and criteria suggested by advances in knowledge of discourse structure. We illustrate this gap by contrasting current practices in the scoring of two major EFL/ESL writing tests with knowledge of text characteristics generated from recent developments in text analysis. The review concludes by making the case for bridging the gap and by proposing a model of writing assessment that incorporates both linguistic and discoursal features of texts.

Language testing is concerned with the measurement of language. Language is the trait, and how we go about measuring it is the method. Trait involves the what, and method the how of testing. This paper will focus on the interaction between the what and the how, where the perspective of the what is the domain of discourse analysis. The paper will also review studies and tests that illustrate the degree to which the domain of discourse analysis has contributed to the theory, research, and development of language testing.

This chapter summarizes 16 empirical studies that employ quantitative and/or qualitative discourse analytic techniques published in applied linguistics journals over the last five years. These studies tend to analyze spoken discourse in formal contexts, produced by both adults and children who are native and nonnative speakers of English. Unfortunately, all studies focus only on English discourse, which suggests that analyses of discourse in other languages are clearly needed; moreover, it was extremely difficult to find published discourse analytic studies which employ only quantitative research methods. Although each of these discourse analytic studies presents segments of transcribed discourse, researchers collect data of the type and in the amount prescribed by the analytical tradition employed—those working within the conversation analytic tradition collect, transcribe, analyze, and present only recorded social interaction, while researchers who situate themselves in the ethnography of communication framework collect and present various forms of “triangulated” data to support their conclusions. The chapter concludes by mentioning the problem of evaluative criteria for qualitative research, and by suggesting that applied linguists need to address this issue and articulate some reasonable solutions, so that all published research is, in fact, quality research.