Language learning is a complex set of processes that largely take place in the learner's head. The extent to which learners consciously focus on specific aspects of language, the degree to which they notice particular features of language, and how this is done has been the object of considerable debate in different theoretical approaches to second language acquisition. For researchers in second language acquisition, one dilemma is how to find out what learners notice, and how, if at all, they incorporate this into their developing linguistic knowledge. Here, I discuss three approaches to researching learner cognitive processes that can be used to identify the knowledge that learners have about their second language, and obtain some insights into the cognitive processes of learners. These approaches have the potential to contribute to our understanding of how learners learn a second language, and, therefore, how this task may be facilitated. The first approach attempts to tap directly into the learner's thought through the use of think-aloud protocols, whereas the second involves having learners engage with activities that encourage them to talk aloud, thus providing insights into their thought processes. The third approach uses planning effects on task performance to investigate how learners monitor their language.

The institutionalized, or conventionalized, properties of human language, somewhat neglected as objects of study in contermporary linguistics, have lately been looked upon with renewed interest. Tannen (1987), for example, synthesizing earlier work by Bakhtin (1981), Becker (1979), and Boliner (1976), has argued for a view of discourse as relatively prepatterned across linguistic domains. Similarly, the notion of “emergent grammer” (i.e., of grammer as “set of …recurrent partials, whose status is constantly being renegotiated in speech”; Hopper 1988:118) has been advanced in opposition to more widely-accepted models of grammatical knowledge. Recent research of this type, as well as a number of older studies, indicates a serious interest among certain linguists in formulating a theoretical basis for the study of conventionalized language.

As the world continues to experience the recent wave of racial reckoning and its associated backlash, the field of applied linguistics has been called upon to renew efforts through which language functions as an avenue for redemption and restoration of humanity and of the world. Acknowledging the role of racialization in the language-related challenges faced nationally and globally has spurred on a wave of examinations that extend beyond a focus on the intellect and that increasingly allow for a simultaneous grappling with what it means to advance language solutions that equally center human sensitivity and the body. Among such acknowledgments have been the effects of racism on language use by immigrants, including immigrants of color, many of whom are often introduced into the U.S. as “languageless.” We operate now on the verge of an imminent global metaverse within which the world will soon largely exist, provoking questions about the degree to which language, and racialized language, will continue to function as the primary mechanism for operating in a future world order. Given this impetus, I draw from the Black immigrant experience in the United States in this brief essay to demonstrate why the future of applied linguistics in a global metaverse must be concerned with “transraciolinguistic justice” that: (1) creates opportunities beyond racialized [language] as a function of the imminent global metaverse; (2) disrupts the racialization of [language] for relegating citizenship based on national norms as a function of civic engagement; and (3) dismantles racialized [language] and borders that hold up the exclusion of “foreignness” to transform the relational experience. The impending reality of a global metaverse that lays flat distinctions among migrants while also introducing a plethora of spaces where racialized language further functions as subtext in a nonmaterial world calls for a (re)thinking of what it will mean to instruct, assess, plan for, and preserve [languages] in a soon to be, predominantly, virtual global existence. Civic and legal engagement in a global metaverse that can potentially transcend racialized language allows for the disruption of perceptions that advocate a lack of connectivity of diverse human publics across national and global borders. Relational healing through a focus on transraciolinguistic justice in a global metaverse represents an opportunity to restore the brokenness of the oppressed and cultivate opportunities for building bridges across diverse realities, critical to the abandonment of centuries of, and the introduction of, an era of peace. To the degree that the field of applied linguistics is prepared to engage transraciolinguistic justice, will determine, in large part, the extent to which it adjusts to a largely virtual world.

This article provides a comprehensive and critical synthesis of the methods utilized in studies investigating the role of language aptitude in second language acquisition (SLA). The synthesis is informed by sixty-five studies generated by a thorough search of the literature, three meta-analyses (Li, 2015, 2016, 2017), and a thematic issue of Studies in Second Language Acquisition (Li & DeKeyser, in press). The synthesis starts by identifying three categories of research investigating the role of aptitude in naturalistic learning, aptitude's associations with instructed learning, and the nature of aptitude pertaining to whether it increases with age and learning experience and how it is connected to other individual difference variables. The synthesis then presents an overview and critique of major measures of aptitude and discusses the construct validity of aptitude measures based on the principles of psychometric assessments. Specifically, the measures are scrutinized along the dimensions of reliability, content validity, divergent/convergent validity, and predictive validity. The content and measurement of implicit aptitude—a newly emerged construct in SLA—are highlighted. The synthesis proceeds to summarize and vet the measures of the outcome variable of aptitude research—L2 proficiency. Throughout the synthesis, methodological features are summarized, issues are identified, and remedies are proposed.

Although schools have long been recognized as primary sites for creating citizens of the modern nation-state, in recent years traditional assimilationist and exclusionist notions of national identity have been challenged by competing values of multiculturalism, hybridity, and transnationalism. This article surveys recent language socialization research that has examined classrooms as sites for socializing novices into political identities associated with membership in a national or transnational community. It explores five broad themes: (a) socialization into the national language, (b) socialization of immigrants, (c) socialization into new forms of national identity, (d) socialization of minority political identities within nation-states, and (e) socialization and transnational identities. The survey concludes with a review of the contributions of a language socialization approach to the study of these issues as well as suggested directions for future research.

This article reviews recent ethnographic studies on how children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) use language in their everyday lives: how they are socialized into sociocultural competence, how they participate in the social world as members of families and communities, how they draw on structural properties of social interaction to participate in everyday talk, and to what extent the European American habitus of child-directed communication supports or hinders their communicative development. Other studies reviewed in this article examine language use in autism in relation to narrative, question–answer sequences, bilingualism, accountability and morality, and politeness. The studies frame autism more ethno-methodologically than clinically and capture how children with ASD actively participate in the co-construction of their life worlds through communication with others. This perspective makes visible aspects of language use and everyday experiences of children with ASD and their families that are usually obscured in other theoretical approaches to autism. Through participant observation and extensive naturalistic data collection involving video and audio recording of everyday interaction, ethnographic studies reviewed in this article shed light on patterns of language use and link these patterns to particular cultural practices, making language of children with autism more intelligible and interpretable.

In this chapter we present a brief overview of the literature on interpreting focused specifically on issues and questions raised by this literature about the nature of bilingualism in general. It is our position that research carried out on interpreting—while primarily produced with a professional audience in mind and concerned with improving the practice of interpreting—provides valuable insights about complex aspects of language contact that have not been thoroughly addressed by the existing literature on bilingualism. Examination of the literature emphasizing a category of bilinguals, who have been referred to as “true” bilinguals (Thiery, 1978a, b), provides perspectives on both individual and societal bilingualism that can complement, and possibly refocus, some current views of the linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic characteristics of language contact. For applied linguists who study language minority populations around the world, the literature on interpreting suggests important new directions for research focusing on areas such as the process of high level development of two languages in diglossic contexts; the effects of instruction on the development of nonsocietal languages; the nature of language transfer; and the characteristics of communication between speakers of societal and nonsocietal languages.

Israel's geographical position as a land bridge connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, its resulting long history of conquest and reconquest, and its status as the point of focus of four major world religions (the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, and significant to Islam and Baha'i), all assure it a long tradition of complex and ever-changing multilingualism. By the beginning of the Common Era two thousand years ago, a pattern of triglossia had emerged, with Hebrew, Judeo-Aramaic, and Greek all playing meaningful roles (Spolsky 1983). This model of language organization became the norm for the Jewish people during most of their dispersion, with separate defined functions for three languages. Hebrew (actually Hebrew and Talmudic Aramaic) was used for religious and literacy purposes; a Jewish language like Yiddish, Judeo-French, Ladino, or Judeo-Arabic was used for most other community and home functions (Rabin 1981); and one or more “co-territorial vernaculars” was used for communication with non-Jews (Weinreich 1980).

While the United States has never declared a national official language, the primacy of English in public affairs has been well-established since the time of the earliest colonies (Crawford 1992a, Ruiz 1988). This is so in spite of the reluctance on the part of the British colonial authorities and, later, leaders of the early republic, to legislate matters of language—considered traditionally one of the most fundamental freedoms of civilized societies (Heath 1992). English even at that time was considered a language of political, economic, and social power and prestige; its preeminence in the United States, as elsewhere, has been reinforced in recent times by its establishment as a language of technology.

This chapter surveys recent work on the linguistic construction of national identity in the Middle East, against the backdrop of political conflicts of different intensities. It does so by discussing the language situation in Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan in so far as these situations involve conflict between Arabic and other languages (French and Hebrew), Arabic and one of its dialectal variants, or different Arabic dialects. The chapter shows the dynamic nature of linguistic identity construction and the variety of modes this construction takes. It highlights the significance of linguistic subtraction as a marker of identity, the relevance of power differentials to language maintenance, and language shift as tropes of identity construction and shows that linguistic boundary setting is as much related to structural forces in society as it is to specific political conflicts that speed up the progress of these forces and their inevitable outcomes.The author wishes to thank the Leverhulme Trust for their Major Research Fellowship which has enabled him to conduct this research.

In recent years, digital technologies have expanded the possibilities for human interactions in ways that were never before imagined, further complicating the teaching and learning of languages (Taguchi & Sykes, 2013; Thorne, Sauro, & Smith, 2015). Despite this complexity, when approached as meaningful, high-stakes practices, discourses in digital contexts can be highly useful for language learning and teaching. This article synthesizes work related to two digital discourse contexts, specifically hashtags and digital games. Moving away from technology as the vehicle to deliver “important content,” the analysis to follow examines digital discourses as both the content and context to be examined as part of learners’ multilingual experiences. The article begins by situating the discussion focused on digital discourses, reviewing relevant work addressing interactional patterns in each context, and then applying findings to second language teaching and learning. Drawing on empirical work, the article then describes a framework with specific examples for learner exploration of digital discourses as part of their language learning experience. The article concludes with implications for future research and teaching.

The article addresses the intersection of policy, validity, and impact within the context of educational reform in U.S. schools, looking in particular at the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (2001). The discussion makes a case that it is important to reconsider the established views regarding the responsibility of test developers and users in investigating impact given the conflated roles of developers and users under NCLB. The article also introduces the concept of social impact analysis (SIA) to argue for an expansion of the traditional conceptualization of impact research. SIA promotes a proactive rather than a reactive approach to impact, in order to inform policy formulation upfront.

This paper begins by discussing new trends in the use of neurostimulation techniques in cognitive science and learning research, as well as the nascent research on their application in second language learning. To illustrate this, an experiment designed to investigate the impact of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS), which is delivered via earbuds, on how learners process and learn Mandarin tones is reported. Pupillometry, which is an index of cognitive effort, is explained and illustrated as one way to assess the impact of tVNS. Participants in the study were native English speakers, naïve to tone languages, pseudorandomly assigned to active or control conditions, while balancing for nonlinguistic pitch ability and musical experience. Their performance after tVNS was assessed using a range of more traditional language outcome measures, including accuracy and reaction times from lexical recognition and recall tasks and was triangulated with pupillometry during word-learning to help understand the mechanism through which tVNS operates. Findings are discussed in light of the literatures on lexical tone learning, cognitive effort, and neurostimulation, including specific benefits for learners of tone languages. Recommendations are made for future work on the increasingly popular area of neurostimulation for the field of applied linguistics in the 40th anniversary issue of ARAL.

Following the trends established in psychology and emerging in L2 research, we explain our support for an Open Science approach in this paper (i.e., developing, analyzing and sharing datasets) as a way to answer controversial and complex questions in applied linguistics. We illustrate this with a focus on a frequently debated question, what underlies individual differences in the dynamic system of post-pubertal L2 speech learning? We provide a detailed description of our dataset which consists of spontaneous speech samples, elicited from 110 late L2 speakers in the UK with diverse linguistic, experiential and sociopsychological backgrounds, rated by ten L1 English listeners for comprehensibility and nativelikeness. We explain how we examined the source of individual differences by linking different levels of L2 speech performance to a range of learner-extrinsic and intrinsic variables related to first language backgrounds, age, experience, motivation, awareness, and attitudes using a series of factor and Bayesian mixed-effects ordinal regression analyses. We conclude with a range of suggestions for the fields of applied linguistics and SLA, including the use of Bayesian methods in analyzing multivariate, multifactorial data of this kind, and advocating for publicly available datasets. In keeping with recommendations for increasing openness of the field, we invite readers to rethink and redo our analyses and interpretations from multiple angles by making our dataset and coding publicly available as part of our 40th anniversary ARAL article.

This chapter describes recent research into the assessment of school-age language learners in both second language and foreign language situations. The review is organized under five areas of research endeavor: the standards movement and its impact on second language learners in schools; large-scale content-based assessment and ways to counteract its negative impact on second language learners; investigations of academic language proficiency; explorations of classroom assessment; and young learner assessment. These areas of research are interrelated but sufficiently distinct to be addressed under separate headings. References to current research from various countries around the world are included, and suggested directions for further research are given.

The provision of corrective feedback during oral interaction has been deemed an essential element for successful second language acquisition (Gass & Mackey, 2015a). However, corrective feedback—especially corrective feedback provided by peer interlocutors—remains understudied in naturalistic settings. The present mixed methods study aimed to identify the target and type of corrective feedback provided by both native-speaker and peer interlocutors during conversation groups while abroad. U.S. study abroad students (N = 19) recorded group conversations with native speakers (N = 10) at the beginning, middle, and end of a 6-week stay in Barcelona, Spain. Results indicate a significant decrease in the provision of corrective feedback by both native speakers and peer learners over the course of the program. Qualitative analyses revealed that both learners and natives alike engage in negotiations for meaning throughout the program, which for learners resulted in successful recall on tailor-made quizzes. The use of the first language by both the study abroad students and the native speakers promoted these opportunities in some instances. Results are discussed in terms of their contribution to the study abroad literature as well as to research into the effects of feedback on second language development.

Charity Hudley and Flores give you the real about the papers in this volume and share their direct vision for how to take this work forward in theory and practice. They shout out the leadership of emerging scholars as key to dreaming a world and a role for applied linguistics in the ongoing struggle for justice and liberation throughout the whole world. They lift up the volumes as the start of a new model of justice in scholarly publishing in applied linguistics and linguistics, where the conversations between emerging and more established scholars are more regularly integrated into our scholarly output. In doing so, the flavor that emerging scholars are adding to our understanding of language in various applied contexts will more quickly become part of the educational policy and practice that we legit need everywhere all the time.

In 1978 Merrill Swain and I had the opportunity to review theory and practice in the emerging communicative orientaitons to second language teaching and testing. The immediate outcomes of that review were published by the Ontario Ministry of Education in the form of a theoretical position paper (Canale and Swain 1979; see also Canale and Swain 1980) and a bank of sample items and techniques for measuring communication skills in French as a second language (Ontario Ministry of Education 1980). Although the limitations and problems in various communicative approaches have become increasingly evident since 1978, communicative competence has nonetheless become one of the most productive, influential, and complex paradigms in applied linguistics. Nowhere is this more true than in the relatively isolated area of measurement of communicative competence. It is thus appropriate to review activity in this area over the past decade.

This article presents original empirical research carried out in the early total Mandarin language immersion context. The study involves K–5 learners from three early total Mandarin immersion programs whose home language is English. We examined students’ second language (L2) oral proficiency in Mandarin in two ways: (a) a statistical comparative analysis of cross-sectional assessment data for kindergarten, Grade 2, and Grade 5 students and (b) a detailed linguistic complexity analysis comparing immersion students’ speech samples (one per grade level) produced during the assessment interview. Results indicate significant differences in median scores between kindergarten and Grade 2 in all domains; however, no median score differences were found between Grades 2 and 5. An exploratory complexity analysis of three speech samples revealed increasingly higher levels of grammatical complexity across grades. Measures of lexical complexity for the Grade 5 sample, while higher than those in kindergarten, were lower than those of Grade 2. Study findings question the efficacy of existing proficiency assessments at capturing the multidimensionality of oral proficiency in the intermediate and pre-advanced range. They also highlight the important role finely grained complexity measures can play in informing curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices.

Although estimates of the number of language minority students in U.S. schools vary, there is consensus that the numbers are increasing dramatically. In 1980, there were 24 million language minority individuals living in the United States, including nearly 8 million school-age children and 2.6 million children under age five, one or both of whose parents spoke a language other than English at home (Waggoner 1992). Of the school age children, an estimated 3–5 million had limited English proficiency. Between 1980 and 1990, according to the U.S. Census, the Asian-American population more than doubled and the Hispanic-American population increased by more than 50 percent. Many major metro-politan school districts report a student population speaking more than 60 or 70 different languages, and in one of these, Los Angeles, more than 50 percent of the school age population is language minority.