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.

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).

What is quality in the context of applied linguistic research? Addressing this question is both an intellectual and ethical imperative for the field. Toward that end, I propose a four-part framework for understanding and evaluating study quality: Quality research is (a) methodologically rigorous, (b) transparent, (c) ethical, and (d) of value to society. The bulk of the paper is devoted to describing each of these four elements, first conceptually and then as observed in the field. I also articulate some of the many connections among the four elements within the framework. In addition, I suggest next steps for further addressing the notion of quality in terms of the framework itself as well as the ways it might be used to advance our field’s research, training, and legitimacy as an academic discipline that is still in some ways coming of age.

Reading text is a relatively recent human activity, only having been around for about 5,000 years. Through text, writers are able to communicate with others at great distances. Readers are able to perceive arbitrarily determined shapes presented against some background and then form them into meaning. As the reader becomes more proficient at reading and uses reading in more and different ways, this process of interpreting letters and words becomes increasingly automatic.

In 1992, the author of this paper was invited to New Zealand to work within the Ministry of Education on the development of a New Zealand National Languages Policy. Prior to the arrival of the author, Waite (1992a) had prepared a comprehensive document laying out the language issues in New Zealand (see also Peddie 1991). A search of the documentation available in New Zealand (see, e.g., Kaplan 1981, National Language Policy Secretariat 1989) suggests that the notion of a National Languages Policy has been under discussion in New Zealand for more than a quarter of a century. Largely, that discussion has produced a great number of seminars, retreats, symposia, colloquia, and other meetings, and a plethora of reports, most now overtaken by time.

The global demand for English has broad implications for teacher preparation in lingua franca settings. Given that up to 80 percent of all English teachers globally are nonnative speakers of English, the quality of their professional preparation and their degree of language proficiency are key issues. This review surveys research on nonnative English-speaking teachers related to teacher preparation, including issues of pedagogy and language varieties. To illustrate actual training issues, two cases of teacher preparation experiences in Egypt and Uzbekistan are presented. The Egypt case describes the development of standards for English teachers and how they may provide a road map for professional preparation and improved English language skills. The Uzbek case provides examples of ways in which the teacher preparation program targeted needs perceived by both the trainers and the local teachers. This review also sets out goals for teacher preparation in lingua franca settings such as assisting participants to view themselves as intercultural speakers and integrating methodologies that are valued in the local context. Suggestions for future research include consideration of how teacher educators might address the issue of Inner Circle and Outer Circle varieties of English and how teachers' cultural knowledge can be addressed within teacher preparation curricula.

In the past several years the subfield of sociolinguistics known as language and gender has developed a sophistication that could not have been predicted from the research of the early 1970s. While this area of study has evolved along many of the same lines as other branches of sociolinguistics, the lessons of language and gender research have informed the wider field by producing an awareness of the subtlety of such categories as sex and gender (along with class and ethnicity); it has forced a reevaluation of these categories, once assumed to correlate in a straightforward fashion with language variation.

In this brief article, I discuss the relationship between language testing and the other sub-disciplines of applied linguistics and also the relationship, as I see it, between testing and assessment. The article starts with a brief exploration of the term ‘applied linguistics’ and then goes on to discuss the role of language testing within this discipline, the relationship between testing and teaching, and the relationship between testing and assessment. The second part of the article mentions some areas of current concern to testers and discusses in more detail recent advances in the areas of performance testing, alternative assessment, and computer assessment. One of my aims in this article is to argue that the skills involved in language testing are necessary not only for those constructing all kinds of language proficiency assessments, but also for those other applied linguists who use tests or other elicitation techniques to help them gather language data for research.

Politics and legislation have been entangled in language planning and policy in the United States since 1776. Regulations for immigration and citizenship (naturalization) have been in place since the Naturalization Act of 1790. This article examines the history of immigration and citizenship legislation that started with this act up to the more recent act of 1952, which included regulations requiring ability in English language and knowledge of history and government. It concludes with brief examinations of the old and redesigned Naturalization Tests.

With just the two words of the title “Teaching writing,” we are thrown into ambiguity characteristic of the enterprise the title names. Is that second word a participle, referring to the activity of generating, composing, and revising ideas on paper, or is it a more static gerund noun form—writing as an artifact, as text presented on a page, performing social functions? The position we take with regard to the multiple realities encompassed in this dichotomy and in others in our field gives shape to our teaching. And that shape is changing.

This paper explores the roles of both working memory (WM) and more traditional aptitude components, such as input processing and language analytic ability in the context of foreign language learning aptitude. More specifically, the paper compares two current perspectives on language aptitude: the Stages Approach (Skehan, 2016, 2019) and the P/E Model (Wen, 2016, 2019). Input processing and noticing, pattern identification and complexification, and feedback are examined as they relate to both perspectives and are then used to discuss existing aptitude testing, recent research, and broader theoretical issues. It is argued that WM and language aptitude play different but complementary roles at each of these stages, reflecting the various linguistic and psycholinguistic processes that are most prominent in other aspects of language learning. Overall, though both perspectives posit that WM and language aptitude have equal importance at the input processing stage, they exert greater influence at each of the remaining stages. More traditional views of aptitude dominate at the pattern identification and complexification stage and WM with the feedback stage.

The past decade has seen increasing acceptance of the perspective that there can be no disinterested, objective, and value-free definition of literacy: The way literacy is viewed and taught is always and inevitably ideological. All theories of literacy and all literacy pedagogies are framed in systems of values and beliefs which imply particular views of the social order and use literacy to position people socially. Even those views which paint literacy as a neutral, objectively definable set of skills are in fact rooted in a particular ideological perspective, and it is precisely because they obscure this orientation that they are most insidious. In fact, as Fairclough (1989) argues, one of the primary mechanisms of social control is the “naturalization” of institutional practices which legitimize and perpetuate existing power relations.

Formative assessment, particularly in the current form known as Assessment for Learning (AfL), has caught the attention of policymakers in many education jurisdictions. Diverse educational systems such as Hong Kong and Western Canada have publicly endorsed the principles and practice of AfL. In the United Kingdom, progressive devolution of state power from London has meant that Scotland and Wales now have national autonomy in education matters. In a dramatic reversal of policy, both of these “home” countries have in the past four years dismantled the heavily test-oriented schooling regime. Instead both the Welsh and Scottish administrations have adopted assessment policies that prioritize learning. This article discusses (1) the political and ideological trajectories that have supported the emergence of the for-learning assessment policies and (2) the fit (or lack of) between AfL principles and the prevailing espoused educational values in these two nations. The potential impact of these developments for assessment of English as an additional/second language (EAL) in schooling education will be discussed.

Some of the ways in which the range of discourse characteristics in Somali was extended due to the addition of written registers in 1973 have been examined. These discourse characteristics were operationalized by five major dimensions of variation in which each dimension represents a set of co-occurring linguistic features. With respect to three of these dimensions, the addition of written registers greatly extended the linguistic patterns previously in use: structural elaboration features along Dimension 1, lexical elaboration features along Dimension 2, and directive interaction features along Dimension 5.

Only relatively recently has discourse analysis begun to have an impact on how English grammer (i.e., the rules of morphology and syntax) is taught to non-native speakers of English. In fact, a majority of teachers of English to speakers of other languages still conceive of grammer, and thus teach grammer, as a sentence-level phenomenon (if and when they teach it). This state-of-affairs reflects a rather counterproductive view of grammer since, as Bolinger (1968; 1977) has long argued, there are relatively few rules of English grammer that are completely context-free.

The goal of this article is to introduce the reader to contemporary adult multilingual acquisition research within generative linguistics. In much the same way as monolingual and bilingual acquisition studies are approached within this paradigm, generative multilingual research focuses primarily on the psycholinguistic and cognitive aspects of the acquisition process. Herein, we critically present a panoramic view of the research questions and empirical work that have dominated this nascent field, taking the reader through several interrelated epistemological discussions that are at the vanguard of contemporary multilingual morphosyntax work. We finish this article with some thoughts looking towards the near future of adult multilingual acquisition studies.

When an anonymous speech sample is associated with a criminal matter, for example in the case of a phoned-in bomb threat or ransom demand, forensic linguistic profiling may be used to infer attributes of the speaker from his or her linguistic characteristics. In this review, we present research and case examples outlining what types of speaker characteristics are discoverable via speaker profiling by expert linguists, for example, gender, age, and region of socialization. We also consider different methods in speaker profiling, including aural-perceptual, acoustic phonetic, and automated, and briefly discuss expert versus nonexpert speaker profiling, as well as the proper role of linguistic profilers versus law enforcement and legal professionals, government agencies, and others with whom forensic linguists work. Finally, we address the problem of voice and dialect disguise, including what types of disguises criminals may effect and what methods can be used to unmask them, including human and automated. We illustrate our points by alluding, throughout the review, to various elements of a case in which we recently served as expert linguistic profilers.

A great deal has happened in the study and understanding of multilingualism in England since it was last considered in ARAL (Reid 1985). To examine these changes, this review will concentrate on the dynamic and contested relationships among 1) educational policy, 2) academic discourse, and 3) everyday sociolinguistic practice. Our account is limited to England and to its newer heritage languages; due to limitations of space, it also does not provide any detailed discussion of particular languages. For fuller sociolinguistic discussion of thirty one of these, we refer the reader to Alladina and Edwards (1991), a major step forwards in the documentation of linguistic diversity in the British Isles which provides an idea of the wide but uneven spread of multilingualism across a range of institutional sites (including, for example, press and broadcasting as well as education).

This paper will review the role of data mining in research on second language learning. Following a general introduction to the topic, three areas of data mining research will be summarized—clustering techniques, text-mining, and social network analysis—with examples from both the broader field and studies conducted by the authors. The application of data mining in second language learning research is relatively new, and more theoretical and empirical support is needed in the appropriate collection, use, and interpretation of data for specific research and pedagogical objectives. The three examples that we introduce illustrate how new data sources accessible in online environments can be analyzed to better understand the optimal instructional context for corpus-based vocabulary learning (clustering technique), characteristics and patterns of collaborative written interaction using Google Docs (text mining and visualizations), and issues of access and community in computer-mediated discussion (social network analysis). Implications of these new techniques for L2 research will be discussed.

Technology continues to move forward with smaller and faster hardware, more efficient software, multimedia capabilities, and universal reach through advanced telecommunications. Evidence for the successful use of technology in education is overwhelming (Kulik 1994, Snow and Mandinach 1991) given that there are reasoned use of that technology—uses that reflect an understanding of what is to be taught and tested. With the above in mind, this paper reviews current and developing technology uses that are relevant to language assessment and discusses examples of recent liguistic applications from our own laboratory at Educational Testing Service. Below, we describe the processes of language test development and the functions that they serve from the perspective of a large testing organization. We encourage readers to think of technology broadly, to include not only hardware, software, and telecommunications, but other technologies as well, such as job analysis, Item Response Theory (IRT) scaling, standards-setting, and group assessments. Only in this way can the broad activities of language testing, and the relevance of new technologies, be assessed.