This review focuses on contemporary work in discourse stylistics, defined here as that designated branch of stylistics which draws specifically on the techniques and methods of discourse analysis. The review acknowledges a key assumption in modern discourse stylistic research, namely that the distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘nonliterary’ discourse, if tenable at all, is drawn not on a purely linguistic basis but in terms of multiple intersections among texts, readers, institutions, and sociocultural contexts. In spanning studies of both literary and nonliterary discourse, therefore, the coverage of the present review is intended to reflect this axiom. It also attempts to foreground the diversity of method and approach in contemporary discourse stylistics. Given that the techniques of discourse analysis are themselves many and various, the survey seeks to cover stylistic work that offers productive applications of the many available models in pragmatics, conversation analysis, cognitive linguistics, speech act theory, and discourse psychology. Finally, in covering a selection of important monographs, articles, and book chapters, the review seeks both to highlight some of the critical, cultural, and ideological frameworks currently employed by discourse stylisticians and to demarcate, in more general terms, the current state-of-play in this research tradition.

This article describes the conception, goals, design, and evaluation of a 3-week study abroad program in the Dominican Republic for preservice teachers at New York University to address cultural diversity in teacher education. Taking a critical approach to teacher education and drawing on four interrelated areas of research—second language acquisition, study abroad, culturally responsive pedagogy, and intercultural competence—the program sought to deepen teachers’ understanding of their students’ cultures, develop empathy toward language learning, and promote culturally responsive pedagogy. Program evaluation revealed that participants developed more critical understandings of the Dominican language, culture, and education system, which they could harness to practice culturally responsive pedagogy.

In this paper, I discuss the tension between official monoglossic language ideologies and the heteroglossic classroom realities in higher education in Pakistan. Pakistan has maintained an English as the only medium-of-instruction policy in higher education since independence in 1947, while the everyday classroom practices have been characterized by translanguaging, that is, a hybrid and fluid use of plurilingual resources for communication. Using an autoethnographic lens, I discuss the intuitional processes and discursive practices within which my own experiences with deficit ideologies were shaped as an English language teacher and as I journied into translanguaging. Based on my experiences, I argue that while translanguaging shows great promise to confront monoglossic language ideologies inside the classroom, it offers fewer tools to resist unjust linguistic and social structures.

Complex social activities—such as maintaining a legal system, fostering a literary system, or developing communally validated knowledge—rely on language as the medium through which these activities are accomplished. Law, literature, science, religion, politics, and even economics are socially constructed through discourse. Special language tools and uses have developed in conjuction with the rise of these activities. Thus, we may well say that the construction of legal language is part and parcel of the construction of the legal instructions that order social lives, and that the language acts using legal language were developed in coordination with the elaboration of roles, responsibilities, and relationships of legal actors.

This article surveys recent English-language research on language policy and education in the 15 countries that are now two decades removed from Soviet hegemony. I examine how researchers employ geometric concepts such as asymmetry, parallelism, and trajectories to analyze multilingualism in this region. I then discuss the spatial turn in post-Soviet scholarship on language policy and schooling through attention to the ways language is produced in and through place, the management and experience of language in particular places, and the production of place through language and schooling. In conclusion, I argue that states have inherited schools with a Soviet-era commitment to multilingualism, but have been challenged to transform them into new types of post-Soviet plurilingual institutions—ones that generally promote the titular language, create space for instruction in minority languages, and educate in a foreign language. Evidence from these countries also speaks powerfully to the ways teachers, students, and parents use school space in dynamic ways to negotiate community boundaries and cultivate particular national identities through deliberate language practice.

I am personally delighted to have an opportunity to contribute ‘Concluding Thoughts’ to this volume, prepared as it is at the juncture of millennia, since it provides a similar opportunity for reflection and prediction, and since for one reason or another I have been an active participant in, and observer of, developments in the field of applied linguistics for more than three decades. Indeed my own career path reflects clearly the permeability of traditional departmental or disciplinary boundaries that has at once contributed to the sense of excitement and potential in the field and simultaneously to its lack of rootedness (e.g., I have at various times held academic appointments in departments of psychology, linguistics, and modern languages as well as worked for a private philanthropic foundation and a mission-oriented non-profit organization).

This chapter presents a survey of recent developments in teaching Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) in North Africa and discusses current issues and future challenges. It devotes more space to ESP in this francophone environment given the greater demand for English, as opposed to other languages, and the more abundant ESP activity in terms of practice, research, and publications.

The Soviet Union was a country with one of the most complex language situations in the world. Over one hundred nationalities were listed in its last 1989 census, ranging in size from 145 million Russians (50.8 percent of the population) to the ‘26 Peoples of the North’ who together numbered only 184,448. For most of these nationalities, the majority claimed that their national language was their mother tongue. However, knowledge of Russian as first or second language was claimed by about 62 percent of the non-Russians. Only 4.2 percent of the Russians reported fluency in one of the national languages, though among the Russians living outside the Russian Federation, bilingualism was about 19 percent (Anderson and Silver 1990, Arutiunian, et al. 1992, Goskomstat 1991, Haarmann 1992).

Most aspects of human life—from gene expression, to brain structure/function, to underlying linguistic and cognitive processes, through to overt language production and comprehension behaviors—are the result of dynamic developmental processes, in which timing plays a crucial role. So, the study of language acquisition in developmental disorders such as Williams syndrome (WS) needs to change from the still widely held view that developmental disorders can be accounted for in terms of spared versus impaired modules to one that takes serious account of the fact that the infant cortex passes from an initial state of high regional interconnectivity to a subsequent state of progressively increasing specialization and localization of functional brain networks. With such early interconnectivity in mind, developmental neuroscientists must explore the possibility that a small perturbation in low-level processes in one part of the brain very early in development can result in serious deficits in higher-level processes in another part of the brain later in development. Therefore, in profiling developmental disorders of language such as in WS, it is vital to start in early infancy, from which to trace the full trajectory of the interactions of language and other cognitive processes across infancy, toddlerhood, and childhood, through to adolescence and adulthood.

The role that input plays in second language learning and the interactions between learners and other speakers of the language which provide some of that input are two of the most discussed topics in the contemporary field of second language acquisition [SLA]. Several surveys of the considerable body of literature on input and interaction have appeared recent books on SLA (Hatch 1983a ch. 9, Ellis 1985a ch. 6, Young and Doughty 1987, Chaudron 1988 chs. 3–5) and two collections of papers on input and interaction research have been published (Gass and Madden 1985, Day 1986). This essay will outline the main issues which have emerged form this scholarship and comment on some of the more important theroretical and empirical papers.

An advantage of Namibia's late attainment of independence is that it can benefit from the experience of other African countries that achieved independence some thirty years earlier. Hence Namibia is unique in that it is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that at the time of attaining independence already provided for constitutional rights for its local languages. The major policy document of the then liberation movement SWAPO, Toward a language policy for an independent Namibia (United Nations Institute for Namibia 1981), which was published in Lusaka by the institute (UNIN) as proceedings of a seminar held in 1980, essentially set the trend for the policies pursued since independence in 1990.

The application of linguistics to other areas of life has occurred in a somewhat natural, if haphazard, fashion. The first and most obvious applications were to education (first and second language learning, teaching, and testing), lexicography, translation, and speech therapy (Crystal 1981). There has been rather long standing interest in other fields, such as medical interaction (Mishler 1984; cf., van Naerssen and Kaplan elsewhere in this volume) and religious language (Samarin 1976), but it has been only within the past few years that increasing amounts of linguistic knowledge have been applied to the field of law.

In the relatively recent past, a whole issue of ARAL (Kaplan, et al. 1983) was devoted to text analysis. In a way, an article of the sort offered here may be premature in the sense that it appears only two years after the more thorough review volume. There are two reasons why it seems appropriate to look at this area again so quickly. First, the area of text analysis is an extremely active one, and no major bibliographies have appeared since 1983. Second, the approach taken here is somewhat different from that in ARAL III; this review has no direct concern either with pedagogical applications or with contrastive forms of text. There is, of necessity, some overlap in bibliography between this article and the earlier volume, but the great majority of sources cited did not appear there. This particular area is in a state of very rapid growth, moving toward the evolution of a new paradigm which may radically modify the field of applied linguistics by providing a new set of questions and a new way of answering them. The rate and direction of change seem to justify another brief sortie into text analysis, and thereby to try to disambiguate some notions that have been available for greater or lesser periods of time.

The Annual Review of Applied Linguistics is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and we are happy to report that applied linguistics is still with us. We also believe that the field of applied linguistics is here to stay, much as psychology and English literature are disciplinary fixtures after having developed in the early 20th century. The development of a disciplinary field, however, is a messy undertaking, typically driven by needs and purposes that extend beyond individual goals or planned group purposes. In the case of applied linguistics, its continued development can only be channeled and planned indirectly. Moreover, full disciplinary acceptance will only occur to the extent that applied linguistics responds to wider societal needs and its expertise is valued by people beyond the professional field. Applied linguistics, as an inter-disciplinary field, faces the additional challenge of trying to cohere around a set of central notions with which a diverse group of practitioners can identify. So, while some may want an orderly blueprint for disciplinary development and acceptance, and some practitioners may generate discussions around such orderly expectations, none is likely to arise. At the same time, certain events and institutional structures help to shape and form the discipline without recourse to any neat blueprint. Examples include the establishment of the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan in 1941, the establishment of the Department of Applied Linguistics at Edinburgh in 1956, the establishment of the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC in 1959, the formation of the TESOL organization in 1966, and the formation of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 1977.

Teaching is the main or even only way to pass on ancestral languages when intergenerational language transmission no longer takes place. The main reason for the interruption of natural language transmission is an increasing weakening of community bonds due to intermarriage, migration, and mobility. The formal or informal teaching of ancestral languages is therefore at the core of language revival and language revitalization movements. The article reviews favorable conditions and supportive factors for the teaching of ancestral languages from different parts of the world, and highlights the important role of dedicated community members in these endeavors.

Music and language are highly intertwined auditory phenomena that largely overlap on behavioral and neural levels. While the link between the two has been widely explored on a general level, comparably few studies have addressed the relationship between musical skills and language aptitude, defined as an individual's (partly innate) capacity for learning foreign languages. Behaviorally, past research has provided evidence that individuals’ musicality levels (expressed by singing, instrument playing, and/or perceptive musical abilities) are significantly associated with their foreign language learning, particularly the acquisition of phonetic and phonological skills (e.g., pronunciation, speech imitation). On the neural level, both skills recruit a wide array of overlapping brain areas, which are also involved in cognition and memory.

The neurobiology of language aptitude is an area ripe for investigation, since there has been only limited research establishing neurofunctional and neuroanatomical markers characteristic of speech imitation and overall language aptitude (e.g., in the left/right auditory cortex and left inferior parietal areas of the brain). Thus, as noted above, in this short review for ARAL, the aim is to describe the most recent neuroscientific findings on the neurobiology of language aptitude, to discuss the complex interplay between language aptitude and musicality from neural and behavioral perspectives, and to briefly outline what the promise of future research in this area holds.

As H. Douglas Brown pointed out in his review (1980), the field of second language acquisition [SLA] has emerged as its own discipline in the 1980s. A somewhat eclectic discipline, research in SLA involves methodologies drawn from linguistics, sociolinguistics, education, and psychology. Theoretical models are equally diverse (McLaughlin 1987), but in general a distinction is possible between representational and processing approaches (Carroll in press). Representational approaches focus on the nature and organization of second-language knowledge and how this information is represented in the mind of the learner. Processing approaches focus on the integration of perceptual and cognitive Processes with the learner's second-languages knowledge. This distinction is used here for purposes of exposition, although it is recognized that some approaches combine both representational and processing features, as any truly adequate model of second-language learning must.

Workplace language assessment poses special issues for language testers, but also, when it becomes very large scale, it poses issues for language policy. This article looks at these issues, focusing on the offshore and outsourcing (O&O) industry as it is transitioning from native-speaking (NS) countries into nonnative-speaking (NNS) destinations such as India and the Philippines. This is obviously most impacted in call centers, where the ability of customer service representatives (CSRs) to communicate with ease with their native-English speaking customers is central to business success and can be key to a nation's economy. Having reviewed the (limited) research in this area, we take the Philippines as our example to explore how government, academe, and the business sector are dealing with the language proficiency and personnel-training issues caused by the exponential growth in this industry. Appropriate language assessments that are practical, while also being valid and reliable, are critical if the Philippines is to retain its position in this emerging market. Currently, call centers in Philippines complain of very poor recruitment rates due to poor language ability, and of poor quality communication outcomes measures: But how do they assess these key areas? We describe and evaluate the current situation in call center language assessment in the Philippines and discuss possible ways forward, for the Philippines and for the O&O industry more broadly.

The goals of second language acquisition research, as of first language acquisi-tion research, are to determine exactly what is acquired and precisely how it is acquired. The first concern leads to questions such as the following in the case of second language acquisition [SLA]

•How comparable are the first and second languages of the learners?

•What effect does the perceived closeness or distance of the two languages have on second language acquisition?

•Do learners only acquire linguistic categories and structures of the second language, or do they also acquire a different set of cognitive structures and cultural categories? And finally,

•Do they acquire only linguistic rules, or do they also acquire the sociocultural conventions of language use relevant to the second language?

The second concern leads to the following question:

•What role do cognitive styles, learning strategies, and personality factors—either innate or acquired as a result of socialization in a particular community—play in second language acquisition?

Efficiency in real-time language processing generally poses a greater challenge to adults learning a second language (L2) than to children learning a first language (L1). A notoriously difficult aspect of language for L2 learners to master is grammatical gender, and previous research has shown that L2 learners do not exploit cues to grammatical gender in ways that resemble L1 speakers. But it is not clear whether this problem is restricted to grammatical gender or whether it reflects a broader difficulty with processing local relations between words. Moreover, we do not know if immersive L2 environments, relative to typical L2 classrooms, confer advantages in learning regularities between words. In three eye-tracking experiments, 6- and 10-year-old children who were enrolled in Spanish immersion elementary schools listened to sentences with articles that conveyed information about the grammatical gender (Experiment 1), biological gender (Experiment 2), and number of referents in the visual field (Experiment 3). L1 children used articles to guide their attention to target referents in all three experiments. L2 children did not take advantage of articles as cues to grammatical gender, but succeeded in doing so for biological gender and number. Interpretations of these findings focus on how learning experiences interact with the nature of specific referential contexts to shape learners’ efficiency in language processing.