As the opening quotation suggests, a shift in the practice of literacy such as is suggested by the term, literacy online, has epochal significance: The death of one world (that of print) and its replacement by something else (the online world) signals not just a change in communication or technology but a change in civilization itself. Just what is this new world of literacy online that seems to await us, and how should we approach it—with open arms or poised for battle? Behind such questions lies a host of definitional difficulties. Surely the temptation is here for a kind of simplicity: “Online literacy” means reading and writing with a computer. But reading and writing what and how? In theory, we can read a dense, complex novel like Henry James' Golden Bowl—a work created in and designed for the privacy, solitude, and deep interiority of print culture—sitting in front of a computer terminal. Of central importance, however, is not the theoretical possibility of being able to read anything from a computer screen but whether or not readers and writers fully acclimated to the computer screen as the primary source of literacy would ever think to read, much less produce, such a work in the first place.

This 40th anniversary of ARAL also marks the 40-year anniversary of a significant uptick in research on language assessment, and hence there is much to reflect on and revisit within this period—and still scope for imagining the future. Pre-1980, language assessment had a long history, but Spolsky (1995) designated the late 1940s as a time of professionalization, which continued through the following decades. By the 1970s, language testers were gradually organizing into an academic community with an annual international conference, regional conferences, journals, and scholarly books. The new academic community not only developed and used language tests but also investigated the validity of their interpretations and uses. Canale's (1987) paper in ARAL provides an enduring frame of reference for reflection on the concerns of the academic community, which he introduced as the what, how, and why of language assessment.

Language anxiety plays a key role in language learners’ silent behaviors in class (King, 2013). Given its public nature and emphasis on interaction within it, the classroom context plays a significant role in the production of language anxiety. Anxious people are more likely to negatively appraise situations, affecting their behavior. That is, it is not just the subject content that causes anxiety, it is also the cognitive processes that occur from being in the classroom environment (Clark & Wells, 1995; Horwitz et al., 2010). King (2014) found that anxious language learners’ thoughts often contain feared predictions about the social costs of speaking in the classroom and worries about how peers might negatively evaluate performance. These fears about external factors contribute to learners becoming inhibited and using silence to avoid the discomfort of speaking. Also, while anxious learners tend to have content-specific concerns, for example, making mistakes, self-focused thoughts are often intensified by contextual factors, such as interacting with peers (Gregersen & Horwitz, 2002). This article looks at the relationship between language anxiety and silent behavior from a cognitive-behavioral perspective, emphasizing how the dynamic interplay between an individual learner and the classroom context can result in even the most motivated and proficient learners missing opportunities to develop their language skills through target-language interaction.

There are four major dialects of Thai: Northern (Kam Mueng, Yuan), Northeastern (Isan, Lao), Central (Siamese), and Southern (Pak Tai). Standard Thai, the official language of instruction, is based on a prestigious social class dialect of Siamese. In addition to Thai, a great number of other languages are spoken by indigenous peoples, of whom some individuals are literate in thrir native languages. Foreign languages used in Thailand consist of classical (Pali, Sanskrit, Arabic) and modern (English, Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic). English is the most widely used foreign language.

Inverstigating the effects of classroom instruction on second language acquisition is a fascinating, but formidable, task: fascinating, because it addresses fundamental issues concerning the nature of the mental processes underlying SLA and how they are affected by different learning conditions; formidable, because of the complex, multifaceted nature of both SLA and instruction, the difficulty of establishing valid and reliable profiles of each, and the interacting effects of social context and individual variables. In this brief survey, empiricial research on the effects of L2 instruction is outlined in relation to a few basic issues. For more detailed reviews of the literature, the reader is referred to Long (1983; 1988), Pica (1983a), Ellis (1984a; 1985), and Chaudron (1988).

About seventeen years ago when my eldest daughter was a student in the third grade of elementary school, she came home one day with a grade of “D” on an English assignment. Because I have been, in part at least, a language teacher most of my adult life, and because my daughter was a particularly verbal child, I was a bit distressed at the grade. I looked over her paper and was unable, in my ignorance, to detect what in it had induced her teacher to give her a grad of “D”.

A law student inquires whether a correction of sneaked to snuck suggests misinformation and misguided rigidity. This chapter reports an answer to that question in the context of better information about current legal usage and a perennial tendency to linguistic prescription. It also explores attitudes to current borrowings from English into Japanese and French and distinguishes between language as a vehicle of communication and as a symbol of cultural values. Finally, the chapter indicates the schizophrenic character of linguistic judgments about prescription and description and concludes with a characterization of current guidelines for nonsexist language use as sensible prescription.

In its early stages, “text linguistics” was a sufficiently compact and localized enterprise that describing it would not have seemed inordinately difficult. Today, however, text linguistics has attained such prominence that it formed the largest contingent at the last International Congress of Linguists in Berlin in 1987. This rise has been accompanied by a widening of scope, a profusion of models, theories, and terms, and a diversification of the phenomena it is intended to capture or designate. The very term “text linguistics” may seem too narrow, and wider alternatives have been proposed, such as “text studies,” “text science,” “textology,” and above all “discourse analysis.” Similarly, some scholars have proposed that text linguistics be incorporated into a broader domain, such as semiotics/semiology, ethnography/enthnomethodology, communications, cognitive science, and so forth.

An essentially interdisciplinary activity, like many areas of applied linguistics, the most immediately contingent area to stylistics remains that of literary studies, although recent years have witnessed extension into other domains such as lexicography and teaching English as a Foreign Language. This survey is divided into five main sections but, given the interrelatedness of the areas, there will be inevitable overlaps as well as potential cases for sub-categorization. The sections are: 1) Linguistic stylistics 2) Literary stylistics 3) Style and discourse A) Pedagogical stylistics 5) Stylistics and the foreign language learner.

When the learner of a non-native language actually uses this language for communication, he draws on the L2 skills acquired so far, and on various other sources of knowledge and skill that are relevant to the communicative task. The more advanced the learner is, the more s/he will be able to rely on his/her L2 skills in a way that is analogous to the L1 speaker's use fo his/her individual linguistic competence. The less advanced learner will have to rely more on his/her metalinguistic knowledge (to the extent that it is available) and on a variety of ways to reduce the gap between, on the one hand, the L2 knowledge and skills available to him/her and, on the other hand, the means necessary to convey the intended message, either by using additional resources (L1, gestures, and so on) or by reducing the message to be conveyed. The term communicative processes [hereafter CP] will be used for the reliance on L2 knowledge and skills, and the term communicative strategies or communication strategies [hereafter CS] for the learner's attempts at bridging the gap between these resources and the message to be conveyed. (There is no clear-cut separation between these two mental activities, of course, as the use of CS encompasses the incorporation of whatever relevant fragments of L2 knowledge and skill happen to be available.)

Has language pedagogy advanced since the topics included here were last addressed in the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics in 1998 (Vol. 18)? Yes, in many directions, as a survey of these contributions reveals. Even with respect to the traditional “four skills,” discussed in the first section, professional understanding of best practices is now more differentiated with respect to both purposes and means of language instruction, in part because of advances based on recent related research. Vandergrift's review gives some sense of the interrelationships and the differences between learning to listen and listening to learn in a second language and explores the directions pedagogy may take. Regarding instruction in speaking skills, McCarthy and O'Keeffe provide insights into the impact of corpus-based language research on materials available and related pedagogical options. Grabe uses current research in reading to derive 10 propositions with good potential for instructional improvement and further research as a basis for practice. Silva and Brice document the explosion of interest in and research attention to second language writing and identify many potential areas for future investigation.

Over the past ten years, conversational analysis “CA” has come to wield a significant influence on second language “L2” acquisition and teaching. It originally developed out of a school of sociology called ethnomethodology, develped by Garginkel (1967). Following the work of Garfinkel, Sacks and his colleagues, Schegloff and Jefferson, establised CA, the study of the structural organization of ordinary conversation,. Sack' lecture notes (1964–1972), which comprise appeoximately 2,000 pages, continue to provide a foundation for contemporary CA. In explaining why he developed a framework for CA, Sacks states:

Literacy studies can frequently be characterized as programmatic and/or evaluative: They focus on the need for literacy programs, on the social consequences of illiteracy, on ways in which the literacy level of a particular population group can be increased, or on the results of various programs already implemented. A glance at a bibliographic resource such as Hladczuk, et al. (1989) reveals that the majority of entries are devoted to “literacy campaigns” and “literacy programs,” “computers and literacy,” “functional literacy,” “history of literacy,” and “libraries and literacy.” Before the 1980s, questions of a linguistic nature were infrequently addressed because emphasis was traditionally placed on the psychological aspects of literacy (Bendor-Samuel 1984:5).

A defining moment in the history of generative research on language acquisition was the advent of the Principles and Parameters (P&P) approach (Chomsky 1981). Generative research on second-language (L2) acquisition was no different in this regard, but there was a distinct twist: The L2 research agenda has also often been informed by the possibility that the L2 learner may not have “access” to the innate linguistic endowment described by Chomsky and others (Bley-Vroman 1990, Clahsen and Muysken 1986). It was thus perhaps inevitable that one might find a volume like Point Counterpoint (Eubank 1991), in which researchers with generally opposing viewpoints addressed this possibility. However, while the issue will likely be examined again in future volumes, an appraisal of more recent L2 research suggests that the “access” question no longer dominates the L2 research agenda. Instead, more recent work suggests an agenda in which “access” to UG is presupposed. The purpose of this review is thus not only to review research on the L2 “access” thesis from the 1980s and 1990s, but, more importantly, to provide an overview of more recent L2 research that is not fundamentally constrained by this issue.