This article reviews the recent research on formulaic language in pragmatics from three perspectives: foundational issues, recurrent research questions, and the populations studied. Examination of foundational issues, including definitions and operationalization of the concept of formula in pragmatics, shows the way in which pragmatics understands formulaic language and what it contributes to the study of formulaic language, namely, a strong sense of social contract. Recurrent themes in contemporary investigations include how formulas are used in general and in specific contexts, determining how extensive the use of formulas is, attitudes toward formulas, acquisition of formulas in second language (L2) pragmatics, and formulas in pragmatics pedagogy. The third section reviews pragmatic research according to language community, defined for the purposes of this review as first language (L1; native-speaker communities), L2, cross-cultural comparisons, indigenized varieties, and lingua franca communities. The investigation of formula use by different communities addresses questions of the particular and the universal in formula use and the importance of community and community membership.

Over the last decade, research on multilingualism has grown and has provided researchers with new insights into the mechanisms at work in the multilingual brain. While some studies of multilinguals have shown similar results to what has been seen in studies of bilinguals, certain unique properties of multilinguals are beginning to be noticed, particularly regarding early language representation, gray matter density, and speed of lexical retrieval. In addition, research on cognitive control, language switching, working memory, and certain consequences of multilingualism (advantages and disadvantages) are reviewed in terms of their effects on the brains of bilinguals and multilinguals. Although there is little agreement among papers concerning specific regions that are structurally different in monolinguals and multilinguals, publications do show differences. Similarly, there are studies reporting somewhat different regions called upon for processing a given language in multilinguals compared to monolinguals.

The importance of formulaic language is recognized by many branches of the language sciences. Second language learners acquire a language using a maturationally advanced neurological substrate, leading to a profile of formulaic language use and knowledge that differs from that of the prepuberty learner. Unlike the considerable interest in formulaic language seen in second language learning, attention paid to this theme in clinical communicative disorders has been limited. Historically, verbal expressions preserved in severe nonfluent aphasia, including counting, interjections, and memorized phrases, have been referred to as automatic speech. Closer examination of all forms of aphasic speech reveals a high proportion of formulaic expressions, while speech samples from persons with right hemisphere and subcortical damage show a significant impoverishment. These findings are supported by studies of persons with Alzheimer's disease, who have intact subcortical nuclei and abnormally high proportions of formulaic expressions, and Parkinson's disease, which is characterized by dysfunctional subcortical systems and impoverished formulaic language. Preliminary studies of schizophrenic speech also reveal a paucity of formulaic language. A dissociation between knowledge and use of the expressions is found in some of these populations. Observations in clinical adult subjects lead to a profile of cerebral function underlying production of novel and formulaic language, known as the dual processing model. Whereas the left hemisphere modulates newly created language, production of formulaic language is dependent on a right hemisphere/subcortical circuit. Implications of the dual process model for evaluation and treatment of language disorders are discussed.

Most general theories of language acquisition are based on studies of children who acquire one language. A general theory of language acquisition must ultimately accommodate the facts about children who acquire two languages simultaneously during infancy. This chapter reviews current research in three domains of bilingual acquisition: pragmatic features of bilingual code-mixing, grammatical constraints on child bilingual code-mixing, and bilingual syntactic development. It examines the implications of findings from these domains for our understanding of the limits of the mental faculty to acquire language. Findings indicate that infants possess the requisite neuro-cognitive capacity to differentially represent and use two languages simultaneously from the one-word stage onward, and probably earlier. Detailed analyses of the syntactic organization of bilingual child language indicates, moreover, that it conforms to the target systems and, thus, resembles that of children acquiring the same languages monolingually, for the most part. At the same time, bilingual children acquire the distinctive capacity to coordinate their two languages in grammatically constrained ways and in conformity with the target grammars during online production. In short, current evidence attests to the bilingual capacity of the human mind and refutes earlier conceptualizations which viewed bilingualism and bilingual acquisition as burdensome and potentially disruptive to development.

Some second language (L2) learners are unique in that they bring low print literacy and limited formal schooling to the language learning enterprise. A range of personal, economic, historical, and political circumstances bring them to highly literate, industrialized societies where print literacy becomes not only desirable but necessary to earn a living and participate in a range of everyday activities. This article is a review of current research related to this population of learners for the purpose of informing educators about their particular teaching and learning needs. While the emphasis is on scholarship focused on adult L2 emergent readers, attention is also given to related research with bi- and multilingual children and monolingual adults who are not print literate. Finally, sociopolitical and historical issues are touched upon with regard to broader policy matters that may have contributed to or perpetuate low print literacy.

This chapter provides an overview of approaches within corpus linguistics that address discourse-level phenomena. The shared characteristics of all corpus-based research are first reviewed. Then four major approaches are covered: (1) investigating characteristics associated with the use of a language feature, for example, analyzing the factors that affect the omission or retention of that in complement clauses; (2) examining the realizations of a particular function of language, such as describing all the constructions used in English to express stance; (3) characterizing a variety of language, for example, conducting a multi-dimensional analysis to investigate relationships among the registers used in different settings at universities; and (4) mapping the occurrences of a feature through entire texts, for example, tracing how writers refer to themselves and their audience as they construct authority in memos. For each approach, a variety of studies are reviewed to illustrate the diverse perspectives that corpus linguistics can bring to our understanding of discourse. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of some other foci in corpus linguistics and suggests that two areas require particular attention for the advancement of discourse-oriented corpus studies: the need for more computer tools and computer programmers for corpus linguistics, and the need for further studies about how best to represent language varieties in a corpus.

The widespread accessibility to large, networked computer labs at educational sites and commercial testing centers, coupled with fast-paced advances in both computer technology and measurement theory, along with the availability of off-the-shelf software for test delivery, all help to make the computerized assessment of individuals more efficient and accurate than assessment using traditional paper-and-pencil (P&P) tests. Computer adaptive testing (CAT) is a form of computerized assessment that has achieved a strong foothold in licensure and certification testing and is finding greater application in many other areas as well, including education. A CAT differs from a straightforward, linear test in that an item(s) is selected for each test taker based on his/her performance on previous items. As such, assessment is tailored online to accommodate the test taker's estimated ability and confront the examinee with items that best measure that ability.

Over the past decade, many concerted policy efforts have aimed to change the status and functions of language assessment in school systems or higher education, redefining relationships among language tests, curriculum policies, and classroom teaching practices. Conventionally, formal language tests describe individual proficiency levels in reference to normative standards for purposes of certifying abilities; screening applicants for higher education, employment, or immigration decisions; or monitoring the results of educational systems. Recently, many curriculum policies have been reconceptualized in reference to attainment or benchmark standards that specify (usually functional, communicative) goals for language education, learners' achievements, and program accountability. These innovations have adopted principles of criterion-referenced rather than norm-referenced assessment, creating new relations (as well as dilemmas) between language assessment and new curriculum policies, highlighting the nature of language assessment practices in programs, classrooms, or other learning contexts, particularly the foundation bases for defining language proficiency, alignment between assessments and curricula, the formative purposes of assessment in pedagogy, and the situations and interests of particular learner populations.

This chapter takes note of the longstanding orientation Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to discourse studies before moving to a more detailed and selective presentation of current developments in SFL with respect to discourse models, developing research methodologies, and applications to different domains. The reinterpretation of cohesion as discourse semantics (identification, negotiation, conjunction, and ideation) is reviewed with respect to metafunctions (textual, interpersonal, and ideational). This work on texture is then related to social context through the register variables tenor, field and mode alongside genre. The chapter then reviews recent SFL-inspired research that applies these models to analysis of discourse across languages, modalities of communication, and domains. Work done on school and workplace discourse has raised new questions about appropriate units of discourse structure and their relationship to register analysis. It is predicted that some of these questions may be answered by the development of improved software for discourse analyses affording greater specificity in mapping the relationships among genres.

In this article we explore the relationship between learner corpus and second language acquisition research. We begin by considering the origins of learner corpus research, noting its roots in smaller scale studies of learner language. This development of learner corpus studies is considered in the broader context of the development of corpus linguistics. We then consider the aspirations that learner corpus researchers have had to engage with second language acquisition research and explore why, to date, the interaction between the two fields has been minimal. By exploring some of the corpus building practices of learner corpus research, and the theoretical goals of second language acquisition studies, we identify reasons for this lack of interaction and make proposals for how this situation could be fruitfully addressed.

This article examines the history of African Americans in the academic study of world languages and presents an overview of inquiry on the topic. The paper focuses on the impact of race in second language acquisition (SLA) as exemplified through the experience of black students in language education and study abroad. It discusses objectives, policies, instructional priorities and strategies, conditions, and materials related to how black students have in the past, are currently, or should be engaged in language learning. The article examines the path forged by African Americans in world language study, signals gaps in the present body of knowledge, and suggests future directions for investigations into this important topic in the field of applied linguistics and SLA for ARAL's 40th anniversary.

Multilingual education policy has been a controversial affair in South Africa, especially over the last 60 years. Recent research conducted by government-led and independent agencies shows declining student achievement within an education system that employs 11 home languages for education in the first three grades of primary school, followed by a transition to English medium for the majority (approximately 80%) of speakers of African languages. Research that focuses on the linguistic practices of students in urban settings suggests that there is a disjuncture between the construction of multilingualism within contemporary education policy and the multilingual reality of students (e.g., Heugh, 2003; Makoni, 2003; Makoni & Pennycook, 2012; Plüddemann, 2013; Probyn, 2009; Stroud & Heugh, 2011). There is also a disjunction between constitutional and other government policies that advance, on paper, a multilingual policy, yet are implemented through an assimilatory drive towards English (Alexander & Heugh, 1999). As predicted nearly two decades ago, the ideological framing of multilingualism during the negotiations in the early 1990s was to have consequences for the way in which language policy would unfold in the education sector over the next 20 to 30 years (Heugh, 1995, 1999). While poor student achievement in school may be ascribed to a range of socioeconomic indicators, this article draws attention to contributory factors that relate to language(s) in education. These include different constructions of multilingualism in education in relation to sociolinguistic and educational linguistic considerations, contradictory interpretations of multilingual education in a series of education policy documents, pedagogical weaknesses, and recent attempts to strengthen the provision of African languages education alongside English in the first 10 years of school (Grades R and 0–9; e.g., Department of Basic Education (DBE), 2013a, 2013b).

Manipulation of language is the key to all participation in the legal system. While linguists, especially sociolinguists, have been researching legal contexts for some two decades, there is still a considerable paucity of research on what happens when second language (L2) and second dialect (D2) speakers come into contact with the ‘language’ of the law. This chapter overviews the current state of theory and research on this topic. As with studies of L1 speakers, most of the studies have analyzed language in courtrooms, where access to data is much easier than in other legal settings, such as police interviews, mediation sessions or lawyer-client interviews. Most such research addresses one or more of the following questions, with the greatest concentration of research on the second and third of these: (a) What are the interpreting needs of second language speakers? (b) How are these needs being addressed? (c) What are the challenges to the provision of language services to second language speakers? And (d) How do dialectal differences affect the participation of second dialect speakers? The discussion concludes by highlighting a number of questions of crucial legal concern that need to be addressed by applied linguistics research.

Media language has always attracted the attention of linguists, particularly applied linguists and sociolinguists. There are four practical and principled reasons for this interest. First, the media provide an easily accessible source of language data for research and teaching purposes. Second, the media are important linguistic institutions. Their output makes up a large proportion of the language that people hear and read every day. Media usage reflects and shapes both language use and attitudes in a speech community. For second language learners, the media may function as the primary—or even the sole—source of native-speaker models. Third, the ways in which the media use language are interesting linguistically in their own right; these include how different dialects and languages are used in advertising, how tabloid newspapers use language in a projection of their assumed readers' speech, or how radio personalities use language—and only language–to construct their own images and their relationships to an unseen, unknown audience. Fourth, the media are important social institutions. They are crucial presenters of culture, politics, and social life, shaping as well as reflecting how these are formed and expressed. Media ‘discourse’ is important both for what it reveals about a society and for what it contributes to the character of society.

Just as applied linguistics (AL) may be said to be an emerging discipline, so too is one of its sub-fields, second language acquisition (SLA). The parallelism may not be surprising; after all, a difference of only about twenty years separates the points at which the two were identified as autonomous fields of inquiry. Then, too, the two share central defining concepts. AL draws on multidisciplinary theoretical and empirical perspectives to address real-world issues and problems in which language is central (Brumfit 1997). SLA draws on multidisciplinary theoretical and empirical perspectives to address the specific issue of how people acquire a second language and the specific problem of why everyone does not do so successfully. Furthermore, the two share something else: At this juncture in the evolution of AL and SLA, both are grappling with fundamental definitional issues, ones even extending to the nature of language itself. (See Larsen-Freeman 1997a for how this is true of AL.) Should AL and SLA deal successfully with these challenges, both will have much to contribute in the decade to come. Should they instead succumb to internecine feuding and fragmentation, the future will not be as bright.

One of the most intractable issues in the field of second-language acquisition (SLA) research has been the attempt to identify the role of social context in influencing (or not) the process of acquisition of a second language. The central question has been whether a theory of SLA must account only for the psycholinguistic processes involved in acquiring an interlanguage (IL), or, alternatively, whether social and sociolinguistic factors influence those psycho-linguistic processes to such an extent that they too must be included in such a theory. It seems very clear that SLA is a psycholinguistic process. But to what extent are those psycholinguistic processes affected by social context? In 1985, Selinker and Douglas proposed a construct of ‘discourse domains’ to show how social and psycholinguistic processes might be included in a theory of inter-language; Young (1999) reviews that proposal and a recent attempt to test it, concluding that the results are still uncertain. After 15 years, this is still a lively issue in the field of SLA. Indeed, it is becoming a source of increasing conflict both within the field of SLA and within such areas of applied linguistics as second/foreign language teaching and second/foreign language teacher training. In this article, I will briefly summarize the problem, and review and summarize the current evidence being brought to bear upon this issue in the SLA research literature.

Anxiety is among the most frequently studied emotions in second language acquisition (SLA). Study abroad (SA) researchers have examined its effects on SLA in that setting in a number of studies. The current study goes beyond previous SA research by examining how anxiety develops and connects with language proficiency development over SA. Specifically, it uses anxiety-related measures of foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), foreign language enjoyment (FLE), and a physiological manifestation of anxiety (hair cortisol). As far as the classroom is concerned, learners grew more comfortable, experiencing less anxiety and more enjoyment over the period of SA. However, learners showed physiological signs of overall elevated anxiety despite these increasing classroom comfort levels. Two key factors that may have influenced their anxiety levels abroad were tendency toward anxiety prior to SA and language proficiency upon departure for SA. The latter provides support for having students more proficient prior to SA, since doing so may lead to less anxiety during SA.

Over the past 20 years, many in the field of second language learning and pedagogy have become familiar with models of language that emphasize its communicative nature. These models are often referred to as usage-based because they emphasize the notion that actual language use is a primary shaper of linguistic form. Supporters of these models also argue that making meaning, that is, the use to which language is put, is central to how language is configured. Usage-based models share several other underlying assumptions as well. While these usage models have a number of ideas in common, several distinct approaches have emerged. They often use similar terms, such as cognition and metaphor, but the precise interpretations can vary from model to model. The overall result is that without extensive reading, it is not always clear just how these models differ and what unique insights each offer. This article attempts to address this situation by examining three major usage-based models—systemic functional linguistics, discourse functionalism, and cognitive linguistics. First, the common, underlying tenets shared by the three models are discussed. Second, an overview of the unique tenets and concerns of each approach is presented in order to distinguish key differences among them. Within the discussion of each approach, I also discuss various attempts to apply the model to issues in second language learning.

Within the field of second language acquisition (SLA), there has been much less research undertaken with children than with adults, yet the two cohorts are quite distinct in characteristics and in their learning processes. This article provides a review of child SLA research, particularly the research with a pedagogical focus. We describe a series of studies, including those informed by different theoretical perspectives (interactionist and sociocultural), in different instructional settings (i.e., second language, foreign language, immersion, and content and language integrated learning [CLIL] contexts) and using different research methodologies (longitudinal, case study, experimental, and naturalistic). We begin by highlighting the importance of age as a factor in SLA research, presenting studies that have focused on the differences existing between younger and older learners. We also consider interventions that can support language learning—including form-focused instruction and the use of tasks. We finish by presenting a proposed change in the way that research with children is conducted.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce noneconomists to the economics of multilingualism. This area of research is relatively little known among economists, and until recent years, few of its methods and results had been published in the journals usually read by language specialists, although sociolinguists and applied linguists had for many years been pointing out the importance of economic dimensions in their research field. It is therefore useful to begin with a brief review of the literature which, owing to limitations of space, does not report specific results, but lists the major issues that have been examined to date. More extensive surveys are available in Vaillancourt (1985a) and Grin (1994c; 1996e).