Like many in the profession, from the United Kingdom certainly, the teaching of English was a second, or more accurately, third career for me. After periods as a clinical psychologist and primary school teacher, the lure of travel took me to France. The need to earn money, the discovery that the choices about how to do this were limited, led to a move into teaching English as a Foreign Language. And, again like many in the profession, there was the slow realisation that I had stumbled into a career, and that language teaching was not to be a temporary interlude in the sun.

Recent research has shown that music interventions involving body movements are beneficial for reinforcing music learning. Given the reported positive transfer between music training and phonological skills, we investigated, for the first time, the value of an embodied music training program for improving pronunciation skills. In a classroom experiment, 48 Chinese adolescent learners of English participated in three 40-minute sessions of either Dalcroze-inspired embodied music training or treatment-as-usual non-embodied music training. Participants in the embodied music group were involved in a series of activities designed to develop their rhythmic and melodic skills through bodily experiences. Participants in the non-embodied music group followed music lessons designed by their music teacher, appreciating music pieces and receiving music knowledge. Before and after training, participants were tested with a language imitation task using six unfamiliar languages and an oral reading task in second language English. Results show that the embodied music group significantly outperformed the non-embodied music group in both tasks. Overall, our findings suggest that an embodied music training program has beneficial effects on pronunciation skills, supporting an embodied-based language teaching approach.

Digital multimodal composing (DMC) has been valued as an engaging pedagogy in language teaching and learning in recent decades. Although research on DMC is flourishing and evidences its benefits for students' development as second language (L2) users and writers, there are some missing links between research findings and classroom practices. In this article, we examine three kinds of relationships between research and practice with regard to DMC: areas in which research findings have not been well applied, areas in which research findings have been reasonably well applied, and areas in which research findings have been usefully applied. As recent research–practice frameworks in education research emphasize a collaborative relationship between researchers and practitioners, we argue that L2 writing researchers' and teacher educators' reflections and experiences are crucial to facilitate the dialogue between DMC research and practice in writing contexts. We suggest that DMC should be incorporated into L2 teacher education programs so that instructors are equipped with the necessary knowledge and competence to design, implement, and assess students' DMC productions.

Task planning and its effect on the complexity of second language (L2) written production have been studied extensively. However, the results of these studies are inconclusive, and at times contradictory, potentially as a result of variation in metrics of linguistic complexity. This study is an extension of earlier research syntheses and quantitative meta-analyses on the effects of planning on oral and written L2 production. It examines the identification and selection of linguistic complexity metrics in previous research on planning and its subsequent effects on the linguistic complexity of written L2 production. This research-focused synthesis of studies surveys construct definitions and operational definitions of linguistic complexity in the research domain and provides an overview of rationales for metric selection in the included studies. Methodological implications for future research are discussed in light of the findings.

Based on the rigorous systematicity assumed in systematic review methodology, it is no surprise that a prominent review such as Macaro et al.'s (2018) on English medium instruction (EMI) has been used as a basis for subsequent EMI research. However, in this article, we explore the ways in which the focus of systematic reviews can be necessarily narrowed and how this poses a risk to research when readers perceive them as offering definitive conclusions on all aspects of a subject. This article addresses two significant trends in applied linguistics. First, systematic review – that is, the use of formalised systems when reviewing literature – has become far more prominent and therefore more impactful than traditional reviews as a methodology (Chong & Plonsky, 2023). Second, there has been an explosive growth in interest in EMI research (Curle et al., 2024). There are further parallels between the two trends, given that both systematic review and EMI are umbrella terms that cover a wide range of research types. As we will see, there is perhaps more disagreement over how to conduct a systematic review than lay readers would suspect. Similarly, EMI is a broader field of research than appears in its most prominent systematic review article. Studies into EMI have explored policy, language learning, the effect on subject knowledge, attitudes towards EMI, ownership of English, and so on. Thus, while EMI is a growingly recognised field of study, it is not always clear what it means to ‘study EMI’.

Students' learning transfer is a fundamental goal across contexts of second language (L2) teaching and is therefore a worthwhile topic for L2 teaching research. Building on trends in research on teaching for transfer in L2 education and in other education and training contexts, this article proposes an agenda for future research on teaching for transfer of L2 learning. This includes a description of six specific research tasks and research designs that could be used with these tasks. The six tasks are to investigate: (1) the relationship between L2 teaching and transfer distance, (2) the relationship between L2 learners' transfer motivation and learning transfer, (3) the impact of L2 teaching on learners' transfer motivation, (4) the relationship between transfer climate and L2 learning transfer, (5) the impact of L2 teaching on learners' ability to deal with unsupportive transfer climates, and (6) L2 learners' transfer preparedness and its relationship with learning transfer.

It is, perhaps, with some surprise that I find the native/non-native divide again attracting attention. The first I remember of this being an issue was when we were informed that the native speaker was dead (Paikeday, 1985). Needless to say, to those of us who did not feel at all deceased, this came as a surprise, but the announcement certainly attracted attention. The next contribution to the debate that I remember was Peter Medgyes's (1992) question regarding whether native or non-native was worth more. And so the dispute has continued spasmodically until the present, when we find two pieces on the subject within two recent issues of Language Teaching (Llurda & Calvet-Terré, 2024; Selvi et al., 2024).

Studies investigating the acquisition of multiword items (MWIs) from reading have furnished evidence that the likelihood of acquisition improves considerably if such items are typographically enhanced (e.g., bolded or underlined) in the texts. In the case of captioned audio-visual materials, however, an earlier study by the authors did not find such compelling evidence. In that study, indications of an effect emerged only when the same video was watched twice. Arguably, for learners to benefit more immediately from typographic enhancement in captions, they may need to be made aware of its purpose beforehand. The present article therefore reports an approximate replication of Majuddin et al. (2021), but this time the students were informed about the MWI-learning purpose of watching the video. As in the original study, the learners watched a video once or twice with standard captions, with captions in which MWIs were enhanced, or without captions. The positive effect of enhancement for MWI learning was clearer than in the original study, and it already emerged after a single viewing. On the downside, enhancement was found to have a negative effect on lower-proficiency learners' comprehension of the content of the video.

Over the past two decades in the applied linguistics subfield of second language (L2) writing, there has been considerable interest in the topic of collaborative writing (CW). Studies in this domain have investigated different phenomena such as the nature of learner-to-learner interactions, the learning outcomes of CW, and students' perceptions of these activities when implemented in the classroom. Despite the large number of studies that have been published to date, replication research has been scarce. As such, the current article opens by making a case for replication work in the area of L2 CW, arguing why such research is both important and necessary. Following this, the article turns to a discussion of two key CW studies that have been highly influential in the L2 writing sphere. These studies are described in detail, and suggestions are provided as to how and why these studies might be replicated in the future.

We closely replicated Nurmukhamedov and Sharakhimov (2021), which was the first study to examine the lexical profile of general-audience English podcasts. Nurmukhamedov and Sharakhimov (2021) found that podcast listeners should have a knowledge of the most frequent 3,000 word families and 5,000 word families, respectively, plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds, and acronyms in order to achieve good and high-level listening comprehension. We followed the methods and procedures of the initial study with a much larger corpus. Specifically, a total of 8,862 podcast transcripts sampled from 12 general-audience podcast programs were used to compile the 14-million-word corpus. Results of the study confirmed Nurmukhamedov and Sharakhimov's (2021) findings in the vocabulary size required to understand general-audience English podcasts. However, some minor differences pertaining to individual podcast programs were revealed, indicating that the sampling of data had an effect on the lexical demand. These findings provide solid evidence to support the validity and generalizability of the initial study's findings. Implications for second language teaching and learning are also discussed.

This paper discusses the complexities of teaching Hebrew to Israel's largest minority group, the Arabs, who must be fluent in the language if they are to succeed. While policy-making institutions in Israel today are aware of the importance of Hebrew for Arab students, the teaching of Hebrew faces serious challenges involving the status of Hebrew in Arab society, the inner-Arab state of diglossia, and the training and placement of Arab teachers of Hebrew. The distribution of the Arab population (in mixed Jewish–Arab towns, and in Arab towns and villages), as well as differing levels of exposure to Hebrew, also pose considerable challenges. The paper combines a historical-theoretical with a philosophical-theoretical approach. It analyzes findings of previous studies that examined Hebrew writings of Arabs studying to be teachers of Hebrew, and policy documents dealing with teacher training and placement in the schools. Our study found a profound gap between Arab Hebrew teachers' academic-pedagogical training and its implementation. Our main recommendations for reducing the gap are: (1) the curriculum should take Israeli Arabs' sociolinguistic situation into account; (2) the teacher placement system needs an overhaul; and (3) the teaching of Hebrew should begin in third grade.

Expertise exists among all communities of educational practitioners at all levels and in all national contexts. By identifying expert practitioners, learning from them and valuing their professional competence, researchers can support, promote and build upon sustainable, embodied, holistic models of quality in ways that have direct relevance for the classroom, the curriculum and wider educational goals. Yet, despite its potential as a field of research, there have been relatively few studies involving expert language teachers to date. After a brief historical background, this article makes the case for language teacher expertise research, noting its high ecological validity, its great practical utility, its ability to bridge the research–practice divide and its potentially positive impact on teaching communities. Key methodological considerations are also discussed, including defining expertise, identifying expert teachers and looking beyond the limits of subject-specific pedagogy to understand the whole practitioner in their sociocultural context. The article then proposes a framework for future teacher expertise research that spans diverse methodologies. Six example research tasks from within this framework are proposed, each justified and exemplified, incorporating suggestions for research design that are intended to encourage both experienced and novice researchers to engage with teacher expertise as a promising domain for future investigation.