The Editor and Board of Language Teaching are pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2009 Christopher Brumfit thesis award is Dr Okim Kang.

The aim of this review is to provide a critical analysis of language teacher research engagement. The term ‘research engagement’ here covers both engagement in teacher research (i.e. by doing it) as well as engagement with research (i.e. by reading and using it). Research engagement is commonly recommended to language teachers as a potentially productive form of professional development and a source of improved professional practice; empirical accounts of teachers’ practices and experiences in doing teacher research and reading research, and of the benefits that accrue to them from such activities are, however, limited and diffuse. This review examines the available evidence on research engagement in language teaching and discusses this in relation to the educational literature more broadly. The analysis presented here highlights both the benefits and the challenges that are associated with teacher research engagement, and sheds light on why teacher research remains largely a minority activity in the field of language teaching. It also illustrates the complex relationship between research knowledge and what teachers do, and considers the implications of this relationship for the contribution that reading research can make to teachers’ professional activities. The paper concludes by outlining a number of conditions which facilitate teachers’ attempts to engage both in and with research. An awareness of these conditions is fundamental to the success of initiatives which aim to promote language teacher research engagement.

The format for the present review is similar to that of previous years, though the number of references to research published before 2008 has been somewhat increased in order to identify a few key studies which have influenced some of 2008's published output. In selecting the texts for discussion, I have sought to offer the reader what I consider to be an overview of key themes emerging from the 2008 research which are in one way or another related to the teaching and learning of additional languages, and policies pertaining thereto. In doing so, I have tried to draw on a fairly broad range of journals, languages, countries, sectors of education and research approaches. However, in the space available (which is generous) I find it possible to discuss only some 80–90 articles out of a field of well over 1000 that would be available, if I had the time and the energy to read them all. Accordingly, there is no sense in which I am claiming that those selected are the cream which has risen to the top. There must be many articles not included in the present review which are equal in quality to those I have been able to include.

When in the late 1990s we set out to review the accumulated research on second language (L2) instructional effectiveness, it was with a sense – though no certainty – that a journey into the uncharted territory of systematic research synthesis would eventually prove worth the effort. In order to find a fitting methodology, and in the absence of any guidance within applied linguistics, we willingly delved into challenging techniques and debates from other disciplines. A few years later, we had to search long and hard to find enough synthesists working on language learning and teaching issues to warrant a book, but we did, and we saw that new effort as an important, if initial, step towards the adoption and adaptation of research synthesis, and particularly the subset of methods known as meta-analysis, to the problems of applied linguistics. Now, some ten years after our first publication on the topic, applications of meta-analysis have increased dramatically in the field, as this Timeline clearly shows. For some topics (e.g. interaction, corrective feedback), we have even seen several studies replicating and building on each other. We are pleased with these developments and welcome the efforts of the field to engage in rigorous and meaningful reviews of L2 research, with an eye towards cumulative explanation of key phenomena. At the same time, we also hope that researchers will avail themselves of the full potential of systematic research synthesis, which considerably transcends the narrower domain of meta-analysis and includes other quantitative as well as qualitative methods that more fully enable the task of synthesizing accumulated knowledge in the increasingly diverse research landscape of applied linguistics.

This paper is a very personal attempt to explore the problematics of portraying migrants in Applied Linguistics research. I begin with a discussion of identity, in particular what we might mean when we use the term, and from there I go on to explore its fundamental imprecision through an analysis of a census question about ethnicity. I then consider migration and the problematics of naming migrants in research, first examining an example of my own research and then expanding the discussion to wider issues. I conclude the paper with a brief consideration of the epistemological status of portrayals in research.

Ideologies and communication practices vary hugely in multilingual workplaces. On the one hand, many companies include Diversity Management in their corporate culture because there are theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that a company which employs a diverse workforce enhances its opportunities in a global marketplace whilst improving employee satisfaction and thus productivity. On the other hand, globally oriented companies, often the same ones, choose English preferentially as their corporate language as it has become widely accepted that this is the language of international business. Thus, diversity in general (i.e. cultural diversity) and linguistic diversity are dissociated.

An objective selection protocol identified 25 Ph.D. theses from Welsh universities in the period 2003–2008 which are relevant to the field of second language acquisition. Most of these fall into three broad subject areas: language in school, acquisition and assessment of spoken language, and lexical issues. The last of these encompasses the majority of theses reviewed here, and includes studies of vocabulary assessment, collocation and association, and the organisation of the bilingual lexicon. Research methods vary greatly, from classroom observations and questionnaires to lexical decision tasks and ERP (event-related potentials) techniques, and the stronger Ph.D.s tend to use mixed-methods research design. One persistent theme is that confounding complexities emerge from even the most specific and precise experimental studies. The most valuable doctoral research here recognises that its role is to investigate, with academic rigour, well-defined aspects of those complexities, and to clearly state its position in a larger investigative context.

The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to the application of research on language and culture to educational and societal concerns. Through its work in research, information dissemination, development of instructional materials and language tests, and professional development and technical assistance to schools, districts, and states, CAL serves as a liaison between the academic world of research and the practical world of language education and language-related concerns. CAL plays a leading role in articulating language- and culture-related issues that affect policy decisions; conducting research on language use, language learning, and effective teaching methods; and translating research into practical applications that help language learners succeed.