The Editor and Board of Language Teaching are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2013 Christopher Brumfit thesis award is Dr. Ellen Johnson Serafini. The thesis was selected by an external panel of judges based on its significance to the field of second language acquisition, second or foreign language learning and teaching, originality and creativity and quality of presentation.

Because certain home language and literacy practices have been found to be beneficial to monolingual children's literacy development, we examine immigrant children's home language and literacy practices in different countries. Presenting findings from 92 post-2000 articles, we examine research into these practices, what factors influence their occurrence, how they influence immigrant children's development of literacy in the societal language, and what factors seem to moderate or mediate the effects of home literacy activities on societal-language literacy. We found that immigrant families engage in a wide variety of oral language and literacy activities at home, but that most of these practices have not been investigated in relation to immigrant children's literacy development. Book reading, the most-studied practice, seems to promote such development. Additional research is needed into the many factors that influence children's literacy development, including government policies and community context. In addition, researchers need to build on existing descriptive and correlational studies to design and implement innovative school curricula and family literacy programs that connect home and school practices and encourage parental involvement in the school.

Narrative research in language teaching and learning (LTL) is concerned with the stories teachers and learners tell about their lived and imagined experiences. Teachers typically tell about their professional development and their practices, and learners about their experiences of learning and using languages. What stories are, and indeed what narrative research is, however, remains far from agreed upon in LTL research. There is no single, all-encompassing definition of narrative (research), probably because the same situation exists in other disciplines from which empirical work in LTL draws its theoretical and methodological assumptions and approaches. Stanley & Temple (2008: 276), for example, say that generally there is ‘little shared sense of core concerns, of approach, and even of what narrative is seen as’. In LTL, narrative, whether as text/artefact, method of analysis, or both, has become a popular catchall term for much activity in qualitative, interpretive research which focuses on the experiences of research participants. In other words, it has been appropriated by researchers who exhibit varying degrees of epistemological commitment to narrative, and this is evident in the design and reporting of their research.

Based on recent research in cognitive science, interaction, and second language acquisition (SLA), I describe a sociocognitive approach to SLA. This approach adopts a non-cognitivist view of cognition: Instead of an isolated computational process in which input is extracted from the environment and used to build elaborate internal knowledge representations, cognition is seen as adaptive intelligence, enabling our close and sensitive alignment to our ecosocial environment in order to survive in it. Mind, body, and world are thus functionally integrated from a sociocognitive perspective instead of radically separated.

Learning plays a major part in this scenario: If environments are ever-changing, then adaptation to them is continuous. Learning is part of our natural ability to so adapt, while retaining traces of that adaptation in the integrated mind-body-world system. Viewed in this way, SLA is adaptation to/engagement with L2 environments.

Interaction also plays a central role in sociocognitive SLA: We learn L2s through interacting with/in L2 environments. Founded on innate, universal skills which evolutionarily preceded language and make it possible, interaction supports SLA at every turn. Having presented this argument, I illustrate it by analyzing a video clip of an EFL tutoring session, indicating various ‘sociocognitive tools’ for interactive alignment which undergird L2 development.

The high-frequency vocabulary of English has traditionally been thought to consist of the 2,000 most frequent word families, and low-frequency vocabulary as that beyond the 10,000 frequency level. This paper argues that these boundaries should be reassessed on pedagogic grounds. Based on a number of perspectives (including frequency and acquisition studies, the amount of vocabulary necessary for English usage, the range of graded readers, and dictionary defining vocabulary), we argue that high-frequency English vocabulary should include the most frequent 3,000 word families. We also propose that the low-frequency vocabulary boundary should be lowered to the 9,000 level, on the basis that 8–9,000 word families are sufficient to provide the lexical resources necessary to be able to read a wide range of authentic texts (Nation 2006). We label the vocabulary between high-frequency (3,000) and low-frequency (9,000+) as mid-frequency vocabulary. We illustrate the necessity of mid-frequency vocabulary for proficient language use, and make some initial suggestions for research addressing the pedagogical challenge raised by mid-frequency vocabulary.

In the past quarter century, Hungary has offered fertile ground for innovative developments in foreign language (FL) education. The appropriate, albeit disparaging, label applied to Hungary in the mid-1970s – ‘a land of foreign language illiterates’ (Köllő 1978: 6) – no longer applies. In the wake of the dramatic changes of 1989, the number of FL speakers rose quite rapidly. As a beneficial side-effect, applied linguistic and language education research, areas which used to be relegated to the lowest rung of the academic ladder, began to be recognised as legitimate fields of scientific inquiry, offering young researchers the opportunity to embark on an academic career. As a result, Hungarian authors are now regular contributors to distinguished journals, and researchers from Hungary are welcome speakers at international conferences.

However, Hungarian authors often choose to publish their research studies in local journals and volumes which are not easily accessible to the international research community, especially if written in Hungarian. The aim of this review, therefore, is to give an overview of such studies to demonstrate the breadth and depth of recent research conducted in Hungary.

Research into the distance learning of languages is now established as a significant avenue of enquiry in language teaching, with evident research trajectories in several domains. This article selects and analyses significant areas of investigation in distance language learning and teaching to identify new and emerging gaps, along with research questions, methodologies and research tools. Taken together these define a research agenda focusing on theory, pedagogy, technology use, learner contributions, innovation and less commonly taught languages. Within those broad areas, the scope of proposed research tasks includes the distinctive features and practices of distance language teaching, task design for synchronous settings, mentoring, multimodal learning environments, the transfer of speaking skills, and learners’ affective experiences. To conclude, a number of guidelines are given for future enquiry addressing the distinctive nature of research into distance language teaching and learning and the need for a rich evidence base in both theory and practice.