Comments from the reviewers

‘ … very well-written, well-presented, and well-argued, fulfiling the aim of addressing critically an aspect of applied linguistics/SLA about which the author is clearly passionate and challenging the ubiquity, appropriateness and current relevance of the term “second language acquisition”’.

‘An essay which is at once elegant, eloquent, erudite, critical, creative, and constructive. It is topical while also grounded in a sense of the past, witty and amusing while also serious.’

Despite the wide recognition of language teacher educators’ contributions in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), research on language teacher educators has only picked up the pace in the last decade, shedding light on their cognition, practices, and identities in relation to various personal, interpersonal, and contextual factors. This article provides a systematic and critical review of 69 empirical studies on university-based TESOL teacher educators from 2010 and 2020. A methodological review was also conducted to analyze the different research approaches employed by previous researchers. A synthesis of the identified research led to four major themes, namely: (1) a general professional state (including responsibilities, challenges and quality), (2) professional engagement (including teaching, practicum supervision, and research and publishing), (3) cognition (including beliefs, knowledge, and expertise), as well as (4) continuous learning and identity development. Through a critical discussion of the themes, the review argues against the implicit yet powerful discourse that characterizes language teacher educators as ‘supermen/superwomen’ and emphasizes the need to humanize them as whole people by recognizing their unique strengths and struggles as well as diverse learning needs. The review also proposes a new research agenda to stimulate and deepen future investigations on language teacher educators in TESOL.

Published in Language Learning in 1995, Munro and Derwing's* investigation of foreign accent, comprehensibility, and intelligibility in second language (L2) speech instigated significant change in L2 pronunciation research (Levis, 2020). A key finding was that despite the presence of a foreign accent, listeners could indeed comprehend L2 speech. Within their framework, comprehension of L2 speech was assessed along two dimensions. The first, intelligibility, was an assessment of actual listener comprehension, measured through listener transcriptions of a given utterance. The second, comprehensibility, was a scalar measure of how easy to understand listeners perceived an utterance to be. While these two measures of listener comprehension (i.e., understanding) have been shown to correlate, they have also been shown to measure different forms of understanding (Derwing & Munro, 2015). This means that while increased intelligibility can be associated with increased comprehensibility, it is still common for listeners to accurately transcribe nonnative speech while simultaneously indicating the speech to be hard to understand (i.e., evidence indicates that intelligibility outpaces comprehensibility in the development of L2 pronunciation). Research published in the 25 years since has repeatedly demonstrated that accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility are partially independent dimensions of L2 speech (Munro & Derwing, 2020). Whereas Munro and Derwing's (2011) research timeline attended to the concepts of accent and broad intelligibility (i.e., inclusive of both actual and ease of understanding), the past decade has seen an increased scholarly emphasis specifically on the global speech dimension of comprehensibility. Given this increased scholarly interest, our timeline is presented with the goal of tracing the post-Munro and Derwing (1995) development of L2 speech comprehensibility research.

English language teaching (ELT) publishing as we know it today has a long and lucrative history, dating, according to Rix (2008), from the Longman publication of Michael West's New Method Readers in 1926, to the present day, where annual turnover runs to around US$194 billion (Jordan & Gray, 2019). Some of the sector's best-sellers, such as Oxford University Press's Headway series (Soars & Soars), have sold over 70 million copies (Ożóg, 2018) with OUP's English File (Latham-Koenig, Oxenden, & Lambert) selling over a million copies in China alone. Generally speaking, it is taken for granted that commercial publications in the educational sector are based on sound, accepted pedagogical principles. Early language teaching publications (from the 1950s onwards) naturally reflected practices that were thought to promote language learning at that time – such as repetition, drills and sentence-level grammar exercises. As our understanding of language learning developed, this Structural approach gave way to a Communicative one, reflecting the 1970s preoccupation with the importance of communicative competence, influenced by theorists such as Hymes (e.g. 1972) and Halliday (e.g. 1975). This approach remains the predominant one (in the West at least) 50 years later. It represents, remarkably perhaps, the last time that applied linguistics substantially influenced a language teaching approach, or at least, one that had such global reach and enduring influence. Since then, findings from the fields of applied linguistics and second language (L2) acquisition, which should have fed into language learning approaches and hence language coursebooks, have been slow to do so in any systematic or significant way. Where they have, the way in which language learning theory ‘translates’ into pedagogy in the coursebook and thence classroom, can be questionable. In parallel with this is the problem of the socio-cultural standpoint of teaching materials of an international language such as English, issuing from a particular geographic heartland, viz. England. As with applied linguistics and L2 acquisition research, developments in sociolinguistic, socio-cultural and socio-political theory have been realised in language teaching coursebooks only as a rather superficial multi-cultural gloss. The advent of ‘global’ coursebooks conceived in the 1990s, with multiple iterations, attempting to capture international appeal, still has not resolved the conundrum that language – and hence language teaching materials, that is, the combination of content and pedagogy – constitute cultural artefacts, imbued with cultural values and ideologies. All in all, as Timmis, Mukundan, and Alkhaldi laconically observe: ‘for such commonplace objects, [coursebooks] have aroused a surprising degree of controversy’ (2009, p. 11). These then, are the chief areas of contention that I will develop in this article. Opposing these issues, it will be acknowledged that coursebooks remain the default language learning resource, and that teachers and learners world-wide need, want and value them as ready-made language teaching materials.

This article reviews selected research on foreign language teaching and learning published in local, high-impact journals in China over the past ten years (2012–2021). A bibliometric analysis was conducted to elicit the most frequently researched topics in the field, which were grouped into four categories, that is, language learning and use, language pedagogy, language learners and teachers, and Teaching English as a Foreign Language approaches/theories, and a number of sub-categories. This was then followed by an in-depth and critical review of 71 studies corresponding to those categories and sub-categories. The review concluded with a discussion of inadequacies and recommendations for future research. It is hoped that a review on the experience of Chinese practitioners and researchers’ efforts to promote foreign language education may contribute to language teaching research and development in the international field.

English Medium Instruction (EMI), as a phenomenon occurring in the non-Anglophone world, has been matched by a growth in research output on the topic and is now an important and established field of study. A great deal of research attention has been devoted to attitudes held by the key stakeholders in this form of education: teachers, students, and policy makers. Yet, there are many other important questions that remain unanswered, the most important of which are: What are the outcomes of this form of instruction? What is the social and economic impact of EMI? How can EMI teachers improve their teaching? And how can learners help themselves to improve their learning?

How language learners and teachers actually use pedagogical materials in classrooms is a ‘groundbreaking’ subject of applied linguistics inquiry (Tarone, 2014, p. 653), referred to in this research agenda article as materials use. We begin with a theoretically-oriented overview of language education scholarship on pedagogical materials (henceforth materials). Then, we focus on seven qualitative research tasks across three thematic areas, namely materials use and: (A) language pedagogy, (B) classroom interaction, and (C) language diversity, culture, and power. The first section on pedagogy outlines research tasks on: (1) the roles of materials in classrooms, (2) the influences of materials on practicing educators’ expertise, and (3) how language teacher education programmes address materials use. The second section on classroom interaction proposes inquiry into: (4) polysemiotic patterns of materials-in-interaction, and (5) the expected and unexpected outcomes of materials regarding students’ target language use. The third section focuses on: (6) teachers’ and learners’ responses to diverse linguistic varieties and cultures represented in materials, and (7) instructional materials used in language policy and planning endeavours. Throughout this article we reference interdisciplinary connections to curriculum studies, cultural studies, sociology, and materials scholarship in general education. The seven research tasks are critical next steps for understanding materials use – a vast new field that promises to advance language education practice and theory.

Investigations of crosslinguistic effects in second language acquisition (SLA) have contributed rich understandings about the ways in which prior language knowledge and experience can influence additional language learning. Building on this work, one recent line of research has examined the extent to which SLA findings about crosslinguistic influence can be used to improve L2 learning, indicating that explicit instruction tailored to address the nature of the crosslinguistic learning problem can benefit L2 performance. At the same time, however, this line of inquiry is relatively novel and under-researched. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to suggest further research which might advance knowledge and understanding about the ways in which explicit instruction can facilitate second language (L2) learning of crosslinguistically difficult target features. To this end, I lay the ground for a series of close replications designed to understand the role of prior language knowledge and experience in L2 learning: Ellis and Sagarra (2011) and Tolentino and Tokowicz (2014). These studies were selected because they are grounded in empirical SLA research and SLA theory. In addition, the selected studies facilitate replication because they have either (i) made their data collection materials available in digital repositories or (ii) have robustly described their design and provided the stimuli used.

The Competition Model has served as a functional explanation of cross-linguistic influence and transfer for more than 30 years. A large number of studies have used the Competition Model to frame investigations of sentence processing strategies in different types of bilingual and multilingual speakers. Among the different bilingual speakers investigated, Mandarin Chinese and English bilinguals represent a clear testing ground for the claims of the Competition Model. This is because of purportedly stark contrasts in sentence processing strategies between the two languages. Previous studies investigating sentence processing strategies of English L2 and Mandarin L2 bilinguals suggests forward transfer of L1 cues to the L2, moderated by L2 proficiency. In this paper, we argue for replication of two of these studies, namely Liu, Bates, and Li (1992) and Su (2001). These studies continue to be cited today as evidence of differences between English and Mandarin sentence processing strategies which is in turn taken as support for the predictions of the Competition Model. However, both studies presented methodological limitations in terms of measures of proficiency, participant and stimuli selection, and the statistical analysis. We suggest approximate replication of both of these studies and provide suggestions for how such replications might be conducted.