The Editor and Board of Language Teaching are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2014 Christopher Brumfit thesis award is Dr Hilde van Zeeland. 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.

No area of language assessment research in the past 20 years has received a greater increase in attention than washback research. Beginning with the seminal work of Alderson & Wall (Alderson & Wall 1993; Wall & Alderson 1993), an evolving body of empirical washback studies has been conducted worldwide, especially in countries where English is not the dominant language. A systematic search of the pertinent literature between 1993 and 2013 identified a total of 123 publications consisting of 36 review articles and 87 empirical studies. The focus of this review is on the empirical studies. A further breakdown of these empirical studies reveals 11 books and monographs, 27 doctoral dissertations, 40 journal articles, and 9 book chapters. This intensity of research activity underscores the timeliness and importance of this research topic and highlights its maturity, which in turn calls for this systematic review.

‘Sometimes maligned for its allegedly behaviorist connotations but critical for success in many fields from music to sport to mathematics and language learning, practice is undergoing something of a revival in the applied linguistics literature’ (Long & Richards 2007, p. xi). This research timeline provides a systematic overview of the contributions of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) to the role, nature, and development of individual practice in language learning. We focus on written language practice in Tutorial CALL, corrective feedback and language awareness-raising in Intelligent CALL (ICALL), and individualization of the learning process through tailoring of learning sequences and contingent guidance.

As applied linguists know very well, how we use language both constructs and reflects our understanding. It is therefore important that we use terms that do justice to our concerns. In this presentation, I suggest that a more apt designation than multilingual or second language acquisition (SLA) is multilingual or second language development (SLD). I give a number of reasons for why I think SLD is more appropriate. Some of the reasons that I point to are well known. Others are more current, resting on a view of language from a complex systems perspective. Such a perspective rejects the commodification of language implied by the term ‘acquisition’, instead imbuing language with a more dynamic quality, implied by the term ‘development’, because it sees language as an ever-developing resource. It also acknowledges the mutable and interdependent norms of bilinguals and multilinguals. In addition, this perspective respects the fact that from a target-language vantage point, regress in learner performance is as characteristic of development as progress. Finally, and most appropriately for AILA 2011, the term second language development fits well with the theme of the congress – harmony in diversity – because it recognizes that there is no common endpoint at which all learners arrive. For, after all, learners actively transform their linguistic world; they do not merely conform to it.

Discourse studies is a vast, multidisciplinary, and rapidly expanding area of research, embracing a range of approaches including discourse analysis, corpus analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, genre analysis and multimodal discourse analysis. Each approach offers its own unique perspective on discourse, focusing variably on text, context or a range of semiotic modes. Together, they provide foreign language teachers and material designers with new insights into language, and are beginning to have an observable impact on published English Language Teaching (ELT) materials. This paper examines the ways in which the four approaches with the strongest links to the ELT profession (corpus analysis, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and genre analysis) have found their way into language learning materials, and offers some suggestions on how discourse studies may influence ELT classrooms in the future.

Written corrective feedback (CF) has been the most heavily researched topic in second language (L2) writing over the past 20 years. As a recent research timeline article in this journal (Ferris 2012; see also Bitchener & Ferris 2012) shows, studies of error correction in student writing have crossed disciplines (composition and rhetoric, foreign language studies, applied linguistics) and have utilized a range of research paradigms, including descriptive text analysis, quasi-experimental designs, and quantitative and qualitative classroom research. This article highlights two landmark studies on this topic, both from the 1980s, representing two of these research traditions. It explains why replication of these two studies would further advance our knowledge about written CF and makes specific suggestions about how the replications should be completed.

This paper argues for the replication of two studies, both of which consider feedback and working memory. In the first part of this paper, we discuss the role of interaction-based research and working memory research in second language acquisition research. We then describe two studies that have unified these two areas in recent published articles and discuss ways that replication can further our knowledge in how working memory capacity can impact the benefits of feedback. We emphasize the importance of replication in a number of different areas, including grammatical complexity of the target structure and the nature of working memory tests, in scoring, actual tests, and modes of delivery. Additionally, we discuss the possibilities for replication in the area of population differences, in particular, age groups and more lasting effects as would be found in delayed post-tests. Finally, we point out another means of gathering information about thought processes and suggest the value of adding stimulated recalls to the existing data.

On 29 and 30 May 2014, this seminar was hosted at Lews Castle College, University of the Highlands and Islands and organised by BAAL member Dr Cassie Smith-Christmas. In total, there were 16 participants from 13 universities across the UK. A total of nine papers were delivered over the two days and an hour-long roundtable was held at the close of the seminar. Keynote speakers were Professor Rosamond Mitchell (University of Southampton) and Professor Wilson McLeod (University of Edinburgh). Professor Kenneth MacKinnon (University of Aberdeen) acted as keynote discussant.

After completing a law degree at the University of Birmingham when I was 20 and not really knowing what I wanted to do, except that it was not law, I became an English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher accidentally through signing up as a volunteer with the British United Nations Association (BUNA), roughly equivalent to the US Peace Corps. Instead of being dispatched to assist starving people through a remote third-world community development project, as I had naively expected, I was sent on a fast-paced, two-week English as a second language (ESL) teacher-training course at a well-known private language school, International House, on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of London's West End. Then came a one-week BUNA ‘orientation’ course in the suburbs. A hundred-plus neophyte volunteers were lectured on how to deliver a baby, how to deal with snake bites, how to remove leeches using gasoline or matches (but not both), the importance of taking anti-malaria pills daily without fail (pills subsequently found to be 100% ineffective), and how to avoid schistosomiasis (snail fever). On the last day, I was informed that, contrary to what I had first been told, I would not after all be going to Afghanistan, but to Peru. A week later, I arrived in Lima, a bustling Latin-American metropolis with no shortage of mid-wives, no malaria, no snakes, no snails and not a leech in sight. In the face of pervasive poverty, corruption, violence, and illiteracy, I had been sent several thousand miles, with absolutely no understanding of how people learn languages and minimal understanding of how to teach them, to provide free English classes for the relatively wealthy, mostly middle-class faculty and students in the Faculty of Law of Peru's leading university, the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.