The Editor and Board of Language Teaching are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2012 Christopher Brumfit thesis award is Dr Jim Ranalli. 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.

This article offers a critical review of research about emergent bilingual students in secondary school, where the academic demands placed upon them are great, and where instruction typically remains steadfast in its monolingualism. I focus on recent scholarship about the diversity within this student population, and center on ‘students with interrupted formal education’ (SIFE, new arrivals who have no home language literacy skills or are at the beginning stages of literacy learning) and ‘long-term English language learners’ (LTELLs, primarily educated in their receiving country yet still eligible for language support services). Little has been published about these students, making this a significant area of inquiry. Moreover, both groups are characterized by poor performance and together illustrate the characteristics of secondary students at various points along an academic language and literacy continuum. While existing research provides important information to help us improve secondary schooling for emergent bilinguals, it has also perpetuated deficit views of these students by focusing solely on their perceived academic shortcomings. Grounded in a new body of research in applied linguistics that examines the students’ complex, creative, and dynamic language and literacy practices, I apply a translanguaging lens to critique the positioning of such students as deficient, with implications for research and practice.

This article reviews the empirical research literature on foreign language (FL) learning and teaching published between 2005 and 2010 in Germany. It focuses on the empirical studies that have attracted the greatest interest among researchers during this period of time. These include research on educational standards, teacher education, early FL learning, content and language integrated learning, motivation and interest, intercultural learning, literacy, learning strategies and cooperative and computer-assisted language learning. The review reveals rich and diverse research studies in the field of FL teaching and learning. As a relatively young discipline without a longstanding research tradition, this field overlaps in its research interests and methods with other research fields such as educational psychology, linguistics and the educational sciences. The review also shows that the research into FL teaching and learning is to a large degree dominated by small rather than large-scale projects and is characterized by its largely practical relevance. The review ends with recommendations for future research as a conditio sine qua non for further development in the field.

After characterizing the study of second language acquisition (SLA) from three viewpoints, I try to answer the question, raised by DeKeyser (2010), of whether the SLA field is disintegrating. In answering this question, I first propose a distinction between SLA as the relatively fundamental academic discipline and SLA as the relatively applied field of language education. Instead of portraying the field in terms of quantitative or laboratory studies on the one hand, and qualitative or anthropological studies on the other, I will look at SLA in terms of theories that differ in their empirical basis. All scientific disciplines must create room for ideas or theories that do not yet lend themselves to empirical testing, but for a discipline to develop fruitfully it is crucial that nonempirical ideas do not outnumber the empirical. The fact that the number of empirical SLA theories is large is not in itself a problem: through the practices of rational ‘normal science’ (Kuhn 1962), the best theories (in terms of coherence, testability and scope) will rightfully come out on top.

This paper reviews a selected sample of 24 doctoral dissertations in language assessment (broadly defined), completed between 2006 and 2011 in Canadian universities. These dissertations fall into five thematic categories: 1) reliability, validity and factors affecting test performance; 2) washback (impact) and ethics; 3) raters, rating and rating scales; 4) classroom-based research: teaching, learning and assessment; and 5) vocabulary learning, lexical proficiency and lexical richness. The themes were categorized according to the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) bibliographical categorization index. We identify trends such as the methodological strength of complex mixed methods research design, which enhances the validity of the research findings: 16 (67%) took a pragmatic (rather than paradigmatic) approach in their use of mixed methods, with four (17%) opting for multi-method quantitative approaches and four (17%) for qualitative. We also discuss the depth and breadth of these dissertations and situate their scholarly contributions within Canadian and international research on language assessment.

While Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has received a considerable amount of research interest lately, its increasing popularity as an approach to teaching content subjects in a foreign language requires concerted investigation that reflects and recognises its fundamentally contextualised nature. In this contribution, we sketch various tasks that require localised, often action research, covering a range of areas highly relevant to CLIL realities, but so far underrepresented in the literature. These are, firstly, policy issues, comprising policy statements as well as stakeholders’ perceptions of CLIL and its success; secondly, classroom discourse as the prime site for the investigation of CLIL practices and their implications for the learning process; and, thirdly, classroom pedagogy, with the focus on potential differences between CLIL and non-CLIL settings.

After more than 40 years as the Modern Language Centre, members of the Centre decided to rename ourselves as the Centre for Educational Research on Languages and Literacies (CERLL), to better reflect our current activities and interests. We officially launched the new name for the Centre at a reception on 22 October 2010, and produced a compilation of recent publications by members of the Centre to mark the event. Our interests in research and graduate studies remain fundamentally as they have been for decades, focused on theories and practices in teaching, learning, curriculum, assessment, and policies related to English and French as second or international languages as well as other international, minority, heritage, or indigenous languages. The name change does signal a broadening of perspectives to include research on various forms and types of literacies, though we do not claim to be ‘post-modern’ in doing so.

Language learning is inextricably linked to a social context, and this implies that context-related social variables, such as ethnicity or attitudes, can influence how language learning unfolds. Among the many group-engendered social factors, ethnic identity appears to have interesting consequences for language teaching and learning (Pavlenko & Blackledge 2004). Indeed, issues of personal and group identity often become important when individuals or groups come in contact with one another to learn a language. Briefly, ethnic identity refers to a person's subjective experience of being a part of an ethnic group (Ashmore, Deaux & McLaughlin-Volpe 2004). For second language (L2) learners, the two relevant groups are usually their primary (home) ethnic group and the L2 community. We report here on the research that we have been conducting at Concordia University in Montreal, as part of the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance, with the goal of investigating the role of ethnic group identity in L2 learning.

The Editors, Publishers and Board of Language Teaching would like to thank the following readers who have generously assisted with their time and expertise reviewing manuscripts in the preparation of volume 46. Reviewers are absolutely critical to the functioning of any peer-reviewed journal, and we are very much in their debt.