This review covers recent applied linguistic research in Finland and Sweden during the years 2006–2011, with particular emphasis on foreign language learning and teaching. Its primary aim is to inform the international research community on the type of research that is going on in these countries. Special attention is given to topics which have attracted a lot of interest in the area: language immersion schools and CLIL, cross-linguistic influence, corpus linguistics (English as a lingua franca) and language use in multilingual urban settings.

Study abroad (SA) has long been regarded as a key component of internationalization efforts in higher education and much scholarship has investigated the practices and outcomes of SA from varied perspectives. More recently, scholars have paid growing attention to ways to increase the participation of historically marginalized students in SA, to design SA programs to meet those students’ needs, and to document their experiences abroad. Despite recent scholarship in these areas, relatively little research has employed an equity lens to address research on language-focused SA. This article puts forward language-focused SA as a possible venue to pursue equity and to provide quality education for all students, especially for historically underserved students. More specifically, we address three overarching questions: (1) What theoretical frameworks could be implemented to research SA through an equity lens?; (2) What methodological approaches could inform SA research with an equity lens?; and (3) What topics could be examined to research SA through an equity lens? Drawing on equity as a guiding principle, we discuss relevant research tasks that demonstrate specific ways to address these overarching questions in future research on language-focused SA.

Instructed foreign language knowledge – that is, language skills acquired exclusively in the classroom without the benefit of any significant immersion experience – remains a vastly neglected area of studies on language learning in general and language attrition in particular. There is also little consideration of foreign language attrition and maintenance as a problem for policy or pedagogy.

The present talk will give an overview of what is and what is not known about second language (L2) attrition at the present time. It will then present the results from a pilot project that will hopefully serve as the foundation for larger studies of instructed L2 attrition in future years.

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.

This timeline provides an update on research since 2009 involving auditory-visual (AV) input in spoken language processing (see Hardison, 2010 for an earlier timeline on this topic). A brief background is presented here as a foundation for the more recent studies of speech as a multimodal phenomenon (e.g., Rosenblum, 2005).

At a time of diminishing resources, the sum of apparently minor personal decisions about food can have immense impact. These individual choices are heavily influenced by language, as those with vested interests seek to persuade individuals to act in certain ways. This makes the language of food politics a fitting area for an expanding applied linguistics oriented towards real-world language-related problems of global and social importance. The paper draws upon five consecutive research projects to show how applied linguistics research may contribute to public policy and debate, and also how, by entering such new arenas, it can develop its own methods and understanding of contemporary language use.

CLIL and Immersion Classrooms: Applied Linguistic Perspectives (www.ichm.org/clil/) is one of a number of research networks (ReNs) established under the auspices of AILA. It was founded after the first CLIL Symposium, held in Vienna in July 2005. The network connects applied linguists who focus their research interests on educational settings which make use of an additional language for teaching and learning diverse content areas and thus engage in content and language integrated learning, or CLIL. Thus, this ReN provides researchers with a platform for presenting investigations on any type of classroom-based learning undertaken in a language other than the learners' first or previous language of education. This includes not only typical immersion settings of immigrant learners being integrated into mainstream education and use of the dominant language but also, and more centrally, the more recent phenomenon of using a foreign language as the medium of instruction, which has become an increasingly popular teaching approach at all educational levels in Europe and beyond, as recent publications show (Eurydice Report 2006; Marsh & Wolff 2007; Wilkinson & Zegers 2007).

“An extremely timely, thoughtful, and well-informed discussion in applied linguistics and beyond concerning open science. The essay seeks to engage with a broad audience and to dispel some of the persisting myths around open science and would be read fruitfully by many in the field”.

Plagiarism is a consistent source of concern for educators, and particularly so for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioners, whose objective is to equip students for success across the curriculum. Plagiarism has been on the EAP research agenda for some 35 years and remains a topic of considerable research interest. While perceptions of plagiarism have been extensively investigated, a number of questions relating to the prevalence and causes of plagiarism remain unanswered, and solid evidence about effective pedagogical methods is largely lacking. This article outlines directions for future research on the topic and describes specific investigations that could be conducted.

Since at the turn of the twenty-first century heritage language (HL) research and education was a new field emerging, this research timeline traces the complete history of the field in the US through 2016. It highlights how theories and perspectives have changed, been challenged, and widely accepted. The field's roots are in Spanish since, as the language of the most numerous immigration group, it has long been a commonly taught language in the US.

Presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, Denver, Colorado; 23 March 2009.

This article reviews a purposive sample of 16 doctoral dissertations in second language (L2) education, completed between 2014 and 2018 and published in German, in Germany. Among the 103 relevant dissertations found from this period, a total of 12 thematic strands were identified, of which five were chosen as being particularly common and thus warranting a more in-depth review: (1) learning and teaching about culture in the language classroom, (2) literary texts in L2 education, (3) bilingual models of learning and teaching, (4) plurilingual teaching and learning, and (5) language teacher education and teacher training. We identify relevant topics and relate these to trends in research methodology (qualitative/quantitative/mixed-methods). We also discuss the depth and breadth of these dissertations and situate their scholarly contributions within German and international research on language education.

When I look back over my career as a teacher-trainer and researcher, I can see two themes that run through my work. The first theme is my concern for the practical issues of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), with the strong proviso that practice must be based as far as possible in research. For me this represents the applied in applied linguistics. The second theme is a concern for seeing what the parts are that make up the whole. I think underlying this concern is the desire to see the principles governing the way the parts go together, and underlying this is a tendency to want to see what is simple and rule-based. Knowledge needs to be communicated to others and this is best done if we are aware of the important basic principles and components, and can present them as simply as possible.

Throughout my professional life, I have been interested in the relationship between teachers and curriculum. As someone who has taught languages, educated teachers, and developed curriculum and materials, I have been puzzled by the separation of curriculum and teaching. In the US, this separation is encapsulated in the phrase ‘curriculum and instruction’, where they are seen as separate domains of research and responsibility (Doyle, 1992; Kaplan & Owings, 2015). Indeed, as a teacher educator, I would often hear the refrain from teachers, ‘I know how to plan a good lesson, but I'm not sure what the big picture is. How do the lessons fit together as a whole?’ I interpreted this to mean that they did not have a sense of the overall curricular structure and aims for their students’ learning. As a materials and curriculum developer, I saw my responsibility as providing a map for teachers that would show how the parts added up to a sensible whole.

In this series, Language Teaching invites a well-established scholar to make a personal choice of 12 works that he or she regards as essential reading for those interested in an historical and contemporary overview of the key work in the area chosen for study.

The view that language should be divided into four skills – reading, writing, listening, speaking – has dominated second language (L2) teaching and learning for some time; perspectives have emerged that conceptualize language as holistic or skills as integrated. This construct of language is evident in language assessments, with an increase in ‘integrated skills’ tasks appearing in tests of writing or speaking. Integrated skills assessments have been defined in several ways (Knoch & Sitajalabhorn 2013) such as reading-into-writing performance with the reading content included in the writing or as tasks that use input, textual or visual, as stimulus for writing under the integrated umbrella (Plakans 2013). Even with these multiple interpretations questions arise: ‘Is that all?’ ‘Is there more to integration?’