Since its circulation in two draft versions in 1996, and especially since its commercial publication in English and French in 2001, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has come to dominate discussion of L2 curricula, the assessment of L2 proficiency, and L2 teaching and learning in Europe. Although it is widely referred to, however, the CEFR remains relatively little known beyond the summaries of its six proficiency levels presented in the so-called ‘global scale’ and ‘self-assessment grid’. This article summarises the CEFR's content, purpose, and origins; describes its reception, paying particular attention to its impact on L2 teaching and learning (especially via its companion piece, the European Language Portfolio) and on the assessment of L2 proficiency; and concludes with a brief consideration of present challenges and future prospects.

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.

Virtual exchange is a well-known pedagogical approach in foreign language (FL) education which involves engaging classes in online intercultural collaboration projects with international partners as an integrated part of their educational programmes. This paper begins by reviewing e-tandem and telecollaborative approaches to virtual exchange which are currently being used extensively in FL education and presents two case studies which illustrate the common learning outcomes and limitations of such approaches. I then propose an alternative model of virtual exchange which maintains many of the key characteristics of earlier approaches but which incorporates the principles of global citizenship education and which moves away from bilingual–bicultural approaches. I conclude by outlining the main characteristics of this model and presenting some examples of how this approach could be put into practice.

The topic of language teacher identity receives strong attention in current scholarly literature. Understanding the complexities of identities that second/foreign language teachers construct is crucial because the ways teachers perceive themselves as professionals impact teacher development (e.g., Kanno & Stuart, 2011*), interactions with peers and colleagues (e.g., Kayi-Aydar, 2015*), pedagogical choices or classroom practices (e.g., Duff & Uchida, 1997*), and access to power and ownership of language (De Costa & Norton, 2017*; Varghese et al., 2016*), ultimately undergirding or undermining second/foreign language teaching (Varghese et al., 2016*).

Creating a timeline for formulaic language is far from simple, because several partially independent lines of research have contributed to the emerging picture. Each exhibits cycles of innovation and consolidation over time: domains take a leading role in developing new knowledge and then fall back, while another area comes to the fore. Thus, some of the first observations about formulaic language, back in the nineteenth century, were in the clinical domain of aphasia studies. By the early to mid twentieth century it was theories of language structure that had most to say, until eclipsed by the Chomskian model, which saw little significance in lexicalised units larger than the word (an issue discussed by Jackendoff 2002; see table entry). Meanwhile, changes in language teaching methodology in the mid to late twentieth century increasingly urged teachers to ask how adult learners could best master multiword strings to improve fluency and idiomaticity – a question still asked today. By the end of the twentieth century, new technological advances revealed frequency in usage as a probable agent of formulaicity, and these chimed with new models of lexical knowledge based on neural pathways and networks that could be strengthened by repeated exposure. Drawing on these models, we have seen, as we move into the twenty-first century, the development of new approaches to modelling language as a system – emergent grammars, including Construction Grammar – that are more accommodating of large, internally complex units. And finally, as we gradually understand more about how the brain accesses and retrieves linguistic material, we are seeing a resurgence of interest in formulaic language in neurological and clinical contexts.

In this paper I argue that online intercultural interaction and exchange remains a relatively peripheral ‘add-on’ activity in most foreign language classrooms. In its current state, it is yet to be considered an integral part of curricular activity and it does not yet form a significant part of high stakes assessment procedures. Against this background, it is becoming increasingly difficult for educators to justify to learners the value of their online work. I present here an overview of what online intercultural exchange involves and discuss what have been its contributions to foreign language education. I then present findings from a survey of telecollaborative practices and discuss why this activity has yet to become a ‘normalised’ part of foreign language learning.

This paper develops the concept of meaningful literacy and offers a classroom methodology – poetry writing – that manifests this approach to ESL/EFL literacy instruction. The paper is divided into three sections. The first deals with the concept of meaningful literacy learning in second and foreign language pedagogy; the second summarizes empirical evidence that characterizes second language (L2) poetry writing; and the third describes the practical aspects of teaching poetry writing. This approach is presented as a way of humanizing the second and foreign language classroom by refocusing on the individual language learner as the center of the learning process.

Academics are coming under increasing pressure to publish internationally. Given the global dominance of English, this very likely means publishing in English-medium journals and with publishers which publish in English. This raises the important question of the possible disadvantage of those scholars whose first language is not English and who therefore have the additional burden of having to develop adequate proficiency in an additional language, English. As a student of modern languages to university level and of other languages to rather lower levels of proficiency and as a teacher of English for academic purposes (EAP) and of English for research and publication purposes (ERPP), since I became aware of this issue, I have always believed this extra burden on the English as an additional language (EAL) academic writer to be a self-evident truth. Ken Hyland, however, in a recent book (Hyland, 2015) and an article titled ‘Academic publishing and the myth of linguistic injustice’ (Hyland, 2016a), has taken it upon himself to argue that such an assumption is ill-founded. Hyland argues that native-speakers (NSs) of English encounter the same difficulties as non-native speakers (NNSs) when it comes to academic writing, that ‘academic English is no one's first language’, and that it requires ‘deliberate learning’ by both NSs and NSs (p. 57). Native and non-native writers, Hyland implies, are on a level playing field when it comes to writing for publication, both groups having to jump the same hurdles.

East and Southeast Asia represents a linguistically and culturally diverse region. For example, more than 700 languages are spoken in Indonesia alone. It is against this backdrop of diversity that the ten countries that comprise Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) have recently signed the ASEAN Charter which, while calling for respect for the region's languages, cultures and religions also officially nominates English as ASEAN's working language. In this article, we examine the language education policies of the region and consider the implications of these policies for the maintenance of linguistic and cultural diversity on the one hand and the promotion of English and the respective national languages on the other. As ASEAN is closely connected to the three major countries of China, Japan and South Korea, as indicated by the ‘ASEAN + 3’ forum, we also include these countries here. We stress that, as space forbids an in-depth treatment of the language education policies of each of the 13 countries, we have chosen to describe and discuss in some depth the policies of 5 countries (China, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam), as these provide a cross-section of language policy contexts and approaches in the region. We add brief notes on the policies of the remaining countries.

Although multilingualism and multilingual education have existed for centuries, our 21st-century entrance into the new millennium has brought renewed interest and contestation around this educational alternative. Ethnolinguistic diversity and inequality, intercultural communication and contact, and global political and economic interdependence are more than ever acknowledged realities of today's world, and all of them put pressures on our educational systems. Now, as throughout history, multilingual education offers the best possibilities for preparing coming generations to participate in constructing more just and democratic societies in our globalized and intercultural world; however, it is not unproblematically achieved. There are many unanswered questions and doubts as to policy and implementation, program and curricular design, classroom instruction practices, pedagogy, and teacher professional development, but there is also much that we understand and know very well, based on empirical research in many corners of the world. Here I highlight Bolivian and other Indigenous educational experiences with which I am most familiar, and which capture certainties that hold beyond the particular instances I describe. My emphasis is on what we know and are sure of, and my goal is to convey my deep conviction that multilingual education constitutes a wide and welcoming educational doorway toward peaceful coexistence of peoples and especially restoration and empowerment of those who have been historically oppressed.

The pace at which new L2 words or expressions are acquired is influenced by the degree of engagement with them on the part of the learner. Several researchers with a Cognitive-Linguistics (CL) background have, since the 1990s, proposed ways of exploiting non-arbitrary aspects of vocabulary as stimuli for such engagement. Their proposals have been backed up by the results of several quasi-experimental studies. It must be acknowledged, however, that many of these are small-scale, some show only small effect sizes, and some are hard to interpret due to confounding variables. Taken collectively, the reported experiments are nevertheless beginning to constitute a body of evidence in favour of CL-informed instruction that is hard to dismiss, so there is reason to believe that this kind of instruction deserves a niche in second language programmes. However, a judicious implementation of CL ideas stands to gain considerably from a closer alignment with ‘mainstream’ second language vocabulary research. Insights to be taken on board from the mainstream concern issues of selection, the desirability of distributed learning, and the need to cater for complementary types of knowledge.

This article examines curriculum from a social contextual perspective in which enactment – teaching and learning – is the central process, to which planning and evaluation contribute. It looks at the ways two kinds of contexts, target-language embedded and target-language removed, influence language curriculum planning and enactment. It provides a brief history of syllabus design and a rationale for moving beyond syllabus as the primary construct for curriculum planning. It then explores the classroom as the context of enactment and the role of the teacher as catalyst for curriculum change. It reconceptualizes the classroom as a learning community with potential links with real, virtual and imagined communities. It briefly explores integrated approaches to evaluation and assessment and concludes with examples of promising directions and suggestions for further research. Examples of practice that illustrate concepts are provided throughout the article.

The production-oriented approach (POA) has been developed over ten years to overcome the weaknesses in English instruction in tertiary education in Mainland China. The POA tries to integrate the strengths of Western instructional approaches with Chinese contextual features and consists of three components: (a) teaching principles; (b) teaching hypotheses; and (c) teacher-mediated teaching processes. The teaching principles include ‘learning-centered’, ‘learning-using integration’, and ‘whole-person education’, and the teaching hypotheses are ‘output-driven’, ‘input-enabled’, and ‘selective learning’. The teaching processes contain three phases, each mediated by the teacher: motivating, enabling, and assessing. The three principles set guidelines for the other two components; the three hypotheses serve as a theoretical basis for the teaching process; the three-phase teaching process reflects and illustrates the principles while testing the hypotheses.

This state-of-the-art review is based on the fundamental idea that political economy should be adopted as a frame for research and discussion in applied linguistics as part of a general social turn which has taken hold in the field over the past three decades. It starts with Susan Gal's (1989) early call for such a move in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, that is, for ‘investigations of the links among language structure, language use, and political economy’ (Gal 1989: 346), and moves from a consideration of theoretical bases to the discussion and critique of concrete examples of research. Thus, after a fairly detailed discussion of political economy and the key constructs neoliberalism and social class, the paper moves to a review of research in three broad areas. First, it focuses on how issues and constructs from political economy have been incorporated into discussions of education, work and leisure by a growing number of sociolinguists. This is followed by a review of research which has focused specifically on social class as a central organising construct and then a third section on political economy in language teaching and learning research. The review ends with a consideration of the future of political economy in applied linguistics research.

This article reviews research and developments that are relevant to second language students writing in academic settings. First, it reviews research into writing requirements at undergraduate and postgraduate levels of study. It then discusses the particular socio-cultural context of academic writing, including the notions of genre and discourse community, and the politics of academic writing. The article then reviews descriptions of academic writing that draw on register studies, discourse studies, genre studies, and corpus studies. This includes cross-cultural comparisons of academic writing, disciplinary differences in academic writing, and critical views on the nature of academic writing. The article then reviews the development of approaches to the teaching of academic writing. The article concludes with a discussion of the assessment of academic writing and indications for future research in the area of second language academic writing.

Following on from my state-of-the-art article on Language Awareness and language learning (Svalberg 2007), in this paper I will discuss specific research tasks which are centrally concerned with different aspects of language awareness (LA): ‘explicit knowledge about language, and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning, language teaching and language use’. The overall argument is that research is needed into how LA is constructed by language learners and teachers through engagement with language (Svalberg 2007; 2009). I will sometimes refer specifically to awareness of grammar (form-meaning) but hope the paper will stimulate ideas for research into other LA aspects of language learning and teaching. The absence of other issues and areas (such as LA and multilingualism, intercultural LA, critical LA, LA and language policy) is a function of the personal nature of the paper and the limitations of space.

This article is organised in five main sections. It begins by outlining the scope of pronunciation teaching and the role of pronunciation in our personal and social lives. The second section surveys the background to pronunciation teaching from its origins in the early twentieth century to the present day, and includes a discussion of pronunciation models and of the role of the first language (L1) in the acquisition of second language (L2) pronunciation. Then a third section explores recent research into a range of aspects involved in the process: the effects of L1 and L2 similarities and differences; the role of intelligibility, accent attitudes, identity and motivation; the part played by listening; and the place of pronunciation within discourse. This section concludes with a discussion of a number of controversies that have arisen from recent pronunciation research and of research into the potential for using computer-based technology in pronunciation teaching. The fourth section explores a range of socio-political issues that affect pronunciation teaching when the L2 is learnt as an international rather than a foreign language, and the fifth section moves on to consider the implications of all this for teaching.

This article argues that the Council of Europe's European Language Portfolio is capable of supporting the implementation of language learner autonomy on a large scale. It begins by explaining what the author understands by ‘language learner autonomy’, then introduces the European Language Portfolio and explains how it can stimulate reflective learning in which goal setting and self-assessment play a central role. It concludes by giving two practical examples that involve the learning of L2 English in Ireland, in one case by adult immigrants with refugee status and in the other by newcomer pupils in primary schools.

The ability to communicate in English is now essential to academic success for many students and researchers. Not only has the language established a fairly firm grip in higher education, particularly in the lives of postgraduate students, but also in academic research, where careers are increasingly tied to an ability to publish in international journals in English. Countless students and academics around the world, therefore, must now gain fluency in the conventions of relatively ‘standardized’ versions of academic writing in English to understand their disciplines, to establish their careers or to successfully navigate their learning (e.g. Hyland 2009). English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and the teaching of academic writing in particular, has emerged to support this process (Hyland & Shaw 2016; Hyland 2017a). However, EAP, and its relationship to English language education more generally, is seen from a number of different perspectives, not all of which flatter the field. Among the more critical are that it is complicit in the relentless expansion of English which threatens indigenous academic registers (e.g. Phillipson 1992; Canagarajah 1999), that it is a remedial ‘service activity’ on the periphery of university life (Spack 1988), and that it imposes an imprisoning conformity to disciplinary values and native norms on second language writers (e.g. Benesch 2001).