Research on second language (L2) collaborative writing (CW) has proliferated over the recent decade and will continue to bloom due to the changing landscape of writing and learning in the digital age. This article provides a research agenda on CW in L2 classrooms. We illustrate six research themes for future research inquiry by pointing out the research gap, following a brief review of theoretical frameworks and existing empirical efforts on CW. We then expound on six specific research tasks that we deem to be pressing for this domain to progress, including more attention to multimodal CW, expanded frameworks for analyzing peer interaction and writing products, deployment of underused research techniques and improved research practice, development of CW assessment practice, as well as the inquiry of practitioners’ input on CW. We hope to provide guidance for future research endeavors by identifying avenues of investigations on CW and meanwhile contribute to the trajectory of vibrant research on L2 writing and language learning.

In this paper, I argue for expanding language socialization research on the academic discourse socialization of speakers of English as an additional language to less-commonly researched settings outside of English-dominant countries. Following an overview of some theoretical and methodological issues involved in conducting such research, I lay out a research agenda, focusing on several topics and issues that have the potential to illuminate issues of interest in both language socialization and second language acquisition regarding how competence and community are defined in a globalized, multilingual world. These include: (a) closer investigation of presumed ‘cultural differences’ between ‘Western’ and ‘Asian’ academic discourse practices, (b) the effect of social categories such as ethnicity and ‘nonnative speaker’ status on the construction of ‘expert’ and ‘novice’ identities in these settings, (c) the role of socializing agents outside of the classroom, and (d) the extent to which students in these settings are being socialized into practices and ideologies that promote multicompetence.

English Medium Instruction (EMI) has been defined as ‘the use of the English language to teach academic subjects (other than English itself) in countries or jurisdictions where the first language (L1) of the majority of the population is not English’ (Macaro, 2018, p. 19). This definition has proved to be controversial but has underpinned the work of our research group, from whose collective perspective this article is written. Debates have centred on the role that English language development plays in EMI contexts, and whether this current definitional scope is too narrow in its exclusion of English medium educational practices in Anglophone settings. Pecorari and Malmström (2018), for example, observe that some members of the EMI research community interpret EMI more broadly to include ‘contexts in which English is a dominant language and in which English language development is supported and actively worked for’ (p. 507). Similarly, Baker and Hüttner (2016, p. 502) state that excluding Anglophone contexts from EMI is ‘unhelpful’ by failing to include the experiences of multilingual students in Anglophone universities who learn through their second language (L2). A focus on multilingualism is also one of the driving forces behind the emergence of new terminology that seeks to shift focus towards the contexts of education, rather than instruction and pedagogy. Dafouz and Smit (2016), for example, prefer the term English-Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings (EMEMUS), because the ‘label is semantically wider, as it does not specify any particular pedagogical approach or research agenda’ (p. 399).

We report on a conceptual replication of Révész (2012) in order to investigate the idea whether learners provided with recasts do engage in different kinds of behavioral engagement as a function of their working memory and if/how this engagement comes to bear on performance on different measures. Engagement with recasts was measured through a coding method categorizing responses to the recasts running the gamut from: (1) no opportunity, (2) opportunity, but did not repeat, (3) repeated the recasted form, (4) negotiated the response, to (5) used the recasted form later in the discourse. Consistent with Révész (2012), though with lower effect sizes, the results showed that recasts were most conducive to gains on an oral task and less so on a written description task, but non-effective on a grammaticality judgment task. Furthermore, it was revealed that learners with a high phonological short-term memory were more prone to recast-induced engagement on an oral production task, whereas those enjoying a higher reading span were considerably less so. We propose that learner engagement be deemed more important in future interaction research.

This replication study seeks to extend the generalizability of an exploratory study (McDonough et al., 2019) that identified holds (i.e., temporary cessation of dynamic movement by the listener) as a reliable visual cue of non-understanding. Conversations between second language (L2) English speakers in the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca Interaction (CELFI; McDonough & Trofimovich, 2019) with non-understanding episodes (e.g., pardon?, what?, sorry?) were sampled and compared with understanding episodes (i.e., follow-up questions). External raters (N = 90) assessed the listener's comprehension under three rating conditions: +face/+voice, −face/+voice, and +face/−voice. The association between non-understanding and holds in McDonough et al. (2019) was confirmed. Although raters distinguished reliably between understanding and non-understanding episodes, they were not sensitive to facial expressions when judging listener comprehension. The initial and replication findings suggest that holds remain a promising visual signature of non-understanding that can be explored in future theoretically- and pedagogically-oriented contexts.

In contemporary methodological thinking, replication holds a central place. However, relatively little attention has been paid to replication in the context of complex dynamic systems theory (CDST), perhaps due to uncertainty regarding the epistemology–methodology match between these domains. In this paper, we explore the place of replication in relation to open systems and argue that three conditions must be in place for replication research to be effective: results interpretability, theoretical maturity, and terminological precision. We consider whether these conditions are part of the applied linguistics body of work, and then propose a more comprehensive framework centering on what we call substantiation research, only one aspect of which is replication. Using this framework, we discuss three approaches to dealing with replication from a CDST perspective theory. These approaches are moving from a representing to an intervening mindset, from a comprehensive theory to a mini-theory mindset, and from individual findings to a cumulative mindset.

In my presentation I argue, not for the first time, the need to rethink orthodox ideas about the relationship between applied linguistics and English language teaching that have been promoted in the past and still prevail. I will do this by taking up issues in questions that I invited colleagues to send me in advance; issues that I have discussed elsewhere, most recently in Widdowson (2019, 2020). Therefore, in many ways, this talk is a reformulation of views I have expressed in the past, but which, I would claim, have a direct relevance to the present.

Accurate description of language use is central to English for academic purposes (EAP) practice. Thanks to the development of corpus tools, it has been possible to undertake systematic studies of language in academic contexts. This line of research aims to provide detailed and accurate characterization of academic communication and to ultimately inform EAP practice. Very few studies, however, have attempted to ascertain whether, and to what the extent, corpus-based findings have achieved such goals. The diverse nature of EAP, and the unique methodological challenges involved in compiling and using corpora, provide sufficient incentive for replication research in this area. The present article makes a case for replication of corpus-based studies in the field of EAP. It argues that replication research not only enhances the credibility of corpus linguistics for EAP pedagogy and research but also provides practical advice for EAP teachers and materials designers. It then looks at how two key corpus-based studies on the topic, Cortes (2013) and Biber and Gray (2010), can be replicated with respect to replication approaches described in Porte (2012).

The following is an edited transcript of a webinar that took place on 11 June 2022 between Diane Larsen-Freeman and seven colleagues (in alphabetical order: Anne Burns, Hossein Farhady, Mathias Schulze, Scott Thornbury, Benjamin White, Henry Widdowson, and Yasin Yazdi-Amirkhiz), who generously took the time to formulate and submit questions in advance of the webinar and to participate in the event. The focus of the webinar was on Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). Coincidentally, the webinar took place on the 25th anniversary of Larsen-Freeman's first publication on the same theme (Larsen-Freeman, 1997).

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.