The last couple of decades have seen a dramatic increase in corpus availability and a steady growth in the number of supporters of the use of corpora in language teaching. Yet there still seems to be a long way to go before corpora can be understood and used by language teachers in general. Novice corpus users often fail to grasp that corpora do not work in the same way as the more familiar language learning resources – such as dictionaries, grammar books and textbooks – that they are accustomed to using. I therefore propose a series of task-based, consciousness-raising exercises to help teachers (who are not corpus linguists) understand the basics of corpora. The tasks proposed are not about learning how to use a specific corpus or software, but about learning how to use corpora in general.

Most explanatory work on first and second language learning assumes the primacy of the acquisition phenomenon itself, and a good deal of work has been devoted to the search for an ‘acquisition device’ that is specific to humans, and perhaps even to language. I will consider the possibility that this strategy is misguided and that language acquisition is a secondary effect of processing amelioration: attempts by the processor to facilitate its own functioning by developing routines of particular sorts.

The National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education (NRCFLE) attached to Beijing Foreign Studies University (www.sinotefl.ac.cn/) is a key research institute in the humanities and social sciences in universities approved by the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the People's Republic of China. It was formally set up and approved in September 2000. After a decade of dedicated hard work, the centre has become an applied linguistics hub of research and training unrivalled in China, and co-hosted AILA2011, the 16th World Congress in Applied Linguistics in August 2011. The current director of the centre, WEN Qiufang, currently presides over the China English Language Education Association, another co-host of AILA2011. The centre publishes two journals, one of them, Foreign Language Teaching and Research, being pre-eminent in the field in every key journal index in China, as well as being the only journal in applied linguistics and foreign language education to feature in the MOE's 2010 Distinguished Journals in Humanities and Social Sciences.

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.

The Open University, Milton Keynes, 21 April 2010

This seminar, organised by Caroline Coffin and Jim Donohue (both from the Open University, UK), took the form of a day of dialogue between invited experts and other interested parties, including academic writing practitioners, researchers and postgraduate students. The invited speakers were asked to form panels representing either Academic Literacies or Systemic Functional Linguistics.

Established in 1983, the Centre for Applied Linguistics (CAL) at the University of Warwick is committed to a wide range of teaching, research and consultancy activities which focus on language use, language analysis, language learning and language teaching. It is also engaged in the development of multimedia, teaching and research materials and in a number of joint projects with national and international institutions. Its activities are supported by a variety of resources: staff and student expertise, facilities, equipment and materials including collections such as the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) and the British Academic Written English (BAWE) and the Warwick ELT Archive.

This action research project explores the principles that teachers follow when developing their own materials for lessons aimed at integrating content and language in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) lessons in state secondary education.

The Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century (SFLL) (National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project [NSFLEP]), originally published in 1996, were envisioned by many as the panacea for providing a new and exciting direction for foreign language education in the United States. The perceived impact of these National K-16 Student Standards has been witnessed throughout more than a decade by scholarly works that have acknowledged their role as ‘a veritable change agent’ (Sharpley-Whiting 1999: 84), ‘a vision for foreign language education in the new century’ (Allen 2002: 518), and, more recently, as ‘a blueprint and framework for change’ (Terry 2009: 17). The research that has been done on the Standards since their inception has attempted to provide concrete ways for the field to embrace this new framework and thereby realize a Standards-based curriculum and perhaps even revolutionize language education. This work has consisted largely of (1) implementational research (both with and without experimental design) that proposes specific strategies for addressing the Standards in planning, teaching, and assessment (Schwartz & Kavanaugh 1997; Abbott & Lear 2010); (2) survey research that analyzes self-reported information regarding teachers' pedagogical beliefs about the Standards and ways in which they claim to be addressing Standards in their classrooms (Allen 2002; ACTFL 2011), and (3) White papers that disseminate opinions and insights by leaders in the field regarding the impact that the Standards are having in areas such as language instruction, curriculum and course design, and educational policy (Sharpley-Whiting 1999; Donato 2009; Glisan 2010).

University of Birmingham, 24–25 June 2010

The event (co-ordinated by Alison Sealey and Paul Thompson, University of Birmingham) was divided so that the first day focused mainly on the use of corpus-informed teaching with L1 learners and the second on additional language teaching contexts.

The main purpose of this study is to identify the professional writing needs of undergraduate students studying social work in the University of Botswana. In order to do this, it seeks to analyse the types of texts produced by social workers in their professional setting, to find out what relationship exists between the writing done by professional social workers and the writing taught in the dedicated English Language Support unit at the University of Botswana, and to explore the similarities and differences between the documents written by the students and those produced by professional social workers. It also examines current approaches to teaching writing in the University, with the aim of identifying the writing needs of social work students and exploring how these can be effectively addressed.

Presented at the 16th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA), Beijing Foreign Studies University, China, 24 August 2011.

SLA research has long been challenged by the flawed comparison of L2 learners to native speakers (Bley-Vroman 1983). Since the start of the new millennium, applied linguists have paid increasing attention to studies of English as a lingua franca (ELF), defined as ‘communication in English between speakers with different first languages’ (Seidlhofer 2005: 339). From the ELF perspective, L2 speakers of English are no longer considered as ‘failed native speakers’ who produce problematic talk, but as ‘highly skilled communicators’ (Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey 2011: 284) who attempt to use multilingual resources to achieve their communicative goals.

The Centre for Applied Language Studies (CALS), founded in 1997, is a research centre within the School of Languages, Literature, Culture and Communication. It brings together researchers and postgraduate students from several disciplines within the School, which includes six languages: English (English Language Teaching and English Literature), French, German, Irish, Japanese and Spanish. The Centre provides a focus for research in applied language studies within the University and a focal point for national and international links. It also promotes the interaction of research and the application of language activities in areas such as language learning, corpus linguistics, language in society, and language planning and policy. CALS also has a number of associate members from other Irish and European universities who make an important contribution to the work of the Centre by co-supervising Ph.D. theses and collaborating in publications and events. The Centre currently has 65 members, including 21 Ph.D. students.

Presented at the 16th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA), Beijing Foreign Studies University, China, 27 August 2011.

This symposium aimed to capture the multiple and dynamic processes of language and identity in the context of globalization. The pervasive process of globalization has inevitably affected the previously existing social and linguistic order. Broad, stable and normal patterns of conduct are being deconstructed and reshuffled; multiple, overlapping and conflicting forms are being shaped and reshaped. The abnormal becomes normal; disorder becomes the new order. The symposium explored this issue from two complementary perspectives – a macro perspective that focuses on language policies, and a micro perspective that focuses on how people struggle to articulate their identities.

My research represents an application of the method of autoethnography to the field of teacher education. According to one definition, autoethnography is ‘an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness connecting the personal to the cultural’ (Ellis & Bochner 2000: 739). It is associated with the growing acceptance of the use of the self in research which is characteristic of the postmodern era (Muncey 2010: xii). One of its advantages is that it allows voices that are normally hidden to be heard, including those which are deviant in some way or differ from the official explanations given for a phenomenon (ibid.: 110). Any situation that involves human beings is complex, and the opportunities offered by autoethnography allow the researcher to engage productively with this complexity.