As a phenomenon, discourse does not belong only to applied linguistics, although applied linguistics figures among the disciplines in which discourse is a central focus. For approximately the last three decades, applied linguists and scholars in allied disciplines have developed more detailed theoretical foundations, more sophisticated research techniques, and a wider range of applications for discourse analysis. Heterogeneity of theoretical perspectives, contexts of application, and research methods has been a hallmark of contemporary discourse research, as many of the volumes in the influential series Advances in Discourse Processes attest (see, for example, Tannen, 1988). Papers in the 1990 volume of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Grabe, 1990) similarly testify to the already well-established variety of discourse analytic approaches and applications. The classroom has never been the only setting with which discourse analysts and applied linguists have concerned themselves, although educational applications of discourse analytic techniques have been common in North American scholarship ever since The Language of the Classroom (Bellack, Kliebard, Hyman, & Smith, 1966), Functions of Language in the Classroom (Cazden, John, & Hymes, 1972), and Towards an Analysis of Discourse (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). It remains a context of major consequence for many applied linguists because of their connection to the world of teaching practice and assessment. The theme of this year's volume, Discourse and Dialogue, revisits some of the topics discussed in these earlier volumes, adds some new areas of consideration, and captures some of the richness of recent discourse-related work.

In 1960 I was looking for an interesting thesis topic. My advisor, Professor Harold Hand of the University of Illinois, suggested that I combine my two interests of language teaching and psychology and gave me a month to research the possibilities in this area. After a concentrated period of reading and searching, I gathered together my 3 by 5 cards and went to see Professor Hand. I reported to him that, from my reading, it was clear that, in the present state of the field, it would be impossible to apply the psychologists' theories to the processes of language learning and teaching. To this he replied “Then you go and do it.”

Over four decades ago the so-called Chomskyan revolution appeared to lay the foundation for a promising new partnership between linguistics and psychology. Many have now concluded, however, that the hopes originally expressed for this partnership were not realized. This chapter is about what went wrong and where we might go from here. The discussion first identifies three reasons why initial efforts at partnership may have been inherently flawed — divergent criteria for choosing among competing theories, different ideas about what was to be explained, and different approaches to questions about biology and environment. I then argue that recent developments — especially in associative learning theory, in cognitive neuroscience, and in linguistic theory — may provide a more solid basis for partnership. Next, the chapter describes two possible ways that bridges between the disciplines might develop. One draws on recent psychological research on attention focusing and on linguistic research concerning language constructions. The other draws on the concept of affordances and perspective taking. The chapter concludes that an enduring partnership between linguistics and psychology may indeed now be possible and that there may be a special role for applied linguistics in this new development.

This volume of The Annual Review of Applied Linguistics explores the connections between psychology and language. In the following chapter, I will show how a field that increasingly informs psychology can also inform the psychological issues that concern applied linguists. Neurobiology and psychology have become more closely integrated in recent years as evidenced by the emergence and development of such disciplinary interfaces as biopsychology and cognitive neuroscience. The recognition that psychological phenomena are subserved by the brain is widely accepted; via developments in neuroimaging technology, the brain is becoming amenable to direct psychological investigation. In this chapter, I examine brain mechanisms that are involved in second language acquisition motivation, in cognitive/motor exploratory activity in learning, and in decision-making aspects of pragmatics in language use.

The study of L2 motivation has reached an exciting turning point in the 1990s, with a variety of new models and approaches proposed in the literature, resulting in what Gardner and Tremblay (1994) have called a ‘motivational renaissance.’ In this chapter I provide an overview of some of the current themes and research directions that I find particularly novel or forward-looking. The summary is divided into three sections: theoretical advances, new approaches in research methodology, and emerging new motivational themes. I argue that the initial research inspiration and standard-setting empirical work on L2 motivation originating from Canada has borne fruit by ‘educating’ a new generation of international scholars who, together with the pioneers of the field, have applied their expertise in diverse contexts and in creative ways, thereby creating a colorful mixture of approaches comparable to the multi-faceted arena of mainstream motivational psychology.

This chapter reviews the literature on psycholinguistic aspects of language attrition over the past half decade. Descriptive data-based studies have continued to dominate during this time, providing needed groundwork for the emerging discipline. A few studies have continued theoretical threads from previous work, however, by examining attrition data from the perspectives of the regression hypothesis and markedness theory. We have also seen the beginnings of promising new lines of research which draw theoretical underpinnings from neighboring disciplines, most notably from the savings paradigm in cognitive psychology and from theories of codeswitching in bilingualism studies. Evidence on the effects in attrition of non-linguistic variables such as age, proficiency level, and literacy has continued to accumulate. Hesitation phenomena in attriter speech have begun to receive serious attention. Relearning, one of the main areas to potentially benefit from language attrition studies, is also gaining new research impetus at the turn of the century.

The idea that there is an age factor in language development has long been — and continues to be — a hotly debated topic. This review begins by briefly revisiting some of the early perspectives on this issue; it goes on to sketch some of the relevant findings which emerged in the three decades following the onset in the late 1960s of serious empirical investigation of the age factor in L2 acquisition; and, finally, in the third section of the survey, it hones in on the results of some more recently published age-related research. The article concludes with a short discussion — in the light of the foregoing — of (a) the degree of absoluteness of the age factor in L2 acquisition; and (b) the notion that there may be not one, but a number, of age-related factors at work.

What has happened with the construct of foreign language aptitude since 1990, at which time symposium participants from around the world agreed that the "Time has come to rethink the notion of what constitutes aptitude to learn foreign languages?" To answer this question, we begin with a review of studies on foreign language aptitude and its measurement prior to 1990. We then describe research and thinking in the 1990s in several areas, including affective variables; language learning strategies; learning styles as contributors to aptitude; and aptitude as a cognitive construct affected by language variables. Next, we review research on individual differences in language learners and the importance of phonological/orthographic processing for foreign language learning. Finally, we suggest new directions for research in foreign language aptitude.

This chapter considers the literature on language learning anxiety in an effort to clarify the relationship between anxiety and second language learning. It will first argue that language anxiety is a specific anxiety — rather than a trait anxiety — and discuss how this conceptualization has helped clarify the research literature. After Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope (1986) proposed that a specific anxiety construct which they called Foreign Language Anxiety was responsible for students' uncomfortable experiences in language classes and offered an instrument, the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS), to measure this anxiety, findings concerning anxiety and language achievement have been relatively uniform, indicating a consistent moderate negative relationship between anxiety and achievement. However, some researchers (Sparks and Ganschow and their colleagues) have suggested that poor language learning is a cause rather than a result of language anxiety. This review concludes that anxiety is indeed a cause of poor language learning in some individuals and discusses possible sources of this anxiety, including difficulty in authentic self-presentation and various language teaching practices. In addition, it reports on new trends in language anxiety research that attempt to identify aspects of language learning (e.g., reading anxiety or writing anxiety) which provoke anxiety for some individuals.

We review major issues in research on reading, including theories of word reading, cross-writing system comparisons, comprehension, reading difficulties, learning how to read, and cognitive neuroscience studies of reading. Each of these topics has psycholinguistic components that reflect the language foundations of reading. These foundations lie in two facts: (1) a writing system connects to a linguistic system at one or more levels, meaning that word reading is partially a psycholinguistic process; and (2): reading comprehension shares processes (e.g., parsing) with general language comprehension. One trend of recent research is the development of models of word identification that rely on single rather than dual mechanisms and their extension to explain reading difficulties. Another is the conclusion that phonology plays a role in reading that cuts across writing systems. Reading comprehension research continues to reflect two different traditions, sentence parsing and text comprehension. Both show increasing influence of general cognitive explanations, as opposed to strictly linguistic explanations, for comprehension phenomena. Studies of brain activation bring converging evidence on reading processes and provide neuroanatomical correlates of reading problems. In one area, the acquisition and teaching of reading, advances come from increasing consolidation and practical use of previous research gains.

Most general theories of language acquisition are based on studies of children who acquire one language. A general theory of language acquisition must ultimately accommodate the facts about children who acquire two languages simultaneously during infancy. This chapter reviews current research in three domains of bilingual acquisition: pragmatic features of bilingual code-mixing, grammatical constraints on child bilingual code-mixing, and bilingual syntactic development. It examines the implications of findings from these domains for our understanding of the limits of the mental faculty to acquire language. Findings indicate that infants possess the requisite neuro-cognitive capacity to differentially represent and use two languages simultaneously from the one-word stage onward, and probably earlier. Detailed analyses of the syntactic organization of bilingual child language indicates, moreover, that it conforms to the target systems and, thus, resembles that of children acquiring the same languages monolingually, for the most part. At the same time, bilingual children acquire the distinctive capacity to coordinate their two languages in grammatically constrained ways and in conformity with the target grammars during online production. In short, current evidence attests to the bilingual capacity of the human mind and refutes earlier conceptualizations which viewed bilingualism and bilingual acquisition as burdensome and potentially disruptive to development.

This chapter examines differences in metalinguistic development between monolingual and bilingual children in terms of three subcategories: word awareness, syntactic awareness, and phonological awareness. In each case, some studies have reported advantages for bilingual children, but equally, other studies have found either no difference between the groups, or, in some cases, monolingual advantages. In the discussion of each of these areas, the kinds of tasks for which bilingual and monolingual children perform differently are identified. In none of these three subcategories of metalinguistic awareness do bilingual children exhibit a uniform and consistent advantage over monolinguals. An alternate conception of metalinguistic ability is proposed in which two cognitive processes, analysis and control, are directly responsible for task performance. These processes are involved in all metalinguistic tasks but to different degrees. Re-examining the results in this way reveals that bilingual advantages occur reliably on tasks that make high demands on control but are not evident in tasks that make high demands on analysis. The implications of this pattern for metalinguistic ability are considered.

This chapter reviews recent empirical evidence for universal and orthography- or language-specific processes in the development of basic reading skills in school age children, suggesting that universal and orthography- or language-specific processes should be considered in tandem. The review focuses on three different aspects of reading, phonological processing, rapid naming, and morphosyntactic complexity, targeted in recent research on development of word recognition skills. Studies on L1 school children and studies of children who learn to read concurrently in their L1 and/or in a second language (L2) are examined within the context of variations in orthographic transparency. When children learn to read, characteristics of the spoken language interact with characteristics of the orthography. The chapter concludes that (a) individual differences in phonological processing skills, verbal memory, and rapid naming predict the development of reading in L1 and L2 children in various alphabetic and nonalphabetic languages; and (b) individual differences on such prerequisite skills can indicate smooth or problematic acquisition of L2 reading skills in children, regardless of oral language proficiency. However, task demands associated with learning to read in different orthographies vary and yield steeper or more moderate learning slopes. Regardless of the language and orthography combinations under study, children can develop reading strategies that help them read.

This chapter reviews recent research that investigates second language performance from the perspective of sentence processing (on-line comprehension studies) and word recognition. It concentrates on describing methods that employ reaction time measures as correlates of processing difficulty or knowledge representation. This research suggests that second language learners employ much the same on-line processing strategies as native speakers, but that the L1 can also influence L2 processing. Reaction times in lexical decision experiments have been useful in exploring the relationship between the first and second language lexicons and automatic processes in lexical access. Finally, the chapter mentions some of the problems in this line of research, in particular the issue of individual differences in working memory and technological challenges.

Acceptance of the claims made by researchers in any field depends in large part on the appropriateness of the methods used to gather data. In this chapter I focus on two approaches to research in second language acquisition: (a) various types of acceptability judgments or probes aimed at assessing acquisition of syntactic structure; and (b) various types of stimulated recall designed to gather learners' accounts of their own thought processes. Both methods attempt to overcome a principal problem in psycholinguistics: the desire to describe a learner's knowledge about a language based on the incomplete evidence stemming from learner production. Refinements in acceptability judgments have come from some newer multiple-choice or truth-value story tasks that allow researchers to determine the level of learner knowledge about particular syntactic structures (in the examples here, reflexives). Stimulated recall offers some additional perspectives, but its usefulness can be greatly affected by the temporal proximity of the recall to the original task; the amount of support provided to prompt the recall; and the nature and amount of training given to both interviewer and interviewee. While these newer research methods can improve the accuracy and variety of data available to SLA investigators, research methods drawn from L1 acquisition or L1 research cannot necessarily be assumed to be equally valid when used to examine L2 acquisition.

Some form of verbal report — that is, a research participant's concurrent or retrospective verbal account of thought processes during problem-solving activities — has been used throughout this century as the data base from which psychologists have developed theories of human mentation. Newell and Simon (1972) and Ericsson and Simon (1980, 1993) have provided extensive justification for use of one such method, protocol analysis, to investigate cognition from an information processing (IP) perspective. They have characterized protocol analysis as a methodology capable of providing evidence of the cognitive processes used when people attend to information stored in short term memory (STM) in order to solve problems. Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), with its concern for the mediation of human development by culturally- and historically-grounded signs and tools based on the work of Vygotsky (1987), Leont'ev (1981), and others, suggests a different view of protocol analysis. In this chapter I outline a CHAT perspective that accounts for protocol analysis along three key dimensions: (a) the relationship between thinking and speech from a representational standpoint; (b) the social role of speech in research methodology; and (c) the influence of speech on thinking during data collection. The purpose of this discussion is to illustrate how use of verbal reports can be viewed through a CHAT lens and to identify alternative assumptions necessary to use it from a CHAT perspective.