There is a great deal of variation in gains found between studies of second language (L2) incidental vocabulary learning, as well as many factors that affect learning. This meta-analysis investigated the effects of exposure to L2 meaning-focused input on incidental vocabulary learning with an aim to clarify the proportional gains that occur through meaning-focused learning. Twenty-four primary studies were retrieved providing 29 different effect sizes and a total sample size of 2,771 participants (1,517 in experimental groups vs. 1,254 in control groups). Results showed large overall effects for incidental vocabulary learning on first and follow-up posttests. Mean proportions of target words learned ranged from 9–18% on immediate posttests, and 6–17% on delayed posttests. Incidental L2 vocabulary learning gains were similar across reading (17%, 15%), listening (15%, 13%), and reading while listening (13%, 17%) conditions on immediate and delayed posttest. In contrast, the proportion of words learned in viewing conditions on immediate posttests was smaller (7%, 5%). Findings also revealed that the amount of incidental learning varies according to a range of moderator variables including learner characteristics (L2 proficiency, institutional levels), materials (text type and audience), learning activities (spacing, mode of input), and methodological features (approaches to controlling prior word knowledge).

The growing adoption of emerging technologies for language pedagogy, literacy development, and language assessment has accelerated computer-assisted language learning (CALL) as a major field of education and led to the establishment of major specialized journals, such as Language Learning and Technology, Computer Assisted Language Learning, and ReCALL. As technologies further advanced, we began to see individuals and schools increasingly adopt CALL technologies and use their interactive features to facilitate language learning. Consequently, CALL research began to gain momentum and expand its research foci during the mid-1990s (Levy, 2000; Uzunboylu & Ozcinar, 2009). This expansion gave birth to some independent and stand-alone subfields, such as computer-assisted language testing (CALT) (Parmaxi et al., 2013).

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.

Given that I have been a teacher of one kind or another for practically all of my working life, starting as a high school English teacher before moving into TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages), I would like to suggest (in all modesty, of course!) that I am in a good position to understand the stresses of the job. In this position paper, I would like to try to explain the background to the issues of teacher stress, to identify contemporary problem areas, to suggest some possible ways to address the problems, and also to explain why tackling teacher stress is so important – both for teachers themselves, and also for the other stakeholders, especially the learners. Although this article draws essentially on the experience of language teachers and related literature, many of the issues described could apply to teachers of any subject at any level anywhere, a point that will be taken up again when suggesting areas for further research.

This review provides an account of salient research topics in current Swedish research in the field of foreign language (FL) education, with the aim of making locally published work available outside Sweden. A corpus of work on English and other FLs published between 2012 and 2021 has been scrutinized. Focus has been placed on research conducted and disseminated in Sweden, in some cases adding international publications, in order to portray the work in a wider context. Research on FL learning, teaching, and assessment is reviewed in light of recent policy changes as well as a changing linguistic situation characterized by a plethora of languages spoken in society, among which Swedish as majority language and English as lingua franca share indisputable sovereignty, but where a newly-born interest in the role of other background languages than Swedish can be discerned. The study ends with a discussion of trends observed in the reviewed material and considerations in view of future research.

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.

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.