Teaching English [or any language] as a medium for science and technologymust involve us in the teaching of how scientists and technologistsuse the system of language to communicate, and not just what linguistic elements are most commonly used (1979:12–23).

In this comment, he implies the definition of the problem underlying any discussion of “language and science.” Such a discussion must deal with the language(s) used to communicate science, with the varieties scientists use to communicate with each other, and with the ways in which those varieties (as differentiated from the “general variety” of the language) may be taught to someone else. These different issues assume quite different underlying questions. This brief review will try to address some of the complex questions involved.

As the opening quotation suggests, a shift in the practice of literacy such as is suggested by the term, literacy online, has epochal significance: The death of one world (that of print) and its replacement by something else (the online world) signals not just a change in communication or technology but a change in civilization itself. Just what is this new world of literacy online that seems to await us, and how should we approach it—with open arms or poised for battle? Behind such questions lies a host of definitional difficulties. Surely the temptation is here for a kind of simplicity: “Online literacy” means reading and writing with a computer. But reading and writing what and how? In theory, we can read a dense, complex novel like Henry James' Golden Bowl—a work created in and designed for the privacy, solitude, and deep interiority of print culture—sitting in front of a computer terminal. Of central importance, however, is not the theoretical possibility of being able to read anything from a computer screen but whether or not readers and writers fully acclimated to the computer screen as the primary source of literacy would ever think to read, much less produce, such a work in the first place.

Language syllabus or curriculum design is a constantly changing and continuously expanding sub-field of applied linguistics, as pointed out by Yalden (1987). In its historical development it has drawn, on the one hand, upon general syllabus design, and on the other hand upon relevant fields in applid linguistics such as: language teaching methodology, second language acquisition research, and language planning and policy making. The interaction with these fields of specialization has enriched the process of curriculum design and made it senstive and responsive to needs on the one hand and to research and evaluation on the other.

This 40th anniversary of ARAL also marks the 40-year anniversary of a significant uptick in research on language assessment, and hence there is much to reflect on and revisit within this period—and still scope for imagining the future. Pre-1980, language assessment had a long history, but Spolsky (1995) designated the late 1940s as a time of professionalization, which continued through the following decades. By the 1970s, language testers were gradually organizing into an academic community with an annual international conference, regional conferences, journals, and scholarly books. The new academic community not only developed and used language tests but also investigated the validity of their interpretations and uses. Canale's (1987) paper in ARAL provides an enduring frame of reference for reflection on the concerns of the academic community, which he introduced as the what, how, and why of language assessment.

The word Communicative has, unfortunately, become so widespread that it has suffered the fate of words like democracy and freedom. At worst it has lost any precise meaning and comes to refer to any set of characteristics considered by its user to be good, modern, progressive. At best, the word is invested with precise meaning, but what is meant by it differs from user to user so that it becomes impossible to make generalizations on the topic which would satisfy all those who use the term. Indeed, any attempt at generalization is likely to lead to more divisive debate than it is to bring warring parties together.

Language anxiety plays a key role in language learners’ silent behaviors in class (King, 2013). Given its public nature and emphasis on interaction within it, the classroom context plays a significant role in the production of language anxiety. Anxious people are more likely to negatively appraise situations, affecting their behavior. That is, it is not just the subject content that causes anxiety, it is also the cognitive processes that occur from being in the classroom environment (Clark & Wells, 1995; Horwitz et al., 2010). King (2014) found that anxious language learners’ thoughts often contain feared predictions about the social costs of speaking in the classroom and worries about how peers might negatively evaluate performance. These fears about external factors contribute to learners becoming inhibited and using silence to avoid the discomfort of speaking. Also, while anxious learners tend to have content-specific concerns, for example, making mistakes, self-focused thoughts are often intensified by contextual factors, such as interacting with peers (Gregersen & Horwitz, 2002). This article looks at the relationship between language anxiety and silent behavior from a cognitive-behavioral perspective, emphasizing how the dynamic interplay between an individual learner and the classroom context can result in even the most motivated and proficient learners missing opportunities to develop their language skills through target-language interaction.

The development of a literature on language policy, plannaing, and politics in the U.S. is taking place quickly. Possibly the most difficult job for a researcher is placing the legal and official statements about language within a social, bureaucratic, and jurisdictional context that allows reasonable interpretation. There is as yet no comprehensive framework, compendium of law and other policies, or general research work on the topic. There is much more available and accessible data and research today, however, that could provide the basis for such work in the near future In the next three years, the federal government will consider reauthorizing the Bilingual Education Act, the Language Minority Provision of the Voting Rights Act, and the Court Interpreters Act. These legislative debates, and others, will surely fan the fires of language policy considerations, continue the polemics over the cultural bases of the country, including the role of language minorities, and stimulate greater language policy and planning research and interest in the U.S.

Research within the domain of applied linguistics is at the moment lively and vigorous. Exciting work is being conducted in many settings by scholars trained in diverse areas of specialization. Certainly the inclusion of separate strands in (at least) psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics is now obligatory in most graduate programs in linguistics, bilingual education, foreign language education, or English as a second or foreign language, whereas the subjects were just beginning to be introduced two decades ago. The vitality of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and other organizations bodes well for the strength of our discipline. Annual or semi-annual meetings of each of these groups are well attended and offer broad, stimulating programs for participants. These organizations directly or indirectly sponsor a range of scholarly publications widely distributed to a broad membership.

The investigation of aspects of the spoken language from a pedagogical perspective in recent years has tended, with a few exceptions, to be indirect and typically subordinate to considerations of other topics such as acquisition processes, cognitive constraints on learning, cross-cultural factors, and many others. At the same time, there has been a broad movement in language teaching away from organizing courses in terms of discrete skills such as speaking or listening and towards more holistic or integrated classroom experiences for learners. There is no reason to suspect that these trends will be reversed in the early 1990s and, with the exception of those specifically involved in remediation, language teachers will be less likely to find themselves being prompted to “teach the spoken language” than to “create learner-centered, acquisition-rich environments” which will have listening and speaking activities as incidental processes rather than as objectives. While acknowledging this trend, I would like to survey, albeit selectively, some of the areas where speaking and listening activities relevant to the classroom have been the subject of recent investigation and evaluate some of the claims concerning what might be beneficial or not. In the three sections which follow, I shall review current thinking on: 1) the spoken language as a formal system, focusing on pronunciation, 2) the spoken language as a medium of information transfer (that is, in its transactional function), and 3) the spoken language as a medium of interpersonal exchange (that is, in its interactional function).

In its early stages, “text linguistics” was a sufficiently compact and localized enterprise that describing it would not have seemed inordinately difficult. Today, however, text linguistics has attained such prominence that it formed the largest contingent at the last International Congress of Linguists in Berlin in 1987. This rise has been accompanied by a widening of scope, a profusion of models, theories, and terms, and a diversification of the phenomena it is intended to capture or designate. The very term “text linguistics” may seem too narrow, and wider alternatives have been proposed, such as “text studies,” “text science,” “textology,” and above all “discourse analysis.” Similarly, some scholars have proposed that text linguistics be incorporated into a broader domain, such as semiotics/semiology, ethnography/enthnomethodology, communications, cognitive science, and so forth.

Regardless of one's gastronomic persuasion, the point of the questions above have nothing to do with food; rather, they have to do with language. Even if a person speaks no German, French or Italian, words like wienerschnitzel, vinaigrette, and cappucino are very likely part of his or her vocabulary, the result of contact between speakers of English and those of other languages, leading to the introduction of foreign words into English. Although this little culinary example is not by itself significant, it does represent a phenomenon that is extremely widespread throughout the world, since contact between speakers of different languages is the rule rather than the exception. Thus, language contact and its consequences constitute a very rich area of linguistic inquiry.

About seventeen years ago when my eldest daughter was a student in the third grade of elementary school, she came home one day with a grade of “D” on an English assignment. Because I have been, in part at least, a language teacher most of my adult life, and because my daughter was a particularly verbal child, I was a bit distressed at the grade. I looked over her paper and was unable, in my ignorance, to detect what in it had induced her teacher to give her a grad of “D”.

There are four major dialects of Thai: Northern (Kam Mueng, Yuan), Northeastern (Isan, Lao), Central (Siamese), and Southern (Pak Tai). Standard Thai, the official language of instruction, is based on a prestigious social class dialect of Siamese. In addition to Thai, a great number of other languages are spoken by indigenous peoples, of whom some individuals are literate in thrir native languages. Foreign languages used in Thailand consist of classical (Pali, Sanskrit, Arabic) and modern (English, Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic). English is the most widely used foreign language.

Inverstigating the effects of classroom instruction on second language acquisition is a fascinating, but formidable, task: fascinating, because it addresses fundamental issues concerning the nature of the mental processes underlying SLA and how they are affected by different learning conditions; formidable, because of the complex, multifaceted nature of both SLA and instruction, the difficulty of establishing valid and reliable profiles of each, and the interacting effects of social context and individual variables. In this brief survey, empiricial research on the effects of L2 instruction is outlined in relation to a few basic issues. For more detailed reviews of the literature, the reader is referred to Long (1983; 1988), Pica (1983a), Ellis (1984a; 1985), and Chaudron (1988).

A law student inquires whether a correction of sneaked to snuck suggests misinformation and misguided rigidity. This chapter reports an answer to that question in the context of better information about current legal usage and a perennial tendency to linguistic prescription. It also explores attitudes to current borrowings from English into Japanese and French and distinguishes between language as a vehicle of communication and as a symbol of cultural values. Finally, the chapter indicates the schizophrenic character of linguistic judgments about prescription and description and concludes with a characterization of current guidelines for nonsexist language use as sensible prescription.

When the learner of a non-native language actually uses this language for communication, he draws on the L2 skills acquired so far, and on various other sources of knowledge and skill that are relevant to the communicative task. The more advanced the learner is, the more s/he will be able to rely on his/her L2 skills in a way that is analogous to the L1 speaker's use fo his/her individual linguistic competence. The less advanced learner will have to rely more on his/her metalinguistic knowledge (to the extent that it is available) and on a variety of ways to reduce the gap between, on the one hand, the L2 knowledge and skills available to him/her and, on the other hand, the means necessary to convey the intended message, either by using additional resources (L1, gestures, and so on) or by reducing the message to be conveyed. The term communicative processes [hereafter CP] will be used for the reliance on L2 knowledge and skills, and the term communicative strategies or communication strategies [hereafter CS] for the learner's attempts at bridging the gap between these resources and the message to be conveyed. (There is no clear-cut separation between these two mental activities, of course, as the use of CS encompasses the incorporation of whatever relevant fragments of L2 knowledge and skill happen to be available.)