Media language has always attracted the attention of linguists, particularly applied linguists and sociolinguists. There are four practical and principled reasons for this interest. First, the media provide an easily accessible source of language data for research and teaching purposes. Second, the media are important linguistic institutions. Their output makes up a large proportion of the language that people hear and read every day. Media usage reflects and shapes both language use and attitudes in a speech community. For second language learners, the media may function as the primary—or even the sole—source of native-speaker models. Third, the ways in which the media use language are interesting linguistically in their own right; these include how different dialects and languages are used in advertising, how tabloid newspapers use language in a projection of their assumed readers' speech, or how radio personalities use language—and only language–to construct their own images and their relationships to an unseen, unknown audience. Fourth, the media are important social institutions. They are crucial presenters of culture, politics, and social life, shaping as well as reflecting how these are formed and expressed. Media ‘discourse’ is important both for what it reveals about a society and for what it contributes to the character of society.

Anxiety is among the most frequently studied emotions in second language acquisition (SLA). Study abroad (SA) researchers have examined its effects on SLA in that setting in a number of studies. The current study goes beyond previous SA research by examining how anxiety develops and connects with language proficiency development over SA. Specifically, it uses anxiety-related measures of foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), foreign language enjoyment (FLE), and a physiological manifestation of anxiety (hair cortisol). As far as the classroom is concerned, learners grew more comfortable, experiencing less anxiety and more enjoyment over the period of SA. However, learners showed physiological signs of overall elevated anxiety despite these increasing classroom comfort levels. Two key factors that may have influenced their anxiety levels abroad were tendency toward anxiety prior to SA and language proficiency upon departure for SA. The latter provides support for having students more proficient prior to SA, since doing so may lead to less anxiety during SA.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce noneconomists to the economics of multilingualism. This area of research is relatively little known among economists, and until recent years, few of its methods and results had been published in the journals usually read by language specialists, although sociolinguists and applied linguists had for many years been pointing out the importance of economic dimensions in their research field. It is therefore useful to begin with a brief review of the literature which, owing to limitations of space, does not report specific results, but lists the major issues that have been examined to date. More extensive surveys are available in Vaillancourt (1985a) and Grin (1994c; 1996e).

Since the late 1990s, the field of applied linguistics has seen a revival of interest in the topic of linguistic creativity and language play, with several theoretical works spawning a variety of empirical studies of (second language) L2 learners. This chapter reviews recent literature in order to examine the reciprocal relationship between formulaic language and L2 language play. Formulaic language provides a point of reference against which other uses can be recognized as creative or playful. At the same time, language play can also create new linguistic conventions. Thus, while the relationship between formulaic language and language play has not been explicitly addressed, as the examples presented here will demonstrate, formulaic language is a necessary part of much language play. This article begins by theorizing the relationship between formulaic and playful language. This relationship is then examined in terms of functions, age differences, and media differences, and the article closes with a number of suggestions for future research.

Two current developments reflecting a common concern in second/foreign language assessment are the development of: (1) scales for describing language proficiency/ability/performance; and (2) criterion-referenced performance assessments. Both developments are motivated by a perceived need to achieve communicatively transparent test results anchored in observable behaviors. Each of these developments in one way or another is an attempt to recognize the complexity of language in use, the complexity of assessing language ability, and the difficulty in interpreting potential interactions of scale task, trait, text, and ability. They reflect a current appetite for language assessment anchored in the world of functions and events, but also must address how the worlds of functions and events contain non skill-specific and discretely hierarchical variability. As examples of current tests that attempt to use performance criteria, the chapter reviews the Canadian Language Benchmark, the Common European Framework, and the Assessment of Language Performance projects.

This review of sociolinguistic aspects of language and dementia focuses on studies that (1) examine naturally occurring language with attention to variation that relates to speakers' cognitive or sociocultural attributes or to dimensions of the communicative context, (2) provide a nuanced understanding of individuals with dementia or contexts of communication that may illuminate sociolinguistic analyses, or (3) call for sociolinguistic investigations to clarify or provide additional evidence for a particular finding outside of linguistics. Structured from the global to the local levels, the review begins with literature that frames the study of language and dementia from the societal or cultural perspective, focusing on public discourse relating to dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Studies that shed light on social activities and physical environments are addressed next as possible influences on the shape of the discourse. Finally, investigations of verbal and nonverbal aspects of discourse produced by and with individuals with dementia are reviewed. Ideas for future research are outlined along with a call for increased cross-disciplinary cooperation among researchers who work at the intersection of language, dementia, and society.

This chapter focuses on recent research in cross-cultural pragmatics (CCP) as distinct from interlanguage pragmatics (IP). The essential difference between the two lies in the perspective from which each views cross-cultural communication. CCP takes the point of view that individuals from different societies or communities interact according to their own pragmatic norms, often resulting in a clash of expectations and, ultimately, misperceptions about the other group. The misperceptions are typically two-way; that is, each group misperceives the other. In an age in which cross-cultural interaction is the norm not only across societies but also within them, different rules of speaking have the potential to cause stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination against entire groups of people. Research in the area of CCP can greatly aid in ameliorating these consequences. Recent studies that view CCP from this two-way perspective are the focus of this chapter. The overview of this body of research demonstrates the potential contribution of the field of applied linguistics to mutual understanding through the study of discourse issues in cross-cultural pragmatics.

This chapter reviews the multidimensional research on bilingual education, covering contexts where bilingual children are in transitional classrooms as well as schools where curriculum content is experienced in two (or more) languages. Bilingual education has become a major tool in language reversal planning, since language transmission within families within minority languages typically provides a considerable shortfall in language reproduction. To play its part in language reversal, bilingual education needs to show its relative effectiveness, both as an educational approach and for language maintenance planning. Immersion and dual language approaches have increasingly demonstrated such success. However, bilingual education is neither a universal panacea for language planners, nor is it effective purely due to dual language classroom approaches, as recent research reveals. Such research locates the political nature of bilingual education, not only at the level of policy making, but also in qualitative research in classrooms. It illuminates how language and literacy practices can latently legitimate and reproduce unequal relations between language majorities and minorities. Emerging directions in bilingual education research include trilingual education, the bilingual education of deaf students, the consequences of information technologies for bilingual classrooms, and the effect of the internationalization of English on language contact in schools. This reflects an international interest for research at the varying levels of philosophy, policy, provision, practice, and not least the politics of education as a site of language contact.

American Sign Language (ASL) has become a very popular language in high schools, colleges, and universities throughout the U.S., due, in part, to the growing number of schools that allow students to take the language in order to fulfill a foreign or general language requirement. Within the past couple decades, the number of students enrolled in ASL classes has increased dramatically, and there are likely more instructors of ASL at the present time than ever before. ASL and spoken language instruction are similar in some aspects; however, there are also differences between the two (e.g., modality differences involving visual rather than auditory perception and processing, no commonly used writing system in ASL, and the socio-cultural history of deaf-hearing relations). In spite of these differences, minimal research has been done on ASL learning and classroom pedagogy—especially in recent years. This article reports on studies that have been performed recently and it also suggests various themes for future research. In particular, three main areas of research are proposed: the possible role of the socio-political history of the Deaf community in which ASL teaching is situated, linguistic differences between signed and spoken languages, and the use of video and computer-based technologies.

Second language acquisition research has historically been influenced by the field of linguistics, not only in terms of theoretical inisghts, but also in terms of the emphasis placed on varioustopics. Within linguistics, the lexicon has taken on a secondary role in terms of theory construction; within second language acquisition, the rift between studies of the lexicon and theory construction seems to be even greater. While it is no longer possible to say that the lexicon is the ‘neglected component’ of second language acquisition research, it does appear to be the case that most lexical studies are not centrally concerned with the establishment of a theory of the lexicon; rather, the majority deal with descriptive aspects of the lexicon.

There has been great recent interest in the social and policy context of language testing and assessment, to the point where it represents perhaps the most significant area of new thought and debate in the field of language testing. The topic has also produced a ferment of activity, reflected in policy statements, special symposia, and special issues of professional journals devoted to aspects of the subject. These discussions have been accompanied by the beginnings of a movement away from the traditional positivist, asocial paradigm for language testing research as traced in Lynch and Hamp-Lyons (1996; Hamp-Lyons and Lynch in press).

Attempts to improve education often change how language is used in schools. Many such efforts aim to include minoritized students by more fully including their languages. These are often met with resistance not so much about language but more about identity. Thus processes of social identification are implicated in efforts to change language in education. If we are to understand how identity and language policy interconnect, we must analyze how stability and change are produced in each. This requires attention to macro-level patterns and to micro-level practices. But a two-scale account—micro instantiation of macro categories and micro changes shaping macro structures—does not adequately explain identity and language policy. This article focuses on educational language policy implementation, how language use and social identification change in an evolving policy context. We argue that change and stability in language policy implementation must be explained with reference to heterogeneous resources from multiple timescales—beyond micro and macro—as these resources establish and change social identities. We review recent research using multiple timescales to understand social processes like identification and policy implementation, and we illustrate the use of such a scalar account to describe the social identification of one student in a sixth grade classroom in Paraguay in the midst of a major national educational language policy change. We show how a person's identification as a new kind of minority language speaker involved heterogeneous resources from various spatiotemporal scales. We argue that analysis of the heterogeneous resources involved in social identification is essential to understanding the role that these processes play in cultural, pedagogical, and language change.

Over the last two decades, research has highlighted the important role that listening plays in language acquisition (Brown and Yule 1983, Ellis, et al. 1994, Faerch and Kasper 1986, Feyten 1991, Long 1985), and listening comprehension skills have begun to receive a lot more systematic attention in language teaching classrooms. A wide range of books, articles, and materials aimed at assisting teachers to develop learners’ listening skills are now available, and a variety of comprehension-based methodologies have been proposed (see, for example, Anderson and Lynch 1988, Courchene, et al. 1992, Rost 1990; 1994, Underwood 1989). However, although many of the tasks used for teaching listening are virtually identical to those which appear in tests, assessment of listening ability has received relatively limited coverage in the language testing literature.

Research into listening over the past three decades has, above all, highlighted the fundamental intricacy of the processes involved. In order to make sense of spoken messages, listeners may need to integrate information from a range of sources: phonetic, phonological, prosodic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The fact that we achieve all this in real time as the message unfolds makes listening “complex, dynamic, and fragile” (Celce-Murcia 1995:366). In this review I consider research into four aspects of these complexities: processes (e.g., speech recognition, discourse comprehension, and memory); the role of context; factors influencing listening; and the relationship of listening with other language skills. Finally I suggest likely directions for future research into listening.

Law is language. It is not solely language, since it is a social institution manifested also in non-linguistic ways, but it is a profoundly linguistic institution. Laws are coded in language, and the processes of the law are mediated through language. The legal system puts into action a society's beliefs and values, and it permeates many areas of life, from a teacher's responsibilities to a credit card agreement. The language of the law is therefore of genuine importance, particularly for people concerned with addressing language issues and problems in the real world—that is, Applied Linguists.

The language learning potential of writing has been an underresearched topic in the English as a foreign language (EFL) context. The present study investigates what Basque-Spanish EFL teenage learners (n = 60) notice when writing a composition in response to visual stimuli in a three-stage writing task including output, comparison, and delayed revision. The present study also explores how this noticing and feedback processing affects their subsequent revisions. The findings revealed that participants noticed mainly lexical problems, although they also paid attention to content features. Moreover, more proficient learners and guided learners noticed more features. A qualitative analysis of the results indicated that, overall, learners had a negative attitude toward writing and modeling, but those with more positive beliefs incorporated more items in subsequent revisions. A number of implications for research and pedagogy will be discussed.

The recognition that speech formulas play a role in first language acquisition—that children reuse sequences of words taken directly and seemingly unanalyzed from the input—goes back to the earliest days of the field. Until fairly recently, however, such formulaic language was considered part of an early and soon-superseded stage of development. The last decade has seen the rise of a perspective on language development in which such formulas are central to language acquisition across development. According to this perspective, which is often known as the usage-based theory of language development, acquisition begins when children identify, infer a communicative function for, and start to utilize pieces of language of different sizes (single words and multiword sequences). Generalization, and as a result grammar, is an emergent property resulting from the ongoing coexistence of such sequences in a shared representational space. The growth in popularity of such an account, which represents a radical break from traditional models of grammatical development, has resulted in large part from the appearance of very large corpora of child–caregiver interactions. Such corpora have supported a new understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the learner, as well as allowing new naturalistic analyses of children's productions and the creation of stimuli for experiments, all of which offer considerable support for the usage-based position. This article offers a review of these developments.

Parkinson's disease, the most common progressive neurological movement disorder worldwide, causes slow deterioration of subcortical structures and dopamine deficiency, and the disruption of circuits connecting frontal lobe and basal ganglia regions. Although the motor and cognitive consequences of these structural and physiological changes have been well-documented, only a limited, albeit growing, empirical literature has examined the integrity of language abilities in individuals with Parkinson's disease. This article reviews recent advances in that literature that have furthered our understanding of the quantitative and qualitative changes in morphosyntactic, lexical-semantic, and discourse levels of language functioning associated with Parkinson's disease. This article also discusses the theoretical and applied implications of these linguistic symptoms and provides suggestions to forward this line of research.

Damages done to Indigenous languages occurred due to colonial forces, some of which continue to this day, and many believe efforts to revive them should involve more than Indigenous peoples alone. Therefore, the need for learning Indigenous languages as “additional” languages is a relatively new societal phenomenon and Indigenous language revitalization (ILR) an emerging academic field of study. As the ILR body of literature has developed, it has become clear that this work does not fit neatly into any single academic discipline. While there have been substantial contributions from linguistics and education, the study and recovery of Indigenous languages are necessarily self-determined and self-governing. Also, due to the unique set of circumstances, contexts, and, therefore, solutions needed, it is argued that this discipline is separate from, yet connected to, others. Applied linguists hold specific knowledge and skills that could be extended to ILR toward great gains. This paper explores current foci within ILR, especially concepts, theories, and areas of study that connect applied linguistics and Indigenous language learning. The intention of this paper is to consider commonalities, differences, current and future interests for shared consideration of the potential of collaborations, and partnerships between applied linguistics and ILR scholars.

In the last 20 years, several authors have described the possible changes that computers may effect in language testing. Since ARAL's last review of general language testing trends (Clapham, 2000), authors in the Cambridge Language Assessment Series have offered various visions of how computer technology could alter the testing of second language skills. This chapter reflects these perspectives as it charts the paths recently taken in the field. Initial steps were made in the conversion of existing item types and constructs already known from paper-and- pencil testing into formats suitable for computer delivery. This conversion was closely followed by the introduction of computer-adaptive tests, which aim to make more, and perhaps, better, use of computer capabilities to tailor tests more closely to individual abilities and interests. Movement toward greater use of computers in assessment has been coupled with an assumption that computer-based tests should be better than their traditional predecessors, and some related steps have been taken. Corpus linguistics has provided tools to create more authentic assessments; the quest for authenticity has also motivated inclusion of more complex tasks and constructs. Both these innovations have begun to be incorporated into computer-based language tests. Natural language processing has also provided some tools for computerized scoring of essays, particularly relevant in large-scale language testing programs. Although computer use has not revolutionized all aspects of language testing, recent efforts have produced some of the research, technological advances, and improved pedagogical understanding needed to support progress.