This statement opens the first collection of papers that specifically consider the deterioration of linguistic knowledge among bilinguals (Lambert & Freed 1982: see timeline), a field which in one of the papers in the volume is referred to as being in an ‘antenatal’ state (Berko-Gleason 1982: 22). Thirty years down the line it is still a fact that far less is known about the loss or attrition of language skills than about their acquisition.

Individual differences that have an impact on the processes and outcomes of second language (L2) learning have been thoroughly investigated; but, until recently, the study of language learners with additional needs was at the periphery of both second language acquisition (SLA) and language teaching pedagogy (e.g. Nijakowska, 2010; Kormos & Smith, 2012; Kormos, 2017). Specific learning difficulties (SLDs), which affect between 5 and 15% of the population (Drabble, 2013), often have an impact on how additional languages are acquired. Therefore, in order to create an inclusive language learning context and set up effective instructional programmes, it is essential to understand how children with SLDs develop their competence in additional languages.

Discourse studies is a vast, multidisciplinary, and rapidly expanding area of research, embracing a range of approaches including discourse analysis, corpus analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, genre analysis and multimodal discourse analysis. Each approach offers its own unique perspective on discourse, focusing variably on text, context or a range of semiotic modes. Together, they provide foreign language teachers and material designers with new insights into language, and are beginning to have an observable impact on published English Language Teaching (ELT) materials. This paper examines the ways in which the four approaches with the strongest links to the ELT profession (corpus analysis, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and genre analysis) have found their way into language learning materials, and offers some suggestions on how discourse studies may influence ELT classrooms in the future.

Despite the wide recognition of language teacher educators’ contributions in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), research on language teacher educators has only picked up the pace in the last decade, shedding light on their cognition, practices, and identities in relation to various personal, interpersonal, and contextual factors. This article provides a systematic and critical review of 69 empirical studies on university-based TESOL teacher educators from 2010 and 2020. A methodological review was also conducted to analyze the different research approaches employed by previous researchers. A synthesis of the identified research led to four major themes, namely: (1) a general professional state (including responsibilities, challenges and quality), (2) professional engagement (including teaching, practicum supervision, and research and publishing), (3) cognition (including beliefs, knowledge, and expertise), as well as (4) continuous learning and identity development. Through a critical discussion of the themes, the review argues against the implicit yet powerful discourse that characterizes language teacher educators as ‘supermen/superwomen’ and emphasizes the need to humanize them as whole people by recognizing their unique strengths and struggles as well as diverse learning needs. The review also proposes a new research agenda to stimulate and deepen future investigations on language teacher educators in TESOL.

The fear of technology replacing jobs can be traced back to Aristotle, who, before great technological advances existed, ventured that machines may one day end the need for human labor (Campa 2014). In the current era, there is overwhelming evidence of technological unemployment. This evidence comes in the form of jobs that were once common, but have largely been replaced by technology such as switchboard operators, travel agents, booth cashiers, bank tellers, and typists. These jobs still exist, but their numbers have declined sharply because they were easily replaced by technology. Statistical models indicate future job losses in these areas will continue with booth cashiers at an 84% risk of losing their jobs, travel agents at a 10% risk, and typists at an 81% risk (Frey & Osborne 2013). These, generally, entry level positions do not require specialized training or advanced degrees, which may explain some of the job losses. However, current trends indicate that training and advanced degrees do not necessarily offer protection against technological unemployment, with most analysts predicting that technology will soon replace lawyers (Markoff 2011), pharmacy technicians, and accountants (Frey & Osborne 2013). Unemployment in career sectors such as these will have adverse effects not only on the workers, but also on the systems that support them. When the need for lawyers, pharmacists, and accountants collapses, what will happen to law schools, colleges of pharmacy, and accounting departments that train specialists in these fields? What will happen to the support systems that depend on these jobs or the scholars that move these fields forward through research activities?

Roughly 30 years ago researchers in the second language acquisition (SLA) field started to take a focused interest in the study of inner speech (IS) and private speech (PS) processes in second language (L2) learning and use. The purpose of this review is to assess the status of current research and the progress made during the last ten years on the development and experience of covertly using a language other than the first. The review begins with a critical discussion of the challenges involved in defining and conceptualizing IS and PS. To conduct the search of relevant sources, a broad understanding of IS as ‘silent speech for oneself’ and PS as ‘externalized speech for oneself’ was adopted. After a brief synopsis of past research on L2 IS and PS, recent (2005–2015) work is discussed both from a generic-language stance and an L2, bilingual, and multilingual perspective. The review then takes a critical look at the difficult methodological issue of data collection on IS and PS, highlighting strengths and limitations in recent research. Pedagogical implications derived from the research reviewed and suggestions for future studies are discussed.

We closely replicated Wu and Ortega (2013), who found that an elicited imitation test (EIT) reliably distinguished low-level from high-level language abilities among instructed second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese. The original study sampled learners (1) from second-level courses to represent low-level language abilities and (2) from third-, fourth- and graduate-level courses to represent high-level language abilities. Results showed high-level learners outperformed low-level learners on the Mandarin EIT. Our close replication used Wu and Ortega's (2013) materials and procedures in order to understand (1) the extent to which this EIT can additionally distinguish between finer-grained language abilities and (2) the ways in which the broad grouping of language abilities in the high group may have contributed to the findings. Sixty-five instructed L2 learners from four instructional levels were assigned to one of three groups: Beginner (first-level courses), Low (second-level courses), High (third- and fourth-level courses). Consistent with the original study, our results showed clear between-group differences, indicating that the EIT can distinguish between both broad (beginner vs high) and finer-grained (beginner vs low, low vs high) language abilities. These results are discussed in light of the original study's findings with implications for proficiency assessment in second language acquisition (SLA) research.

This paper presents a story of applied linguistics from my personal vantage point as a multilingual scholar whose career began outside the centers of research and scholarship. The article explains the assumptions and practices characterizing the foundation of the discipline in modernist discourses, and delineates the changes resulting from globalization towards postmodern discourses that question positivistic inquiry and homogeneity. As applied linguistics evolves to address diversity as the norm, the article identifies the different schools that have gradually moved the field in that direction – e.g., variationist applied linguistics (VAL), critical applied linguistics (CAL), postmodern hybridity, and translingual practice. Through these movements, the field has also evolved from linguistics applied (LA) to a more theoretically plural and, currently, to a more agentive relationship with other disciplines. Rather than simply borrowing from other disciplines, applied linguists have begun to make their own contributions to those disciplines on language-related issues.

Since its modern inception in the late nineteenth century, research on word associations has developed into a large and diverse area of study, including work with both applied linguistic and psycholinguistic orientations. However, despite significant recent interest in the use of word association to investigate second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge and testing, there has until now been no systematic attempt to review the wider word association research tradition for the benefit of L2-oriented researchers and practitioners. This paper seeks to address this, drawing together linguistic research from the past 150 years, with a focus on research published since 2000. We evaluate the current state of L2 word association research, before identifying methodological and theoretical themes from a broader range of disciplinary approaches. Emerging from this, new paradigms are identified which have potential to catalyse a new phase of work for second language word association scholars, and which indicate priority foci for future work.

Research into dictionary use does not have a long history. Although publishers recognised in the 1960s that ‘dictionaries should be designed with a special set of users in mind’ (Householder 1967: 279) there were extremely few empirical user studies before the 1980s – Welker's most recent survey (2010) lists only six. The subsequent surge of interest in this field was fuelled by big changes to dictionary content and design in the 1980s and 1990s, changes that were particularly evident in dictionaries for learners of English as a foreign language, conventionally known as ‘learners’ dictionaries’. In the space of a few years the Oxford advanced learner's dictionary, generally considered to be the earliest advanced learners’ dictionary (first published under a different title in 1942, with subsequent editions in 1948, 1963, 1974 and 1989) was joined by two new competitors: the Longman dictionary of contemporary English (first edition 1978, second edition 1987) and the COBUILD English dictionary (1987). In 1995 all three of these advanced learners’ dictionaries brought out new editions, and a fourth, the Cambridge international dictionary of English, was launched. These dictionaries, sometimes referred to as ‘the big four’ (Bogaards 1996, De Schryver 2012 and others), drew on Eastern European traditions of lexical description, the illustrative practices of American children's dictionaries, and insights from English language teaching pedagogies. Each had its own distinctive layout and defining style, prompting a spate of comparative studies intended to help users make appropriate purchasing choices, and to help publishers improve their design still further, for example by changes to the entry microstructure. A fifth such dictionary, the Macmillan English dictionary for advanced learners, appeared in 2002.

This paper provides an agenda for replication studies focusing on second language (L2) writing and the use of natural language processing (NLP) tools and machine learning algorithms. Specifically, it introduces a range of the available NLP tools and machine learning algorithms and demonstrates how these could be used to replicate seminal studies in L2 writing that concentrate on longitudinal writing development, predicting essay quality, examining differences between L1 and L2 writers, the effects of writing topics, and the effects of writing tasks. The paper concludes with implications for the recommended replication studies in the field of L2 writing and the advantages of using NLP tools and machine learning algorithms.

Genres are staged, structured, communicative events, motivated by various communicative purposes, and performed by members of specific discourse communities (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993, 2004; Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995). Since its inception, with the two seminal works on the topic by Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993), genre analysis has taken pride of place in much of the ongoing research in languages for specific purposes (LSP). The goal of much of this research is pedagogic, the understanding being that good genre descriptions can feed into pedagogy in the form of syllabus and materials design. Whereas genre analysis usually focuses on language as action, this paper argues that analysis needs to focus also on content and identity. The discussion sketches out what this might mean in terms of pedagogic application.

This article is a personal view of the application of results from three areas of research that I believe are relevant to developing second language speaking in the classroom: task repetition, pre-task planning and communication strategies. I will discuss these three areas in terms of level of research application – where research is not applied well (task repetition), where it is reasonably well applied (pre-task planning), and where it may have been over-applied (communication strategies). For each area I briefly review the relevant research to highlight how teachers can potentially apply the research findings to scaffold learning processes in speaking. I will also suggest how much of the research is getting through to teachers and being taken up in day-to-day teaching of English. I draw mainly on my own extensive experience as a teacher educator for over 20 years working with pre-service English teachers of bilingual students in Singapore schools and in-service teachers attending professional development courses or pursuing Master's degree studies, as well as college English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers from the People's Republic of China receiving postgraduate teaching certification in English language teaching (ELT) and higher degree qualifications in my university each year. I will also include some observations about classroom practice based on a survey of selected course books.

This article provides a timeline of research on form-focused instruction (FFI). Over the past 40 years, research on the role of instruction has undergone many changes. Much of the early research concentrated on determining whether formal instruction makes any difference in the development of learner language. This question was motivated in part by a theoretical discussion in the field of cognitive psychology over the role of explicit versus implicit learning, on the one hand, and a debate in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) over the role of naturalistic exposure versus formal instruction, on the other. In the early 1980s, for example, based on the notion that the processes involved in second language (L2) learning are similar to those in first language (L1) learning, Krashen (e.g., Krashen 1981, 1982, 1985) made a distinction between learning and acquisition and claimed that an L2 should be acquired through natural exposure not learned through formal instruction. Thus, he claimed that FFI has little beneficial effect on language acquisition. This position, which has also been known as a ‘zero position’ on instruction, was also taken by a number of other researchers who argued that L1 and L2 learning follow similar processes and that what L2 learners need in order to acquire a second language is naturalistic exposure to meaning-focused communication rather than formal instruction (Dulay & Burt 1974; Felix 1981; Prabhu 1987; Schwartz 1993; Zobl 1995).

Curricular articulation and the integration of cultural knowledge with language development over extended sequences are among the most persistent challenges for contemporary language teaching and learning. The paper examines the nature of those challenges in light of theories of language and culture while using as the site of investigation the culture standards that have been developed within the framework of the Standards for Foreign Language Learning, a key document for L2 education in the United States, particularly at the K-12 level. Taking four perspectives, it suggests ways in which simultaneous content and language teaching might be tackled through a genre-based way of constructing extended curricula and by using genre-based tasks for informing pedagogical decisions. In this fashion, learners might be able to progress toward a competent cultural literacy that is language-based.