Most recent publications related to listening comprehension research deal with listening strategy instruction, metacognitive instruction or multimedia applications. This paper discusses one study from each of these three domains – Graham & Macaro (2008), Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari (2010) and Brett (1997) – and presents the need and possibilities for replication, along with a few minor, but interesting, variations that could help test the robustness of the original study. After providing some background to each of the three domains, we overview the respective studies and propose approaches to replication (both approximate and conceptual) along with the accompanying benefits.

This overview of six years of research on language learning and teaching in Austria covers a period of dynamic development in the field. While all the studies reviewed here illustrate research driven by a combination of local and global concerns and theoretical frameworks, some specific clusters of research interest emerge. The first of these focuses on issues connected with multilingualism in present-day society in terms of language policy, theory development and, importantly, the critical scrutiny of dominant discursive practices in connection with minority and migrant languages. In combination with this focus, there is a concern with German as a second or foreign language in a number of contexts. A second cluster concerns the area of language testing and assessment, which has gained political import due to changes in national education policy and the introduction of standardized tests. Finally, a third cluster of research concerns the diverse types of specialized language instruction, including the introduction of foreign language instruction from age six onwards, the rise of academic writing instruction, English-medium education and, as a final more general issue, the role of English as a dominant language in the canon of all foreign and second languages in Austria.

My first encounter with English for specific purposes (ESP) teaching was in the late 1980s. I was asked to lead a small team of teachers in designing a new English course for university students of art and design. We had just a few weeks to devise a teaching plan and materials. ESP was famously described at that time as ‘essentially a materials and teaching-led movement’ (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998, p. 19) and my initial encounter with ESP largely reflected this. However, I believe this description and some other characterizations of ESP have persisted rather too long. In this paper, I seek to problematize a view of ESP as essentially a practical movement and I argue that a characterization of ESP for the present time needs to reflect a broader vision of endeavours and interests.

The impact of globalisation in the last 20 years has led to an overwhelming increase in the use of English as the medium through which many business people get their work done. As a result, the linguistic landscape within which we now operate as researchers and teachers has changed both rapidly and beyond all recognition. In the discussion below, I will outline a research agenda for English as a lingua franca (ELF) in business communication of relevance for scholars and practitioners with an interest in teaching language. I will discuss three main areas of enquiry, which are: (1) the further development of the existing theory concerning the use of English in business and how this impacts language teaching, including the role played by native speakers of English, (2) the influence of culture and context on the production and interpretation of English in business contexts, and (3) the extension of our existing understanding of the use of English in business contexts in order to take increasingly advanced levels of proficiency into account, as well as developing an understanding of what constitutes professional communicative competence in business. For each of these key areas I will suggest a number of tasks which could help to give substance to our research in the future.

English language teaching (ELT) publishing as we know it today has a long and lucrative history, dating, according to Rix (2008), from the Longman publication of Michael West's New Method Readers in 1926, to the present day, where annual turnover runs to around US$194 billion (Jordan & Gray, 2019). Some of the sector's best-sellers, such as Oxford University Press's Headway series (Soars & Soars), have sold over 70 million copies (Ożóg, 2018) with OUP's English File (Latham-Koenig, Oxenden, & Lambert) selling over a million copies in China alone. Generally speaking, it is taken for granted that commercial publications in the educational sector are based on sound, accepted pedagogical principles. Early language teaching publications (from the 1950s onwards) naturally reflected practices that were thought to promote language learning at that time – such as repetition, drills and sentence-level grammar exercises. As our understanding of language learning developed, this Structural approach gave way to a Communicative one, reflecting the 1970s preoccupation with the importance of communicative competence, influenced by theorists such as Hymes (e.g. 1972) and Halliday (e.g. 1975). This approach remains the predominant one (in the West at least) 50 years later. It represents, remarkably perhaps, the last time that applied linguistics substantially influenced a language teaching approach, or at least, one that had such global reach and enduring influence. Since then, findings from the fields of applied linguistics and second language (L2) acquisition, which should have fed into language learning approaches and hence language coursebooks, have been slow to do so in any systematic or significant way. Where they have, the way in which language learning theory ‘translates’ into pedagogy in the coursebook and thence classroom, can be questionable. In parallel with this is the problem of the socio-cultural standpoint of teaching materials of an international language such as English, issuing from a particular geographic heartland, viz. England. As with applied linguistics and L2 acquisition research, developments in sociolinguistic, socio-cultural and socio-political theory have been realised in language teaching coursebooks only as a rather superficial multi-cultural gloss. The advent of ‘global’ coursebooks conceived in the 1990s, with multiple iterations, attempting to capture international appeal, still has not resolved the conundrum that language – and hence language teaching materials, that is, the combination of content and pedagogy – constitute cultural artefacts, imbued with cultural values and ideologies. All in all, as Timmis, Mukundan, and Alkhaldi laconically observe: ‘for such commonplace objects, [coursebooks] have aroused a surprising degree of controversy’ (2009, p. 11). These then, are the chief areas of contention that I will develop in this article. Opposing these issues, it will be acknowledged that coursebooks remain the default language learning resource, and that teachers and learners world-wide need, want and value them as ready-made language teaching materials.

This paper reports on an approximate or partial replication of a study by Salsbury, Crossley & McNamara (2011) that examined the longitudinal developmental of a number of core lexical features related to word imageability, concreteness, familiarity, and meaningfulness in a spoken corpus of English second language (L2) learners. Salsbury et al. found no developmental growth patterns for word familiarity but strong growth patterns for word concreteness, imageability, and meaningfulness as a function of time such that L2 learners began to produce more sophisticated words. Salsbury et al. were the first to formally identify this relation between English proficiency and lexical sophistication, and a large number of studies investigating lexical proficiency have cited this article as a foundational study. There were, however, a number of limitations to the Salsbury et al. (2011) study that make it appropriate for replication. First, the sample size was relatively small (six learners sampled six times over the course of a year). In addition, the study did not control for a number of factors important in L2 acquisition studies (e.g., age, proficiency level, gender) and used a statistical technique that averaged group means and did not properly account for individual participant variation. This replication study addresses these areas and the findings from the replication reflect those reported by Salsbury et al., providing support for the notion that developing L2 lexicons move from the production of words with stronger links to core lexical items to words with weaker links to core lexical items over time. Implications for language learning and teaching are discussed.

Interactive alignment is a phenomenon whereby interlocutors adopt and re-use each other's language patterns in the course of authentic interaction. According to the interactive alignment model, originally proposed by Pickering & Garrod (2004), this linguistic coordination is one way in which interlocutors achieve understanding in dialogue, occurring at the level of the lexicon, grammar, and pronunciation. The goal of this paper is to extend this model to second language (L2) pronunciation and to discuss its possible implications for L2 pronunciation teaching.

This article offers a critical review of research on the use of glossing and its contribution to second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition. Discussion topics include the complexity of estimating the effectiveness of glossing relative to reading non-glossed texts, the quest for optimal implementations of glossing, issues of ecological validity, and ambiguity around the nature of vocabulary learning from glosses. The general conclusion is that, despite the substantial number of research studies on this subject, many questions remain to which only tentative and provisional answers are currently available. This is partly owing to the wide diversity in research designs across studies and the lack of transparency of many research reports. Suggestions are made for further research on glossing with a view to enabling future systematic reviews to produce more nuanced answers and more informed recommendations for the design of L2 reading materials.

We often hear language teachers say ‘Don't confuse me with theories, just give me practical ideas I can take into the classroom’. Many teacher educators and researchers, on the other hand, believe that (research-based) theory is more important, and should be used and implemented by practitioners. This paper will propose an approach to the use of theory and practice in teacher education that may help to resolve this dissonance. After some preliminary definitions and clarification of some common confusions, it is suggested that theory and practice in the context of language teaching are not polar opposites, but points on a continuum: any statement or guideline about teaching can be, more or less, practical or theoretical. The rest of the paper will focus on the questions how the various types of published theories or teacher theorizing can contribute to professional expertise, what is the place of practical tips or recipes, and how all these can be used or combined in teacher education courses to bring about optimal learning by novice teachers, or increased expertise on the part of the more experienced ones.

There are long and diverse strands of thinking about how schools and schooling, teaching, curriculum, and learning could be conceptualized and developed so as to foster what is often loosely called social justice. Many of these strands go back (in Europe) at least to the French Revolution. The original term that encompasses this area is ‘radical pedagogy’ (that is to say, a pedagogy suitable for radicals or radical purposes; cf. Crookes, 2009). Emerging out of this area in the post-World War Two era, one version of this thought and practice that has become somewhat influential in language teaching is ‘critical pedagogy’, and ‘critical language pedagogy’ (CLP) is a key term used to refer to applications of the concepts of critical pedagogy to second language (L2) contexts.

Language test development proceeds best when the test's effect is borne in mind, throughout the test development process. The authors discuss the flexible language of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and explore the pragmatic utility of such language to guide language test development. They select service encounters (e.g. airline ticket sales, open-air markets) as a sample language use domain to illustrate demonstrable weaknesses in the Framework. Using the CEFR Level A1 service encounter descriptor, suggested testing materials are shown in a versioned evolution of a proposed test specification. Provided that effect is kept in mind, the authors argue, the CEFR is actually a valuable – even an optimistic – starting point for language test development.

In order to better understand the role of working memory in second language (L2) written production, this study contributes to recent research attempting to apply Kellogg's model of working memory in first language (L1) writing to L2 writing research (Ellis & Yuan 2004; Ong & Zhang 2010; Johnson, Mercado & Acevedo 2012). This paper describes an approximate replication of a study presented by Johnson et al. (2012) in order to determine whether the effects of pre-task planning sub-processes (idea generation, organization, and goal setting) are mediated by a hypothesized threshold of proficiency in the target language. To do this, the current study replicated a quasi-experimental research design to test the effect of specific pre-task planning sub-processes on the written language production of a group of L1 speakers of English. Using measures identical to those in Johnson et al. (2012), the study found no significant, multivariate effect of pre-task planning on the fluency and complexity of the participants' written language production, suggesting no support for the hypothesized threshold of general proficiency in the target language. The implications of the study's results are discussed in terms of Kellogg's model (1996) of working memory in L1 writing and its ability to describe L2 composing processes.

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.

The past decades have seen dramatic improvements to dictionary content and format. Yet dictionaries – both paper-based and digital – remain disappointingly underused. As a result, it is widely acknowledged that more needs to be done to train people in dictionary-consultation skills. Another solution would be to build lexicographic resources that require little or no instruction. In this paper, I present the ColloCaid project, whose aim is to develop a lexicographic tool that combines user needs, lexicographic data and digital writing environments to bring dictionaries to writers instead of waiting for them to get the information they need from dictionaries. Our focus is on helping writers produce more idiomatic texts by integrating lexicographic data on collocations into text editors in a way that does not distract them from their writing. A distinguishing characteristic of ColloCaid is that it is not limited to providing feedback on miscollocations. It also aims to ‘feed forward’, raising awareness of collocations writers may not remember or know how to look up. While our initial prototype is being developed specifically for academic English, the implications of our research can be broadened to other languages and usages beyond academic.