International teaching assistants (ITAs) are Indian, Chinese, Korean, Turkish, etc. international students who have been admitted to graduate study at universities in the U.S.A. and Canada, and are being supported as instructors of undergraduate-level classes and labs in biology, chemistry, physics, and math. For the past 30 years, the number of ITAs has been increasing, and many departments at universities have come to rely largely on ITAs to cover their undergraduate teaching needs. As high-intermediate and low-advanced second language learners who must use their second language for professional purposes, ITAs face linguistic, social, professional, and cultural challenges. This is a learner population that deserves more attention, as I hope to establish here with this presentation of six research tasks. I have organized proposed research projects in such a way as to increase readers’ familiarity with this little publicized field, and also to relate the projects to different contexts of inquiry. By ‘contexts’ I mean ‘who is asking what and for what reasons.’ The two contexts of inquiry are: (1) Established areas of ITA program concern, including acquisition of fluency, prosody, and vocabulary; and (2) Working with ‘outside’ theories, such as the Output Hypothesis, and deliberate practice theory.

A lot of attention has been devoted in the last 30 years to understanding nativeness and what has traditionally been called non-nativeness. While many studies have attempted to problematize the dichotomic division between so-called native speakers and non-native speakers, several others have specifically focussed on the language teaching profession in order to understand aspects related to identity and performance of teachers who align with either one of those two categories. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of relevant literature published after Moussu and Llurda's (2008) state-of-the-art article and set out a series of tasks that we deem important in order to expand the field of research and cover areas that have not yet been sufficiently investigated. Those tasks are grouped into three sections that cover the main aspects that we perceive to be in need of attention: (1) debunking native-speakerism; (2) differences between native teachers and non-native teachers; and (3) languages other than English.

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.

Students entering English-medium universities around the world come from diverse linguistic backgrounds and many find it difficult to cope with the language demands of their degree courses. This speech focuses first on the motivations for introducing what are known in Australia as post-entry language assessments (PELAs). I discuss in particular the Diagnostic English Language Needs Assessment (DELNA) at the University of Auckland, which has been successfully implemented throughout the university in the last ten years. This leads to a broader discussion of three significant issues in post-entry language assessment. One is the nature of the construct on which such assessments are based. A related issue is whether a PELA can appropriately be considered ‘diagnostic’ in nature. The third issue is how to undertake the validation of a PELA, particularly with regard to the consequential aspect: does the assessment contribute to enhancing the students’ academic language ability?

The assessment of students in the classroom has been going on since time immemorial. What is comparatively recent, however, is the systematic study of classroom-based assessment (CBA). The term ‘CBA’ has been putatively linked to Michael Scriven's (1967) work on formative and summative evaluation. However, current interest in such assessment and how it is enacted has, to a large extent, been prompted by shifts in educational policy in various contexts and evolving education systems. This, in turn, has led to the increase in research activity that is detailed in the timeline that follows. At the same time, considerable effort has been exerted by various governments and professional associations into the development of CBA frameworks, but as publications related to these are not strictly research documents, a separate list of examples is provided as supplementary material.

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) and instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) have much in common in terms of theory, research, and educational relevance. The distinguishing characteristic between the two is that TBLT adopts communicative tasks as the central unit for instruction and assessment, whereas ISLA comprises a broader range of instructional activities and assessment practices. In this presentation, I focus on two of the conference themes: Instruction and Outcomes. With respect to Instruction, I draw attention to the pedagogical timing of form-focused instruction (FFI) and corrective feedback. I discuss relevant studies within ISLA and TBLT and argue that TBLT is particularly well-suited to investigating questions about the timing of FFI. In discussing Outcomes, I consider differences in how outcomes are measured in TBLT (i.e. performance) and ISLA (i.e. development) and the different aspects of language examined within each, for example, accuracy, implicit/explicit knowledge in ISLA and complexity, accuracy and fluency in TBLT. I discuss underlying similarities between fluency and implicit knowledge, how they are measured, and propose research to investigate the pedagogical timing of FFI in relation to fluency development. I conclude with a brief discussion of the need for a balance between theoretically and pedagogically motivated research within ISLA and TBLT.

Most explanatory work on first and second language learning assumes the primacy of the acquisition phenomenon itself, and a good deal of work has been devoted to the search for an ‘acquisition device’ that is specific to humans, and perhaps even to language. I will consider the possibility that this strategy is misguided and that language acquisition is a secondary effect of processing amelioration: attempts by the processor to facilitate its own functioning by developing routines of particular sorts.

This introduction contains three parts: First, a presentation of the timeline, including the selection of target languages. Second, an overview of trends of development in the international research field from the 1960s up until today. Third, a list of categories used in the subsequent table of annotated works.

Like many EFL teachers of my generation, I side-stepped into the profession. While doing post-graduate research at Oxford in the early 1960s, I took a job one summer vacation teaching English in a local language school. Though I had no idea how to do this, I enjoyed the work, and kept on a few hours’ teaching in the next academic year. As time went on, it became clear that I had somewhat more talent for this type of activity than for academic research, and I became a full-time teacher, subsequently opening my own school of English.

This paper reports an approximate replication of Matsuda and Gobel (2004) for the psychometric validation of the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS). Their study examined the structural aspects of the FLRAS developed by Saito, Horwitz, and Garza (1999). The results showed that the FLRAS measured three different subcomponents of foreign language reading anxiety; none of the factors predicted foreign language performance in content-based and four-skill classes. The present study aimed to reconfirm the psychometric validity of the FLRAS because it has been widely employed to make foreign language reading anxiety researchable. Our study retained the same methodology, with the exception of the measurements of classroom performance and reading proficiency. Matsuda and Gobel's conclusions were reproduced by showing a weak relationship between classroom performance and foreign language reading anxiety measured by the three-factor model of the FLRAS. However, this study newly demonstrated a strong association of reading-anxiety subcomponents with learners' reading proficiency. The administration, scoring, and interpretation methods of the FLRAS were reconsidered based on the replicated results.

This paper considers the issue of the norm in the context of learner corpus research and its implications for foreign language teaching. It seeks to answer three main questions: Does learner corpus research require a native norm? What corpus-derived norms are available and how do we choose? What do we do with these norms in the classroom? The first two questions are more research-oriented, reviewing the types of reference corpora that can be used in the analysis of learner corpora, whereas the third one looks into the pedagogical use of corpus-derived norms. It is shown that, while studies in learner corpus research can dispense with a native norm, they usually rely on one, and that a wide range of native and non-native norms are available, from which choosing the most appropriate one(s) is of crucial importance. This large repertoire of corpus-derived norms is then reconsidered in view of the reality of the foreign language classroom.

Recently, we have been witnessing the emergence of scholarly interest and professional advocacy efforts centering on systemic, intersectional, fluid, and contextualized inequalities and dynamic hierarchies constructed by essentialized and idealized (non)native speakerhood (speakerism/speakering) and its personal and professional implications for English language teaching (ELT) profession(als). This critical literature review aims to portray, examine, and guide the existing scholarship focusing on a myriad of issues related to ELT professionals traditionally conceptualized as “native” and “non-native” English-speaking teachers. We come to a working conclusion that (non)native speaker/teacherhood is an epistemologically hegemonic, historically colonial, contextually enacted (perceived and/or ascribed), and dynamically experienced socio-professional phenomenon intersecting with other categories of identity (e.g., race, ethnicity, country of origin, gender, religion, sexuality/sexual orientation, social class, schooling, passport/visa status, and physical appearance, among others) in making a priori connections and assertions about individuals as language users and teachers and thereby forming discourses and practices of (in)equity, privilege, marginalization, and discrimination in ELT.

This paper examines the emergent identities of three STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) lecturers, focusing especially on how they construct themselves with regard to their disciplines and how researchers construct them as potential English language teachers. It begins with essential background information before discussing identity as a key construct. The paper then moves to the presentation of a Foucauldian-inflected version of positioning theory which is employed as a means of understanding the construction of English-medium instruction (EMI) STEM lecturer identities. In the second half of the paper, there is a discussion of three case-studies of EMI STEM lecturers, which shows how each orientates to his or her subject discipline, and the prospect of acting, on occasion, as an English language teacher. Specifically, there is a detailed consideration of how EMI lecturers position themselves in their contacts with researchers and in their teaching; how their self-positionings are consistent or not with how researchers position them; and how self-positionings are similar or different across EMI lecturers. The paper ends with a discussion of what conclusions can be drawn from the research findings.

This review aims to identify major issues in and the direction of recent L2 Japanese research by reviewing over 200 empirical studies published in English or Japanese between 2000 and 2010. The first part of this article examines topics in second language acquisition (SLA) research with regard to L2 Japanese, including vocabulary and kanji (Chinese characters transferred into Japanese) learning, syntactic development, reading and writing in L2 Japanese, interlanguage pragmatics and language socialization, affective factors, and multilingualism and the acquisition of Japanese as a heritage language. The second part offers an overview of issues and problems in pedagogical practices, including curriculum design, culture in language education, classroom discourse, and study abroad. The review of these themes illustrates a broad picture of current research in L2 Japanese learning and instruction inspired by general trends in SLA and applied linguistics research, as well as unique features of Japanese language and social contexts.

In this position paper, we argue that second language (L2) pragmatic research needs to explore new avenues for integrating speech acts and interaction, by proposing a radically minimal, finite and interactional typology of speech acts. While we will introduce what we mean by integrating speech acts and interaction in detail below, the following argument helps us to summarise the issue we consider in this study:

The question of whether written corrective feedback (CF) has a role to play in second language (L2) development has been controversial since Truscott (1996) published an article in Language Learning calling for the abandonment of the practice on theoretical, empirical and pedagogical grounds. As a result of his claims, an on-going debate about the efficacy of the practice has ensued while a number of dedicated researchers have focused their attention on empirically investigating whether learners benefit from the practice in terms of significantly improving their accuracy in subsequent texts over time. Responding not only to Truscott's doubts about the overall effectiveness of written CF for L2 learning and his specific doubts about whether certain types of provision could ever have a meaningful and enduring effect on acquisition, further questions about the potential impact of different variables were central to the thinking and research that followed his claims. Such variables include the linguistic focus of the feedback and the relative merits of targeting a limited number of error categories (focused feedback) rather than a more comprehensive range of error categories (unfocused feedback). While a growing body of research has begun investigating these issues over the last 15–20 years, the field is in need of replication studies before firm conclusions can be reached.