The aim of the one-day symposium was to bring together scholars in applied linguistics with an interest in the African languages for the launch of the new AILA Africa regional network. Contributions were in the form of invited research papers from several African countries. This report focuses on the South African contribution, which highlighted current research into the use and development of the African languages for academic purposes in response to the South African National Language Education Policy (South Africa, DoE 2002) with its focus on the development of multilingualism in the country.

Speakers of a second language (L2), regardless of proficiency level, communicate for specific purposes. For example, an L2 speaker of English may wish to build rapport with a co-worker by chatting about the weather. The speaker will draw on various resources to accomplish her communicative purposes. For instance, the speaker may say ‘falling ice’ if she has forgotten the word ‘hail’ or may repeat the last few words of her interlocutor's utterance to show that she is listening and engaged. The term communication strategies (CSs) refers to the strategic use of various resources (both linguistic and non-linguistic) for communicative purposes. While speakers also use CSs in their native languages (L1s), research on L2 CS use is particularly interesting because speakers’ L2 linguistic resources and the associated cognitive processes are typically less developed, compared to those in their L1. Therefore, for L2 users to accomplish their communicative purposes in the L2, it is important that they effectively use the resources available to them. This research timeline presents key developments in theoretical understanding and empirical research targeting L2 CSs, mainly in oral communication. The timeline places particular emphasis on the evolution of theoretical approaches to the study of CSs and the consequent expansion of research in terms of the nature of participants, speech samples, and analytical tools used.

From 2008, a new section of the journal will be dedicated to academic studies which use a replication approach. We invite submissions of previously unpublished articles based on literal, approximate or constructive replication of a previous study or studies of an aspect of L2 education. In keeping with the survey characteristics of Language Teaching, we also encourage submissions of meta-analyses which attempt to combine or synthesise a series of comparable research replications.

In referencing the title of Chris Candlin's (2008) plenary, this paper focuses on the continuing concern to align research and practice in applied linguistics, and more particularly in language for specific purposes (LSP) and professional communication. We examine how Candlin identified practices for trading places between research and practice and for creating synergies between them – and in so doing opened up new spaces for enquiry and understanding in the field. We identify and critically examine four approaches that Candlin developed to promote the alignment of research and practice: through particular research tools and methodologies, through the investigation of professional settings and inter-domain constructs (such as quality, trust and risk), through a concern with both rigour and relevance in relation to research and training, and through a focus on ‘critical moments of interaction’ in ‘crucial sites of engagement’ (Candlin 2008). To this end, we draw on the diverse domains and trajectories of enquiry outlined in the opening plenary symposium at the 4th Asia-Pacific Language for Specific Purposes & Professional Communication Association Conference from five standpoints: in recent impact case studies of professional communication in the Hong Kong context (Cheng 2017), in a ‘multi-perspectival’ account of Candlin's enacted philosophy of teaching and learning (Moore 2017), in examining the communicative basis of expertise (Sarangi 2017) and the concept of interdiscursivity (Jones 2017), and in the extensive fieldwork and analysis of workplace talk underlying the development of resources for new migrants in New Zealand (Holmes & Riddiford 2017). In conclusion, we pay tribute to an inspirational researcher and teacher whose influence will continue to impact applied linguistics for decades to come.

The Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (CLAL) at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies is recognized as a ‘National Key Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China. It is the only center recognized by the Chinese Ministry of Education to have a national key research institute devoted to linguistics and applied linguistics. CLAL has cultivated a core team of scholars whose work in linguistics and applied linguistics is both prolific and broad in scope, spanning three fields of research: second language (L2) learning, societal and public discourse analysis, and theoretical linguistics.

Both of us were drawn into the writing assessment field initially through our lived experiences as schoolteachers. We worked in radically different contexts – Martin was head of a languages department and teacher of French and German in the late 1990s in the UK, and David was a Grade 12 teacher of Academic English in Alberta, Canada, at the turn of the twenty-first century. In both these contexts, the traditional direct test of writing – referred to, for example, as the ‘timed impromptu writing test’ (Weigle, 2002, p. 59) or the ‘snapshot approach’ (Hamp-Lyons & Kroll, 1997, p. 18) – featured significantly in our practices, albeit in very different ways. This form of writing assessment still holds considerable sway across the globe. For us, however, it provoked early questions and concerns around the consequential and ethical aspects of writing assessment.

South African National Language Education policy (South Africa, DoE 2002) enshrines multilingualism (ML) as one of its major goals. The implementation of such a policy is a slow process, however, particularly in the educational domain, where parents, teachers and students favour the dominant, ex-colonial language (English) for both historic and instrumental reasons (Dalvit & de Klerk 2005). However, results of the National Benchmarking Test (NBMT Report 2009) conducted at selected South African universities show that most non-English speaking students in higher education have underdeveloped language and numeracy skills for study at this level, one of the main barriers to access being that of language (Council on Higher Education 2007: 2). Efforts have thus intensified in South African institutions to introduce the home languages of learners into the educational domain, either as learning support alongside the main medium of instruction or as alternative languages of instruction, working towards the development of a bilingual education model. This report documents developments in research in the promotion and use of the African languages in education in South Africa in recent years, particularly since the publication of the previous report (Wildsmith-Cromarty 2009), which discussed various initiatives in the teaching, development and use of the African languages in South African education during the period 2005–2008. This report considers further developments in the use of the African languages for academic purposes in the following areas: the learning and teaching of these languages as additional languages and for professional purposes in selected disciplines for specialist programmes, and their intellectualization, which includes their use as languages of instruction, in the translation of materials and other learning resources, and development of terminology.

This seminar took place at the Institute of Education, University of London, 4 July 2014 (UCL Institute of Education from 2 December 2014).

Corpus linguistics has transformed the landscape of empirical research on languages in recent decades. The proliferation of corpus technology has enabled researchers worldwide to conduct research in their own geographical locations with few hindrances. It has become increasingly commonplace for researchers to compile their own corpora for specific research questions or to conduct research on the basis of corpora constructed by other researchers. Moreover, corpus linguistics has become accessible to language teachers, providing ideas, instructions and new opportunities to apply corpus techniques, corpus-based materials and activities in their classrooms (e.g., Bennett 2010; Reppen 2010; Scheffler 2011).

The steady expansion in qualitative research in the area of language education over the last two decades indicates the growing recognition of its importance to investigating issues of language teaching and learning. Along with this recognition, understanding and assessing the quality of qualitative studies in this area has gained increasing significance. Addressing this concern, in this research synthesis, we qualitatively explore how 236 qualitative language education studies published in seven leading journals explicitly foreground the issue of ‘research quality’. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of how authors of these studies addressed the main quality concepts proposed by well-known frameworks of qualitative research quality. Our findings, presented as ten major themes, show that qualitative researchers' overt treatment of research quality is realised based on three distinct orientations: no explicit quality criteria, positivist views of quality, and interpretive quality conceptions. We discuss aspects of these orientations and their implications for qualitative research in language education.