Migration, among the most important sociocultural phenomena of contemporary global societies, is complex, dynamic, and multifaceted. At the heart of migration is language, the indispensable agent of migration. Hence, in this article, a new sub-discipline of linguistics is presented, and that is 'migration linguistics'. It is the interdisciplinary…

The effect of first language transfer on second language acquisition and learning has been a major theoretical concept in second language research and pedagogy since the 1950s. In order to give a historical perspective, the authors offer a brief presentation of some of the major topics from the broad spectrum of issues that have been examined by…

When we think of the debates surrounding linguistic transfer in L3 acquisition, one of the most prominent discussions concerns whether transfer occurs in a wholesale fashion or whether it is property-by-property. One such model is the Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM, Mykhaylyk et al., 2015; Westergaard et al., 2017; Westergaard, 2021), which…

The first part of this paper discusses the rationale for universal grammar (UG) theory to explain first language acquisition. It also illustrates the issues of language acquisition Chomsky argued which could not be supported by behaviourist theories and shows how Chomsky proposed a solution to this problem through his theoretical model of…

This paper traces recent theorisation stemming from the multilingual turn and brings this into dialogue with assemblage thinking, discussing the critical potential of bringing these perspectives together to explore what language is and how it is understood. The argument maps salient features of the multilingual turn which have extended the fields…

American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses "wh"-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien,…

This state-of-the-art review focuses on translanguaging in education. In recent years, scholars have engaged in the conceptualisation of 'translanguaging' (e.g. García, 2009; García & Wei, 2014a; Wei, 2018) as well as in conducting a vast and ever-increasing number of empirical studies, in educational contexts in particular. This article aims…

This Perspectives article proposes a renewed vision of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) through a translanguaging (TL) stance, grounded in critical sociolinguistic inquiry and embodied practice. A TL theory of language asserts an activist agenda to dismantle mono/lingualism, inviting a more dynamic and expansive view of…

Despite the substantial expansion in vocabulary research since the 1980s, we still know very little about how vocabulary develops over time and what factors influence this development. This methodological overview discusses key issues and considerations in vocabulary breadth growth assessment to help advance research in this area. The report…

There are several theories which tackle predicting the source of third language (L3) crosslinguistic influence. The two orthogonal questions that arise are which language is most likely to influence the L3 and whether the influence will be wholesale or piecemeal (property-by-property). To my mind, Westergaard's Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM) is…

Contrastive rhetoric (CR) has made great contributions to our understanding of L2 writing. Nevertheless, CR has endured countless criticisms over the years, resulting in "reimagined" forms attempting to address many of these criticisms. In doing so, these forms have shaped CR into a collection of complex ideologies that have…

Promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has become a unifying cause within applied linguistics. Whether highlighting the experiences of linguistically diverse learners across the social class spectrum or advocating for the inclusion of marginalized populations in research, researchers within the subfields of applied linguistics have…

This paper argues for bringing insights from linguistics into the world language classroom. At any level of study, such insights can add intellectual interest to the study of a target language (TL), and can also help students accept and acquire aspects of the TL that are different from their first language or that are inherently challenging. As a…

This provocative article raises many important issues that need to be addressed and in so doing will advance the fields of second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition in several important ways. Fundamental questions concerning multilingual development persist especially with respect to the role of Universal Grammar in this language…

Because a large number of Chinese characters are commonly used in both Japanese and Chinese, Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL) find it more challenging to learn Japanese functional expressions than to learn other Japanese vocabulary. To address this challenge, we have developed "Jastudy," a…