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…

Instructed foreign language knowledge -- that is, language skills acquired exclusively in the classroom without the benefit of any significant immersion experience -- remains a vastly neglected area of studies on language learning in general and language attrition in particular. There is also little consideration of foreign language attrition and…

Investigations of crosslinguistic effects in second language acquisition (SLA) have contributed rich understandings about the ways in which prior language knowledge and experience can influence additional language learning. Building on this work, one recent line of research has examined the extent to which SLA findings about crosslinguistic…

Accurate description of language use is central to English for academic purposes (EAP) practice. Thanks to the development of corpus tools, it has been possible to undertake systematic studies of language in academic contexts. This line of research aims to provide detailed and accurate characterization of academic communication and to ultimately…

First, we trace the history of second language acquisition (SLA) from early stages in the mid-twentieth century to today. We next consider the status of the field in today's research world with a particular focus on all aspects of methodology and, finally, we take a look at the future and discuss issues related to scientific rigor in light of Open…

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…

This review involved 60 articles chosen from 336 empirical studies identified in five leading journals on the learning and teaching of Chinese as a second or foreign language in mainland China during the period 2014-2018. The selected studies document Chinese researchers' efforts to improve the teaching and learning of the Chinese language in…

Research employing psycholinguistic techniques to assess the on-line processing of collocation by native and non-native speakers has flourished in the past few years. This line of research aims (among other things) at exploring actual performance in real time as opposed to the traditional paper-and-pencil testing techniques that have been…

This paper reviews how the construct of oral fluency in a second language (L2) has been defined and researched over the last twenty-five years. The emerging picture is somewhat kaleidoscopic, as domains of cognitive, social, individual and linguistic influences on L2 speech have been opened up for study. L2 fluency research presents a wealth of…

This paper calls for the replication of two task-based language teaching (TBLT) studies, Kim (2012) and Shintani (2012). Kim contributes to the large body of TBLT research on output-based tasks, whereas Shintani initiates research into input-based tasks, a less well researched domain. These studies deserve to be replicated for several reasons.…

The focus of this paper is replication research in pedagogical approaches to spoken fluency and formulaic sequences, and in particular, a call for replication of two often cited studies: Wood (2009) and Boers, Eyckmans, Kappel, Stengers & Demecheleer (2006). We begin by presenting a brief background to fluency and formulaic language, and…

Recent development in L2 pragmatics research in a study abroad context has witnessed an emerging line of studies investigating the joint influences of contextual and individual learner factors on second language (L2) pragmatic development. This paper argues for the replication of two representative quantitative studies in this new research…

Ever since Aristotle and Plato ("The Categories"; "Cratylus"), linguists have considered language to be the pairing of form (sounds or gestures or written strings) and meaning. This is true for all meaningful linguistic units from morphemes, through words, phrases and sentences, to discourse. Generally speaking, semantics is…

In her 2017 article 'Research into practice: Listening strategies in an instructed classroom setting,' Suzanne Graham outlines ways that research-derived principles of listening instruction have (not) been adopted in second language (L2) classrooms. She organizes her argument into three categories, discussing research findings that have not been…

This paper suggests six areas of vocabulary research which the author believes would be fruitful for future research. They include (1) developing a practical model of vocabulary acquisition, (2) understanding how vocabulary knowledge develops from receptive to productive mastery, (3) getting lexical teaching/learning principles into vocabulary and…