The aim of this personal reflection is to revisit the major concepts that have informed my academic research in the area of applied linguistics and second language development, and show how my overall pedagogical approach has evolved, thanks to the contribution of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory (SCT). The main focus of this paper is on the…

Learner corpora of written texts from academic writing assignments provide a practical resource for students, particularly in fostering academic writing skills. One such corpus is the newly available ROGER (Corpus of Romanian Academic Genres), a bilingual comparable corpus containing learner discipline-specific academic writing data in Romanian…

Since its inception in the late 1960's, the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has undergone many transformations. As pre-existing theories have been expanded upon and new theories introduced, researchers and practitioners have come to a deeper understanding of the second language (L2) learning process. The past two decades, in particular,…

Acquiring a second language (L2) has been increasingly recognized to be an ongoing developmental process, one that progresses in a fluid and non-linear fashion (Larsen-Freeman, 2015). Instead of operating like a mechanical black box that parses incoming linguistic information and outputs oral/written language indiscriminately, the learner's…

Recently, Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy won the 2018 Research Impact Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the largest international organization that specializes in the teaching and studies of composition. This recognition seems to signal a turn to transliteracy education, i.e., English writing…

This article offers the author's commentary on the Multiple Grammar (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in the present issue and touches on other second language acquisition research. Topics discussed include the concept of second language (L2) optionality, a hypothesis regarding the acquisition of the…

Communication is important for people around the world. People try to communicate to other people around the globe using language. In understanding the differences of some languages around the world, people need to learn the language of other people they try to communicate with, for example Indonesian people learn to acquire English. In the…

The issue of teaching pragmatics in foreign and second language classrooms has received a lot of attention in the recent years. Its origins can be dated back to the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSRAP) led by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) and the research on interlanguage speech acts that followed (for a comprehensive…

Webtools provide language students a uniquely authentic audience with which to share their creativity and growing proficiency in the target language. Students tend to write/speak more--and better--when using these tools in the language classroom. Webtools form an enjoyable and pedagogically sound way of getting students to create and have fun with…

Teaching L2 pragmatics is often not covered in teacher education programs, and is an excellent area for continuing professional development. As part of a larger project on instructed interlanguage pragmatics, volunteer instructor participants were asked to teach a series of lessons on pragmatics to university-aged (19-23) ESL learners in ESL and…

English language learners are increasingly present in early care environments. In 2005, for example, 14.7 percent of children in nonparental care in the United States came from homes where only one parent or neither parent spoke English. Approximately 29 percent of children participating in Head Start programs spoke a language other than English.…

This article describes the development and evaluation of a computer-assisted language learning approach which integrates a finite state dialogue engine with an animated pedagogical agent. The design of the request game is theoretically motivated by interlanguage pragmatics and Long's Interaction Hypothesis. The tutoring system creates a venue in…

The paper discusses World Englishes (WEs) in relation to English as an International Language (EIL) and Applied Linguistics. Taking into account Kachru's interesting but at the same time controversial debate about the status of English in its varieties, which are commonly called WEs and the opposing ideas presented by Quirk, it is aimed to present…

Because the appearance of the passive construction varies cross linguistically, differences exist in the interlanguage (IL) passives attempted by learners of English. One such difference is the widely studied IL pseudo passive, as in "*new cars must keep inside" produced by Chinese speakers. The belief that this is a reflection of L1 language…

Teaching English became a professional and academic field from a half century ago. Many researches for teacher education and teacher training have been conducted in order to raise the English as well as the foreign language trainers' knowledge and capabilities in carrying out effective lessons in classroom. During second millennium of speedily…