This reflective piece tells the story of how I started out doing Conversation Analysis (CA) and have been transitioning into doing mixed methods for some years now. My basic argument is that language learning talk is too complex a phenomenon to analyse using a single methodology. Specifically, it is extremely difficult to isolate from the…

In this short article I try to present a taxonomy of sources of difficulty, in particular complexity. I emphasize how these factors interact with each other and with individual differences and treatments, before illustrating some of these interactions and the methodological issues involved in studying them with examples from the empirical studies…

This is the first collection of research studies to explore the potential for mixed methods to shed light on foreign or second language learning by young learners in instructed contexts. It brings together recent studies undertaken in Cameroon, China, Croatia, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Tanzania and…

This chapter takes a critical look at complexity in L2 research. We demonstrate several problems in the L2 literature in terms of how complexity has been defined and operationalised as a construct. In the first part of the chapter we try to unravel its highly complex, multidimensional nature by presenting a taxonomic model that identifies major…

This article critically scrutinizes a number of issues involved in the definition and operationalization of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) constructs. It argues for maintaining clearer distinctions between CAF, on the one hand, and notions such as linguistic development and communicative adequacy, on the other. Adequacy, in particular,…

In this article, we examine current practices in the measurement of syntactic complexity to illustrate the need for more organic and sustainable practices in the measurement of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in second language production. Through in-depth review of examples drawn from research on instructed second language acquisition, we…

Compares the use of sentence weight and the T-unit in measuring the oral language of 32 adolescents. Indicates the relative merits of the T-unit as a measure of oral language, because the two measures appeared to give much the same information about the speech samples examined. (RL)

This study focused on linguistic analyses used in the PIF Project (Project in Error Analysis, Interlanguage Studies and Contrastive Linguistics), an ongoing study of learner language and a project in foreign language pedagogy. For the project, 120 Danish learners of English were divided into 12 groups representing different Danish educational…

The collection of essays on aspects of Vygotskian theory focuses on the theory's application to research on second language learning. Articles include: "Theoretical Framework: An Introduction to Vygotskian Perspectives on Second Language Research" (James P. Lantolf, Gabriela Appel); Collective Scaffolding in Second Language…