The purpose of this article is to examine the ethical tensions and considerations that arise in the world language classroom from using pedagogies of discomfort. Although pedagogies of discomfort have mostly been seen through a positive lens in the literature for engaging students with difficult issues in the classroom, there are ethical concerns,…

With a forward-looking and problem-solving mindset, this article aims to combine theoretical knowledge and empirical evidence from different schools of thought in the field of second language (L2) learning and teaching--namely, instructed second language acquisition, generative linguistics, and an ecological perspective that includes multiple…

This complex article has six subsections. Following a brief introduction, one team of three co-authors and three single authors present compact statements of their distinctive individual research perspectives on second language acquisition and teaching (SLA/T): Atkinson, Mejía-Laguna, and Ribeiro offer a sociocognitive perspective; Cappellini…

This article reports a teaching project for the purpose of improving the citation ability of second language (L2) graduate students in academic writing through concept-based language instruction (C-BLI). "Citation" here refers to writers' use of external sources in their own writing, which is an important and unique feature of academic…

Competent L2 writing has been described in research in terms of an increasing incidence, variety, and length of clauses; a countervailing compactness and tightness with reduced number of clauses even as clause length expands; and various interrelationships between syntactic realizations of texts and the genres they represent. These partly…

The effects of learner- and task-related variables on second language (L2) writing syntactic complexity (SC) have been extensively investigated. However, previous research has rarely assessed the reliability of computational tools for analyzing the SC of L2 spoken production, and we know less about the effects of such variables on L2 speaking SC.…

In order to conceptualize materials used in pair-work activities from a sociomaterialist perspective, this study examined the moment-by-moment unfolding of 67 pair-work interactions in beginner-level Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classrooms. The types of pair-work materials used in the focal classrooms--either textbook or teacher-designed…

This article adopts learning-behavior tracking as a research methodology within conversation analysis for second language acquisition to investigate its applicability to track and document how learning opportunities through collaborative repair work are brought about and whether they lead to second language (L2) word learning. To this end, the…

This commentary discusses the issue of small samples in instructed second language acquisition research. We discuss the current state of affairs, and consider the disadvantages of small samples. We also explore other considerations regarding sample size, such as research ethics and ecological validity. We present a range of recommendations for…

In classrooms, teachers play a fundamental role in managing students' participation. As part of their classroom interactional competence to maximize interactional space for students' learning, teachers use multimodal resources to orchestrate turn-taking, allocate the next speaker, and manage repair sequences. However, little is known about how…

Flow is an intrinsic motivational state associated with full task engagement, positive affect, and enhanced performance. While research has examined how different language tasks interact with flow experiences, no study has examined learner flow experiences in a wide range of tasks using an experience sampling method to determine how universal…

The rationale behind this special issue is to underscore the importance of studying instructional materials in context--that is, how materials and textbooks are used by teachers and learners. Research on teaching materials needs to reach beyond traditional 'armchair' analyses and evaluations to appreciate the place of instructional materials in…

This study compares the effects of distributed versus massed corrective feedback (CF) on Spanish differential object marking (DOM). Forty-eight Spanish learners completed three communicative tasks with a researcher on three consecutive days, one task per day. Partial recasts were used to reformulate DOM errors. The distributed group (n = 16)…

In the coda chapter of the special issue on second language (L2) practice and cognitive psychology, we proposed a theoretical framework for optimizing and researching L2 practice (Suzuki, Nakata, & DeKeyser, 2019). Rogers and Leow's commentary (2020) raised three potential issues regarding this framework, and the present response article aims…

This study explored the role of feedback-seeking behaviors (FSB) in how English-as-a-second language (ESL) learners benefit from written corrective feedback (WCF). Seventy-six learners enrolled in an ESL writing course at a major university in the United States completed an FSB questionnaire, wrote a narrative essay, received WCF on their essays,…