Two areas of investigation and professional practice--language teachers' philosophies and language teacher cognition--can be considered as related, perhaps overlapping, insofar as they are both the result of thought. The concept of a philosophy of teaching may hold together sets of language teacher cognitions, or guide specific investigations of…

No area of language assessment research in the past 20 years has received a greater increase in attention than washback research. Beginning with the seminal work of Alderson & Wall (Alderson & Wall 1993; Wall & Alderson 1993), an evolving body of empirical washback studies has been conducted worldwide, especially in countries where…

Selecting appropriate texts for L2 (second/foreign language) learners is an important approach to enhancing motivation and, by extension, learning. There is currently no tool for classifying foreign language texts according to a language proficiency framework, which makes it difficult for students and educators to determine the precise…

In a series of articles Dörnyei and his colleagues (Dörnyei, Ibrahim, & Muir, 2015; Dörnyei, Muir, & Ibrahim, 2014; Muir & Dörnyei, 2013) describe the phenomenon of a period of intense and enduring motivation in pursuit of a highly desired personal goal or vision. These surges of motivational energy, which they call "Directed…

Linguistic knowledge, cognitive ability, and instruction influence how adults acquire a second orthography yet it remains unclear how different forms of instruction influence grain size sensitivity and subsequent decoding skill and speed. Thirty-seven monolingual, literate English-speaking adults were trained on a novel artificial orthography…

Dynamic assessment (DA) derives from the sociocultural theory of mind as elaborated by Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky. By offering mediation when individuals experience difficulties and carefully tracing their responsiveness, Vygotsky (1998) proposed that diagnoses may uncover abilities that have fully formed as well as those still in the…

Epistemics in interaction refers to how participants display, manage, and orient to their own and others' states of knowledge. This article applies recent conversation analytical work on epistemics to classrooms where language and content instruction are combined. It focuses on Epistemic Search Sequences (ESSs) through which students in peer…

This study uses conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the coupling of specific linguistic items with specific gestures in second language (L2) learning over time. In particular, we are interested in how gestures accompany learning of new vocabulary. CA-informed studies of gesture have previously shown the importance of embodiment in L2 use and…

This study investigates (1) whether late second language (L2) learners can attain native-like knowledge of English plural inflection even when their first language (L1) lacks an equivalent and (2) whether they construct hierarchically structured representations during online sentence processing like native speakers. In a self-paced reading task,…

Eye-tracking was used to investigate the attentional processes whereby different types of focus on form (FonF) instruction assist learners in overcoming learned attention and blocking effects in their online processing of second language input. English native speakers viewed Latin utterances combining lexical and morphological cues to temporality…

This study analyzes the language learning narratives of 3 NNS foreign language teachers. It uses as a theoretical framework the L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) (Dörnyei, 2009) but adds the dimension of psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966). Our findings indicate that the L2MSS underestimates the relationship between "I" and…

This paper looks at the continued survival of "myths" about English grammar, for example, the statement that in negative and interrogative sentences "any" should be used instead of "some". It is based on a survey of 195 Hong Kong students majoring in English, in five different cohorts, which found that such myths are…

The role of executive functioning in second language (L2) aptitude remains unclear. Whereas some studies report a relationship between working memory (WM) and L2 learning, others have argued against this association. Similarly, being bilingual appears to benefit inhibitory control, and individual differences in inhibitory control are related to…

Slobin's (1996) "thinking for speaking" hypothesis has been recently adopted by second language researchers as a valuable lens from which to examine the complexities of possible conceptual restructuring during interlanguage development. This paper reviews a sample of studies analyzing the linguistic and conceptual patterns observed in…

Since the late '60s, the field of second language acquisition (SLA) has grown enormously. Throughout its development, SLA researchers have investigated a wide range of issues including the processes involved in second language learning, as well as the psycholinguistic, affective and social factors that influence its success or failure (Spada,…