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 researchers to address the issue of small samples. Recommendations

Language learning and teaching (LLT) materials—like teacher‐created handouts, textbooks, and overhead transparencies—are central elements of language classrooms worldwide. Nonetheless, how language students and teachers actually engage with and deploy LLT materials has rarely been the focus of research. In response, this issue offers the first compilation of classroom‐based studies of ‘materials use’

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 the wider social and educational context, and to do so

This article reports the results of the first longitudinal study that systematically investigates the acquisition of verb agreement by hearing learners of a sign language. During a 2‐year period, 14 novel learners of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) with a spoken language background performed an elicitation task 15 times. Seven deaf native signers and NGT teachers performed the same task to serve

This study reveals hitherto overlooked effects of age of onset (AO) in immersive school contexts, using multiple measures over time so as to focus on fluctuations and trends in individual data. The second language (L2) English development was studied in 91 children who received 50–50 content and language integrated learning (CLIL) instruction in German and English and varied in their AO (5, 7, or 9)

Israel's Education Ministry invited proposals for the development of a new multilingual policy for the country's education system. We submitted a proposal for an ‘engaged language policy’ approach, which helps schools to conceptualize and develop a policy that best fits them ideologically and demographically. This study aimed to map teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward various principles and practices

To date, attempts at empirically validating a construct of academic vocabulary in the form of a frequency list in languages other than English remain conspicuously absent in peer‐reviewed journals. This study aims to close this gap by using Russian as a case study to develop an academic vocabulary list and prove its viability through a variety of data science methods, including cross‐validation and

This study investigated incidental learning of single‐word items and collocations through listening to teacher talk. Although there are several studies that have investigated incidental vocabulary learning through listening, no intervention studies have explicitly investigated the extent to which listening to teachers in a classroom context might contribute to vocabulary learning. The present study

This article explores language learning as the speakers’ microlongitudinal project in interaction. Using conversation analysis (CA) as a method, we present a single‐case analysis on how a change occurs in the linguistic repertoire of 2 learners of Finnish. We discuss the challenges that the temporal aspect in learning poses within CA, such as the difficulty in documenting a change on the one hand,

French second language education, including the option of one‐way French immersion, is mandated for majority‐language Anglophone children in New Brunswick, Canada's only officially bilingual province. Language ideological debates in the province surrounding official English–French bilingualism led us to investigate adolescent majority‐language immersion students’ investment in French, the co‐official

Translation has recently been revived as an approach to language learning that builds on students’ linguistic repertoires, particularly in linguistically diverse classrooms. However, few studies have examined how students use translation as part of writing in an additional language. This article provides new insights based on the translation practices of 22 newly arrived students in Norway during English

In studying the relationship between word recognition and reading development, a distinction is made between analytic and holistic processing of words. These strategies are often assessed in a length effect in an alphabetic language or in a stroke‐number effect in a logographic language. Analytical processing is associated with a robust length or stroke‐number effect while holistic processing is reflected

The present study investigated the role of Arabic diacritics in word recognition and their impact on Arabic L2 learners’ reading speed, accuracy, and comprehension at different stages of Arabic L2 acquisition. Fifty‐four English L2 learners of Arabic from 3 proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) participated in the study. They belonged to 2 sets of groups: half with exposure to instructional

This study explored the influence of speech rate (normal vs. fast), sentence length (short vs. long), and second language (L2) oral proficiency on listening comprehension in L2 Spanish. Thirty‐one native English‐speaking learners enrolled in upper‐level Spanish courses were aurally exposed to 8 sentences of each type of speed–length matrix, for a total of 32 sentences in Spanish. Listeners’ comprehension

Even though there is ample evidence that pronunciation plays a crucial role in effective second language (L2) communication, pronunciation training is frequently neglected in L2 classrooms due to time constraints or because instructors do not feel adequately prepared to teach pronunciation. To address this discrepancy, the present study investigates the effectiveness of a novel, homework‐based method

Lexical sophistication has been an important indicator of productive lexical proficiency for almost 30 years. Although lexical sophistication has most often been operationalized as the proportion of low frequency words in a text, a growing body of research has indicated that a number of indices such as concreteness, hypernymy, and n‐gram association strengths meaningfully contribute to the construct

We investigated how learner factors, such as vocabulary proficiency, strategy use, and working memory, are associated with successful corpus‐based second language (L2) vocabulary learning, in which learners are encouraged to analyze and explore large, structured collections of authentic language data (i.e., corpora) to resolve their lexical issues (i.e., data‐driven learning [DDL]). After measuring

Learning a language is a long‐term undertaking. In this endeavor, motivation is served by patterns of regulation that steer and control behavior. Regulation can be focused on possibilities and opportunities (an approach pattern), or the implications of failure (an avoidance pattern). Responding to calls for work with a focus on regulation (Papi et al., 2019), and with the aim of developing insights

For L2 learners from English‐dominant societies, study abroad (SA) is an especially significant opportunity for linguistic, sociocultural, and personal development. Less is known about the durability of these SA‐related developments, once Anglophone language specialists complete their home studies and then progress to graduate careers. This article reports a study of 33 specialist languages graduates

This article focuses on the identities constructed and negotiated during work‐based talk between in‐service English language teachers and a supervisor during dyadic post‐observation feedback meetings. Meetings were recorded with participants working in a tertiary institution in a Gulf state. Microanalysis of discourse excerpts shows how both participants (i.e., supervisor and teacher) negotiate identities

The present study investigated the effects of 2 forms of text‐based second language (L2) vocabulary glosses, namely dynamic and nondynamic glosses on EFL learners' vocabulary knowledge. Dynamic glosses were operationalized as a set of incrementally ordered mediating annotations designed to help learners identify the correct word definition while nondynamic glosses were operationalized as traditional

The aim of this study was to investigate deaf and severely hard‐of‐hearing students’ foreign language learning characteristics. In order to provide a better understanding of the challenges this group of learners face, a mixed methods study was designed including a questionnaire survey to provide generalizable results for our context and an interview study to get a deeper understanding of the issue

Learner corpus studies using syntactic complexity as a construct for characterizing learner proficiency have found that higher proficiency permits learners to produce more complex syntactic structures. However, the majority of previous studies have focused on writing, almost exclusively with adult second language (L2) learners. Given the fundamentally different mechanisms underlying speaking and writing

Adopting a translanguaging perspective, this article examines interlocutors’ orientations to, and use of, multidialectal and multilingual practices during second language (L2) Arabic conversations‐for‐learning beyond the classroom in a study abroad program. The study argues that participants’ translanguaging practices challenge monolingual ideologies and the program's monodialectal policy of using

IT IS A GREAT HONOR TO INTRODUCE THE PRESENT MLJ MONOGRAPH AS THE supplemental issue in Volume 104. In A Human Ecological Language Pedagogy, Glenn Levine has managed to create a holistic framework for language teaching and language learning that aligns with contemporary postmodern, dynamic, and multilingual theories. Building upon existing standards frameworks, such as the ACTFL Standards and the Common

THE IDEAS IN THIS MONOGRAPH ARE BUILT UPON THE VARIOUS ‘TURNS’ IN APPLIED linguistics in recent years. The field has expanded its understandings of what language itself is and how learning happens to include social, sociocultural, sociocognitive, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and most recently, post‐human analyses of human meaning making. These paradigm shifts have been especially fruitful in research

The ideas in this book began as a few notes on the back of a napkin, scribbled together with Alison Phipps, whom I must thank first for our rich and rewarding years of friendship, for her collegiality and support, for her sharp mind, brilliant ideas, and deep humanity, for helping to draw the occasional bright idea out of me, for the inspiration and motivation to think beyond the narrow confines of

LANGUAGE TEACHING HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR AS LONG AS THERE HAS BEEN CONTACT among people using different languages, even if formal, theoretically or empirically based approaches to the teaching and learning process are a more recent phenomenon. Every time anyone has ever taught another person a language, or for that matter, whenever someone has undertaken autodidactic language learning, there has been

Glenn S. Levine (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is Professor of German and affiliated professor in the Department of Language Science at the University of California, Irvine. At UC Irvine he also serves as the German language program director and in 2020 will begin a term as Director of the northern Europe study abroad programs of the University of California. Levine has published widely in

Recent research in second language acquisition suggests that a number of speed, breakdown, repair, and composite measures reliably assess fluency and predict proficiency. However, there is little research evidence to indicate which measures best characterize fluency at each assessed level of proficiency and which can consistently distinguish one level from the next. This study investigated fluency

This study examines the putative benefits of explicit phonetic instruction, high variability phonetic training, and their effects on adult nonnative speakers’ Mandarin tone productions. Monolingual first language (L1) English speakers (n = 80), intermediate second language (L2) Mandarin learners (n = 40), and L1 Mandarin speakers (n = 40) took part in a multiday Mandarin‐like artificial language learning

Research on language learning motivation has typically focused on the strength of different motives in isolation and often out of context. The present study aims to explore the applicability of one global framework of motivation to integrate different perspectives. We investigated how adaptive interactions between learners’ motivations for value, truth, and control effectiveness, and contextual factors

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 at addressing them. First, we introduce two recent studies

While an elicited imitation test (EIT) has been widely used as a measure of oral proficiency in second language acquisition (SLA) research, it is still unclear the extent to which memory capacity impacts EIT performance. In light of this gap, the present study sought to clarify the nature of elicited imitation by examining the relative contributions of language ability and phonological short‐term memory

In volume 103 of Modern Language Journal, Stephen May suggested that the multilingual turn has not fully delivered on its promises, pointing out second language acquisition (SLA) researchers’ continued focus on parallel monolingualisms rather than on dynamic bi/multilingualism, the lack of theorization of historicity in sociolinguistic research on the latter, the balkanization of academic knowledge

This article explores the information desk of a city library as a site for language learning. Using a linguistic ethnographic approach, the interactions between a customer experience and information assistant and the many library users who approach her information desk were analysed. Findings are that, in addition to providing information about library resources, information desks are sites at which

A strand of task‐based interaction research has emerged to better understand the effects of heritage language (HL) and second language (L2) learners’ peer collaboration on interactional moves (e.g., language‐related episodes [LREs], self‐repairs) and linguistic focus. To extend this line of research, this study compared 14 HL–L2 and 16 HL–HL advanced learners’ peer interactions across face‐to‐face