This paper reports on an approximate or partial replication of a study by Salsbury, Crossley & McNamara (2011) that examined the longitudinal developmental of a number of core lexical features related to word imageability, concreteness, familiarity, and meaningfulness in a spoken corpus of English second language (L2) learners. Salsbury et al.…

This special issue contains reports of research on a variety of variables that are hypothesized to have an impact on how practice affects language learning. This includes spacing of practice opportunities, the provision of feedback, training working memory, and oral versus written input. Each study is complex and clearly contextualized within the…

An ongoing debate in phonology concerns the extent to which the phonological typology is shaped by synchronic learning biases. The two best-studied types of synchronic bias are complexity bias, a bias against formally complex patterns, and substantive bias, a bias against phonetically unnatural patterns. While most previous work has focused on…

The construct "awareness" is undoubtedly one of the more difficult constructs to operationalize and measure in both second language acquisition (SLA) and non-SLA fields of research. Indeed, the multifaceted nature of awareness is clearly exemplified in concepts that include perception, detection, and noticing, and also in type of…

The practice of securing informed consent from research participants has a relatively low profile in second language (L2) acquisition research, despite its prominence in the biomedical and social sciences. This review article analyses the role that informed consent now typically plays in L2 research; discusses an example of an L2 study where…

In this paper I propose an agenda for researching language learning motivation "through a small lens", to counteract our tendency in the second language (L2) motivation field to engage with language learning and teaching processes at a rather general level. I argue that by adopting a more sharply focused or contextualized angle of…

This study is located in a lesser-known educational context and investigates aspects of migration, religion and multilingualism. Focusing on the discourse of second-generation adolescent migrants in a Tamil Hindu temple school in urban Australia, I discuss how flexible language practices manifest in this migrant faith setting. I argue that the use…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise, description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Latgalian is a Baltic regional language originating in the region of Latgale (Latgalian: Latgola) in Eastern Latvia. It is mostly spoken in Latgale, but also in families and small communities of people…

This dissertation investigates a typologically rare linguistic phenomenon found in Irish from three different perspectives: how it challenges phonological theory, how it is used by contemporary speakers, and how its written representation affects its acquisition. Initial consonant mutation (ICM), as it appears in the Celtic languages, is known to…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relations between emotions, classroom environment, and willingness to communicate (WTC) using the advanced quantitative methodological procedure of doubly latent multilevel analysis. To this end, 1528 secondary school students from 65 different classrooms in Iran participated in the study.…

Since at the turn of the twenty-first century heritage language (HL) research and education was a new field emerging, this research timeline traces the complete history of the field in the US through 2016. It highlights how theories and perspectives have changed, been challenged, and widely accepted. The field's roots are in Spanish since, as the…

Much research has been done in the realization of apology and request speech act but very few have explored this in the context of Arabic language. We perform a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) process in this paper to gather and analyze studies to identify the diverse apology and request strategies preferred by Arabic learners of English and…

In the current conditions of globalization and the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF), the notions of pragmatic competence and appropriateness as well as pragmatic failure become of paramount importance to the language learners and instructors. The current article discusses these questions through an approximate replication of Jaworski's…

With the largest number of English learners in the world, the influence of the English language teaching (ELT) reform in China cannot be underestimated. This article explores the implications of the actual use of English in China's workplace for ELT reform in the context of English as a lingua franca (ELF). On the basis of cross-validated data…

During the last 20 years, "Critical Inquiry in Language Studies" has played an important role in advancing research on critical applied linguistics. Although the level of scholarly interest in critical research and its visibility have increased, issues that critical research has attempted to problematize, such as normative ideologies of…