This paper examines the key linguistic arguments underpinning Basil Bernstein's theory of "elaborated" and "restricted" "codes". Building on a review of selected highlights from the collective critical response to Bernstein, the paper attempts to clarify the relationship of the theory to "deficit" views…

In this article, a survey of current psycholinguistic techniques relevant to second language acquisition (SLA) research is presented. I summarize many of the available methods and discuss their use with particular reference to two critical questions in current SLA research: (1) What does a learner's current knowledge of the second language (L2)…

This paper highlights the role of speech community members on a series of interconnected projects to document, study and maintain Kokama, a deeply endangered language from the Peruvian Amazon. The remaining fluent speakers of the language are mostly older than 60 years of age, are spread out across various small villages, and speak the language in…

Can stories about students and classrooms be the basis for meaningful research? In this book, the authors describe and tell illustrative stories about the potential and limits of narrative for the purpose of inquiry in English education. They argue that narrative inquiry is uniquely suited to the questions educators are asking in the field today.…

This study investigates the potentials and limits of sociolinguistic research on language shift. Starting from a position that the ultimate goal of the research must be to create a general theory of language shift of predictive power, the author examines the explanatory potential of current mainstream research methodology now regarded as canonical…

This article constitutes the first empirical assessment of methodological quality in second language acquisition (SLA). We surveyed a corpus of 174 studies (N = 7,951) within the tradition of research on second-language interaction, one of the longest and most influential traditions of inquiry in SLA. Each report was coded for methodological…

Extracting and representing semantic information from large scale corpora is at the crux of computer-assisted knowledge generation. Semantic information depends on collocation extraction methods, mathematical models used to represent distributional information, and weighting functions which transform the space. This dissertation provides a…

There is a general consensus among second-language (L2) researchers today that lexical inferencing (LIF) is among the most common techniques that L2 learners use to generate meaning for unknown words they encounter in context. Indeed, claims about the salience and pervasiveness of LIF for L2 learners rely heavily upon data obtained via concurrent…

This article proposes an answer to the primary question of how the American Sign Language (ASL) community in the United States conceptualizes (im)politeness and its related notions. It begins with a review of evolving theoretical issues in research on (im)politeness and related methodological problems with studying (im)politeness in natural…

For decades educational psychologists have bemoaned the black box approach of much research on learning, that is, the focus on product rather than process, and the absence of fine-grained analysis of the learning process in the individual. One way that progress has been made on this point in the last couple of decades is through cognitive…

Research has described the key role of formulaic language use in both written and spoken communication (Schmitt, 2004; Wray, 2002), as well as in relation to L2 learning (Ellis, Simpson--Vlach, & Maynard, 2008). Relatively few studies have examined related fixed and semi-fixed multi-word units (MWUs), which comprise fixed parts with the potential…

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…

Linguistics and Communication Disorders are considered two different disciplines by most students and scholars in both fields as well as by researchers working in other relevant fields such as psychology and education. However, most core disorders, disabilities and delays in communicative ability directly concern language, especially in…

The purpose of this article is to motivate the use of effect size (ES) for single-subject research in clinical phonology, with an eye towards meta-analyses of treatment effects for children with phonological disorders. Standard mean difference (SMD) is introduced and illustrated as one ES well suited to the multiple baseline (MBL) design and…

In the last 20 years, technological advancement and increased multidisciplinarity has expanded the range of data regarded as within the scope of languages for specific purposes (LSP) research and the means by which they can be analyzed. As a result, the analytical work of LSP researchers has developed from a narrow focus on specialist terminology…