The shifts underway in contemporary social conditions call for a new alignment between the specializations constituting English Studies: namely, literature, applied linguistics, and rhetoric and composition. Postcolonial social movements have generated new language, textual, and literary practices. These developments bring to the fore practices…

A large-scale study of complex "wh"-questions with 1,000 subjects aged 4-9 years is reported. The subjects' dialects were Mainstream American English or African American English, and approximately one-third were language impaired. The study examined when children permit long distance "wh"-movement, and when they respect a variety of syntactic…

Drawing on the findings of an ESRC-funded research study, which included a detailed linguistic analysis of a large corpus of writing from secondary English classrooms, this article describes patterns of linguistic deployment at the level of the sentence. Given the limited number of applied linguistic studies which consider writing development in…

In the past decade, language memoirs, linguistic autobiographies, and learners' journals and diaries have become a popular means of data collection in applied linguistics. It is not always clear however how one should go about analyzing these data. The aim of this paper is to offer a critical review of analytical frameworks applied to second…

This review of research on the learning, teaching, and assessment of L2 German published or completed between 2002 and 2008 may be particularly timely due to developments from within the profession as well as recent political changes which continue to have a strong bearing on the way L2 German is promoted, learned, taught and assessed. Far from…

A "text"-translation task and a recognition task investigated the hypothesis that "semantic memory" principally mediates translation from a bilingual's native first language (L1) to her second language (L2), whereas "lexical memory" mediates translation from L2 to L1. This has been held for word translation by the revised hierarchical model (RHM)…

This article overviews the status, ecology, use, and the teaching/learning of English in the southern Indian state of Kerala. It does so along two overlapping dimensions. A socio-demographic dimension situates the ecology of English in Kerala in the general Indian context, and relates it to the ethno-linguistic identity of Kerala. A second applied…

This study examines the first time publishing experience of non-native English speaking doctoral students at three public universities in Hong Kong. The purpose was to gain an understanding of the perceptions of Hong Kong non-native English speaking doctoral students as writers of journal articles, their difficulties in getting papers published in…

This study explores the relationship between aptitude, phonological memory (PM), and second language (L2) proficiency in nonnovice adult learners of English as an L2. Native speakers of French (N = 77) enrolled in a university Teaching English as a Second Language program were the participants in the study. Exploratory factor analysis revealed…

Demotivation is a relatively new issue in the field of second language (L2) motivation. In this study, we review previous studies that investigated demotivation of learners of English in order to identify common demotivating factors and report a survey study which explored demotivating factors for Japanese high school students. A 35-item…

Blended learning, a combination of face-to-face and online instruction, is seen as one of the most important advancements of this century and a natural evolution of the learning agenda (Thorne, 2003). Blended learning studies that compared traditional and blended foreign language classes showed no significant differences in learner outcomes and…

Calls for teaching and learning that cross subject boundaries have been making themselves heard in recent Higher Education literature in different national contexts. Communication is pivotal in any such learning encounter: it is in the process of negotiating meaning across disciplines that its rewards and challenges lie. And yet, the question of…

This paper explores the degree of variability in the structure of research article introductions within a single discipline. It is an exploratory study based on the analysis of 20 research articles. The study investigates the differences between two subdisciplines of applied linguistics, namely second language acquisition and second language…

As a result of investigations showing that communication problems can be a significant contributing factor to major aviation accidents, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has established a set of Language Proficiency Requirements. All pilots and air traffic controllers engaged in international aviation must be certified by their…

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers "each", "every", and "all" are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse college-level student groups on a…