Getting Inside “Measuring Second Language Pragmatic Competence”

This month we published Measuring Second Language Pragmatic Competence by Rod Ellis, Carsten Roever, Natsuko Shintani and Yan Zhu. In this post Rod introduces us to the book.

There is a background to the writing of any book which often goes unstated. In my blog post I’d like to take you inside the book by telling you a bit about why and how it got to be written. I will explain who the authors are, what motivated the writing of the book, what research it was based on and what I see as the uses of the book.

How did I come to work with my co-authors on this book?

The real starting point was a research study I completed more than fifteen years ago investigating the measurement of second language (L2) grammatical knowledge. This research drew the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge of an L2 and involved the development of a set of tests designed to provide separate measures of these two types of grammatical knowledge. The results of this research project were reported in a book called  Implicit and Explicit Knowledge in Second Language Learning, Testing and Teaching published by Multilingual Matters in 2009. My idea was to extend this earlier research by investigating whether it was also possible to develop tests that would provide separate measures of implicit and explicit L2 pragmatic knowledge (i.e. the knowledge we use to communicate smoothly and appropriately).

I decided therefore to put in an application for a Discovery Research Grant from the Australian Research Council, drawing on my experience of the earlier project. My own expertise lay in second language acquisition research but I recognized that I also needed expertise in L2 pragmatics. I approached Carsten Roever, who had published widely in L2 pragmatics, to see if he would be interested in joining in the project. Carsten was an ideal co-researcher because he also had experience in language assessment. Together we developed a research proposal, which was successful. We now had the funds we needed for the project.

Our original aim was to investigate different populations of L2 learners – both EFL and ESL. After designing a battery of tests, we started by collecting data from L2 university learners in China and Japan. To help in this we were joined by two other researchers – Yan Zhu, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, and Natsuko Shintani, a professor at Kansai University in Osaka. Unfortunately restrictions arising from the Covid epidemic in Australia made it impossible to continue by collecting data from ESL learners.

The research team, then, comprised myself, Carsten, Yan Zhu and Natsuko. This team has remained with the project throughout and many of the chapters in the book involved all four authors.

Why was it important for us to take a psycholinguistic perspective?

By ‘psycholinguistic perspective’ I mean an approach that is founded on the psychological underpinning of linguistic rules and processes. In the case of language testing, this involves considering the mental processes involved when completing tests. While there are a number of different psycholinguistic perspectives, the one we drew on was based on the implicit/ explicit distinction. From this theoretical perspective, when learners complete a test they can draw on their implicit knowledge (i.e. knowledge that they have no conscious awareness of and can be accessed automatically) or their explicit knowledge (i.e. knowledge they are conscious of and that is only accessible slowly after reflection). The implicit/explicit distinction is a fundamental distinction in current thinking theorizing about an L2 but, surprisingly, it has not figured in research on the testing of L2 pragmatic competence. In fact, many of the popular ways of testing L2 pragmatics really only measure explicit processing and thus tell us nothing about learners’ ability to process their pragmatic knowledge implicitly even though, arguably, it is implicit abilities that are essential in everyday communicative situations.

All research needs to focus on how it can build on and extend existing research. By adopting a psycholinguistic perspective, we hoped to fill a gap in current research on the measurement of pragmatic competence.

How did we develop the tests that featured in the book?

The development of any test requires making decisions about what to test and how to test it. Our starting point was to decide what aspects of pragmatics to measure. A study of the L2 pragmatics literature led us to identify three aspects: metapragmatic awareness, implicature, and conversational structure. In deciding how to assess these aspects, we tried to design tests that would tap either learners’ implicit pragmatic processing abilities (i.e. responses made rapidly and without time for reflection) or explicit processing abilities (i.e. responses made without time pressure and that favoured reflection).  We ended up with two tests involving explicit processing, two tests more likely to favour implicit processing, and a test of the ability to comprehend irony where we were unsure of the kind of processing it would most likely elicit. These tests also differed in terms of whether they involve comprehension/perception or production.

The initial tests were designed by myself and Carsten Roever, piloted on a small group of ESL learners, revised, and then administered with the help of Yan Zhu and Natsuko Shintani in China and Japan respectively. One of our aims was to carry out a careful evaluation of the tests and there are chapters in the book that report the results of the evaluation of each test. Not unexpectedly, we did not find that all the tests worked as well as we had hoped! Subsequently, we redesigned some of the tests and used them in a final study where we investigated the effects of instruction on the development of the two types of knowledge.

What do we hope readers will take away from the book?

We envisage that the main readers of our book will be second language acquisition researchers interested in pragmatics. An abiding issue in SLA research is how learning is measured and we hoped that the tests we developed would help in designing studies that investigate how different conditions of learning impact on the kind of the learning that results. Two chapters in our book illustrate how the tests can be used in this way. In one chapter, we report a comparative study of L2 learners who completed a one-year study abroad and learners who received language instruction while staying in their home country. In another study, we used the tests to investigate the effects of different kinds of instruction on the acquisition of implicit and explicit L2 pragmatic knowledge.

We did not write the book for teachers. But the perspective that informs the book is one that teachers need to consider. Any time teachers set their students a test they need to consider what kind of knowledge the test is measuring.

What are we working on next?

The tests provide the tools we need to investigate the pragmatic competence of L2 learners and how learning conditions shape the kind of learning that take place. We are already embarking on two other studies investigating this. In one study (involving myself and Scott Aubrey), we are comparing the pragmatic competence of students in Hong Kong and Shanghai universities to see if there are differences in these groups of learners. In the other study with Natsuko Shintani, we are investigating how the interactive experiences of Japanese students on a study abroad shape the kind of pragmatic abilities they develop.

Rod Ellis

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting you might also like Assessing Speaking in Context edited by M. Rafael Salaberry and Alfred Rue Burch.

How do Students with Specific Learning Differences Learn Additional Languages?

We will soon be publishing the second edition of Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences by Judit Kormos and Anne Margaret Smith. In this post the authors explain what’s new in this edition.

When we published the first edition of our book, Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences, in 2012, there was limited awareness among language teachers, teacher educators, material designers, language testers and researchers regarding how students with specific learning differences (SpLDs) acquire additional languages and how to support their success as language learners. Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest and increased effort to design and implement inclusive language teaching programs that cater to the diverse needs of students. In a wide range of contexts, it is now mandated at the policy level that language learners with disabilities should be provided with equitable opportunities to acquire additional languages. There has also been a remarkable shift away from medicalizing and viewing disabilities from a deficiency perspective, instead recognizing them as part of the inherent diversity of human existence and experience, highlighting the importance of removing socially constructed barriers in all aspects of life.

The new edition of our book has been fully revised to reflect these changing conceptualizations of specific learning differences and places emphasis on barriers to participation, inclusive language teaching, and assessment practices in all its chapters. Accordingly, the first updated chapter includes a detailed discussion of discourses and conceptualizations of neurodiversity and draws attention to the fact that individual learners may have different types of intersecting disabilities and disadvantages simultaneously. The chapters on the general principles and specific techniques of inclusive language teaching have also been thoroughly revised to incorporate recent advances in research and practices related to accessibility and universal design.

Since the original publication of our book, a considerable amount of research has been conducted, not only on the potential challenges that students with SpLDs might face in language learning but also on how various instructional approaches and methods can support second language learners with diverse cognitive profiles. While many recommendations for teaching language learners with SpLDs were previously based on teachers’ intuition and prior experience, there is now substantial evidence from the field of second language acquisition research showing that these recommended approaches, such as multi-modal teaching techniques, benefit all language learners, not just those with SpLDs. The updated chapter on language teaching techniques has also been expanded to include detailed recommendations from first language literacy research that can assist in the development of reading and writing skills for second language learners with SpLDs. Not only has the number of studies investigating the language learning processes of students with SpLDs grown in the past decade, but there has also been an increased effort to make assessments fair and equitable for test-takers with SpLDs. The updated chapter on assessing students with SpLDs includes these latest developments and the studies supporting current inclusive assessment designs.

The field of inclusive language teaching and the study of disabilities in language learning are likely to continue expanding and branching into new directions in the future. Our book provides a current and comprehensive overview of how students with SpLDs learn additional languages, the barriers they might face, and how their language acquisition experiences can be enhanced. We hope that it will serve as a valuable resource for teachers, teacher educators, language testers, and academics, and that it will inspire future research and initiatives to make multilingual language education accessible to all.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like (M)othering Labeled Children by María Cioè-Peña.

How to Help Second Language Learners Develop Their Literacy Abilities

We recently published Second Language Literacy Pedagogy by Kimberly Buescher Urbanski. In this post the author explains what led her to write the book.

The seeds of this book began when I was a high school French student. As an avid first language reader and a dedicated second language learner, I found it difficult to use my first language reading ability and my knowledge of French to read authentic French texts. Once I later became a high school and college level French teacher, I found it equally difficult to help my students to do the same. I wanted to find a way to better understand the second language literacy development process and how we can help students. My research as a scholar began during my Master’s after reading Michael Cole’s (1996) work with struggling L1 readers and his solution using Sociocultural Theory. Through many iterations and investigations during my PhD and after, as well as much reading and thinking, I continued to develop my own understanding of how to best help second language learners develop their literacy abilities. In general, my research focuses on needs that are present in pedagogical contexts, draws on theory to inform and guide my efforts to improve the practice of teaching-learning, and returns to test the theory through my research-teaching.

In this book, for my research-teaching, I used Concept-Based Language Instruction from Sociocultural Theory (e.g., Lantolf & Poehner, 2014; Vygotsky, 2012) and a Division-of-Labor Pedagogy (Buescher, 2015). This unique combination allowed me to help students develop their understanding and use of the concepts of literacy such as Foundation, Organization, and Genre while reading authentic French narratives collectively. Each concept had four roles, which were prepared, shared, and then rotated among the students so that at the start, they each had responsibility for one portion of the intricate task of reading, yet gained the full understanding of the text through their collectivity. In addition, they were mediated individually and collectively through the researcher-teacher’s real time attuned mediation. The aim was to address the well-documented curricular gap (e.g. Byrnes et al., 2010) in second language teaching between the introductory courses, focusing mainly on language, and the advanced courses, focusing mainly on reading literature by working with learners aiming to bridge this gap.

If you are interested in learning more about second language literacy development or to learn more about Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory as applied in both small group and full classroom settings, I hope that you will find the detailed pedagogy and results of that pedagogy as helpful guides for your own teaching and researching.

Kimberly (Buescher) Urbanski
Pronouns: she, her
Associate Professor
Department of Applied Linguistics
University of Massachusetts – Boston
kimberly.urbanski@umb.edu

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Second Language Literacy Practices and Language Learning Outside the Classroom by Miho Inaba.

The Past and Present of Grammar Teaching in ELT

This month we published Grammar in ELT and ELT Materials by Graham Burton. In this post the author explains what inspired him to write the book and what he hopes readers will take away from it.

What motivated you to write this book?

It was a combination of things. I started my career in ELT as a teacher but as my background was in linguistics, I always had a somewhat analytical eye with respect to teaching content and was often far more interested in the ‘what’ of teaching rather than the ‘how’. I also worked for years in ELT publishing as an editor and author and saw first hand how decisions on content selection are made. As I gradually moved from teaching and publishing into academia, I found that – particularly in the field of SLA – the focus was far more on questions of how language should be taught and how it can be learned, but the question of which content was appropriate and useful for learners was largely taken for granted. The latter is more commonly addressed in the fields of corpus linguistics, syllabus design and materials analysis, but it seemed that nobody had brought these things together, particularly in the context of ELT grammar. This seemed to make it ripe for an investigation.

Your book is both about the past and present of grammar teaching in ELT. What made you want to focus on the past?

There’s a well-known adage – perhaps a little trite – that says we can’t understand the present without knowing the past. In all kinds of professions and walks of life we come across ‘best practice’ – established ways of doing things that are accepted as being optimal in some way. We tend to be inducted into these ways of working when we enter into a profession, including language teaching, and there’s often not much space for people to question the assumptions underlying them. To understand ELT grammar now, we need to understand better where pedagogical accounts of English grammar come from. Were they ever planned out? Who came up with the familiar list of grammar points, such as relative clauses, tenses, reported speech and so on, which are ubiquitous in teaching materials and classrooms around the world? Who decided at which levels these areas of grammar are typically taught at? And while we’re at it, who decided on the level system generally used in ELT and other languages (ELT generally uses six levels, like the CEFR, but why six?). To address questions like this superficially is to do a disservice to the past, so the research reported on in the book includes an analysis of older coursebooks and grammars in order to track how accounts of English grammar evolved, and also interviews with some of the people who were involved in fixing the current consensus on grammar. I also investigated the views of ‘historical’ figures whose work was critical in the evolution of accounts of English grammar over the last several hundred years. While my intention in the book isn’t primarily to present a historical account, I hope to provide the reader a fuller understanding of the present by situating it in its historical context.

What do you hope people will take away from your book?

While there is both implicit and explicit criticism in the book of the grammar that is used in ELT, I hope that readers will also come away with a sense that the people who were involved in creating the familiar accounts of ELT grammar were highly capable and in many ways did a great job in creating rules and explanations that are understandable to learners and usable in the classroom. This is no mean feat and takes skill and experience. Equally, I hope that the book can contribute to reducing the ‘demonisation of the past’ in linguistics and language teaching, and the assumption that we simply ‘know better’ today. That said, there are all kinds of ways in which current pedagogical grammar accounts can be improved; I focus heavily on how data from learner corpora might be of use, but this is just one possible source of renewal. As most people realise, it’s not easy to effect change within the ELT profession because people are used to the status quo, and to the tried-and-tested approaches they’re familiar with; but I do hope we can start to focus a little more again in applied linguistics on pedagogical grammar and syllabus design. I think it’s clear that the explicit study of grammar in language teaching is – in one form or another – not going away, so we need to be sure that what we teach is appropriate, just as much as how we teach it.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Authenticity across Languages and Cultures edited by Leo Will, Wolfgang Stadler and Irma Eloff.

The Importance of Prioritising Writing in the L2 Chinese Classroom

We recently published Developing Writing Competence in L2 Chinese Classrooms edited by Li Yang and Laura Valentín-Rivera. In this post the editors introduce the book and explain why they chose to focus their research on writing Chinese as a second language.

Introduction to the book

Our edited volume is focused exclusively on writing Chinese as a second language (L2). It provides readers with cutting-edge empirical research and insightful teaching methods and strategies for effectively developing L2 writing competence in L2 Chinese classroom contexts. In particular, each chapter in the volume offers practical, detailed and insightful pedagogical recommendations to (1) assist language teachers, educators,  graduate students and research scholars in making well-informed decisions on how to efficiently provide writing instruction in L2 Chinese and (2) facilitate the implementation of writing-focused activities to promote the construction of meaning, as opposed to reducing writing to the mere practice of specific vocabulary and grammar points.

Focusing on “writing” as the theme

The reasoning of focusing our edited collection on writing was our surprise caused by the fact that writing as a skill is not prioritized when being taught in the L2 classroom, especially considering that writing is a productive skill that should be as prioritized as orality. We consider that this is a pedagogical deficiency that compromises the holistic linguistic growth of L2 learners. Therefore, we aspire that our work provides pedagogical guidance that allows language instructors and academics to further their learners’ abilities as writers, that is, who can independently and collaboratively construct messages that convey complex meanings.

Targeting “Chinese” as the language: 

Originally, we had anticipated focusing on Chinese and Spanish, not only because these two represent our respective languages of research specialty, but also since both languages represent codes that are widely spoken and learned as second languages globally. However, we realized that we could make a greater contribution to the field by dedicating a single collection to one language at a time. Given the limited work available on Chinese settings, we decided to dedicate our time to said language, aspiring to make a greater contribution to the SLA field.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Cross-Linguistic Transfer of Writing Strategies by Karen Forbes.

Connecting SLA Research and Instructed Second Language Acquisition

This month we published Psycholinguistic Approaches to Instructed Second Language Acquisition by Daniel R. Walter. In this post the author reveals the questions answered in the book and who it is for.

As second language acquisition (SLA) researchers and educators have likewise expressed, there is a significant gap between research in SLA and its application by teachers, educators, and curriculum developers. This gap not only exists in terms of the amount of communication and knowledge transmission between researchers and educators, but also how research should be used to inform pedagogical choices. This book is an attempt to remedy some of those issues by making direct connections between the lab and classroom, the researcher and educator, and broad spectrum of psycholinguistic research into language learning and the complex learning environment in which the language learner takes part.

Taking a psycholinguistic approach, this book explores the connections between SLA research and instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). Some of the questions I answer for colleagues at multiple levels of research an instruction include: What is the role of consciousness in second language (L2) learning? What are the underlying psycholinguistic mechanisms that support L2 learning? How can an understanding of these processes impact the way we teach languages, from early L2 learners through post-secondary students? And how can cutting-edge research in psycholinguistics and SLA inform the way we design learning over the course of a curriculum?

In writing this book, I hoped it might find a home not only with fellow SLA researchers, but also with educators at multiple levels; from those teaching in immersion programs in kindergartens and elementary schools, to those teaching at the post-secondary level. And also, that the knowledge contained and presented in this book would be useful for teachers from the first day of a new language class, all the way through the most advanced levels of instruction.

For teachers, it provides clear connections between psycholinguistic research and its implications for the language learning classroom, with straightforward methods and recommendations to support student language learning and development. It can function as an important tool for pedagogues, especially those entrusted with training future teachers and providing professional development to current teachers, who can see how the different activities, with which they already engage inside their classes, apply to the psycholinguistic development of their students.

And finally, I hope this book also impacts the field of (I)SLA in general. First, it could act as a catalyst for more teacher/scholars to make explicit connections between theory, findings, and practice in the space of second language learning. And secondly, and maybe more importantly, for researchers and educators to find places to connect, to bring about a deeper discussion at the personal and professional level, about how those who may lean more towards theory or towards praxis can come together to build a deeper understanding of our applied field of ISLA.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Complexity Perspectives on Researching Language Learner and Teacher Psychology edited by Richard J. Sampson and Richard S. Pinner.

Why Should Forced Migration be Considered in Research on Language Learning?

This month we published Language Learning and Forced Migration edited by Marte Monsen and Guri Bordal Steien. In this post the editors explain why it’s important to consider forced migration in language learning research.

When you listen to debates about migration in some European countries, you might get the impression that the rest of the world spend their life waiting for an opportunity to pack their bags and penetrate the European borders. As academics living in Norway, we are used to a discourse where adult language learners are portrayed as people who came to Norway voluntarily and need to meet strict Norwegian language requirements to prevent too many others taking the same journey. Researchers on second language acquisition also tend to view second language learning for adults as voluntary, and of course, many people both move across borders and learn new languages voluntarily for work, for studies or even just for the sake of new experiences.

However, many people experience that they are moved across borders with force. In Norway, the immigration policies are strict, so migrants coming to Norway from outside the EU will not be able to settle in Norway unless they are in special need of protection, such as UN resettlement refugees. Adult second language learners in Norway are thus usually forced migrants. In our work, we have met people who have been forced from their homes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, often by means of cruelty beyond our imagination. They have fled on foot to Uganda, where they have lived a rough life in a sort of limbo, as they know their life in Uganda is only temporary. Under these circumstances, many of them have learned new languages through communicating with people “in the streets”, and many of them have large language repertoires. After years in transit, sometimes decades, they have been resettled in Norway, where few or none of their current language resources are valued. Entering many countries in the Global North entails forced attendance of classes to learn the host language, as is also the case for Norway.

The language courses and language tests that the migrants will come up against in Norway and other European countries are based upon the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). A well-known critique of this framework is that it allows policymakers to easily use language proficiency levels as standards and gatekeepers, while the empirical foundation for these standards is weak, and while the descriptions of language proficiency in CEFR initially was developed to measure foreign language learning by students. Well used concepts within SLA that might further guide the language courses, like Selinker’s theories on interlanguage or various models of motivation or investment in language learning, are also based upon knowledge from students or voluntary migrants. This means that a large number of people that attend language classes in the Global North enter a system that lacks knowledge of their language backgrounds, their needs and their lived experience.

Because of the unique situation of refugees and other forced migrants, we believe we need a research agenda that takes into consideration the experiences of people who have been forced to cross borders. That is what we hope to initiate with our book Language Learning and Forced Migration.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Crossing Borders, Writing Texts, Being Evaluated edited by Anne Golden, Lars Anders Kulbrandstad and Lawrence Jun Zhang.

L2 English Use Online and Its Effects on Language Learning

We will soon be publishing Second Language Use Online and its Integration in Formal Language Learning by Andrew D. Moffat. In this post the author explains what inspired the book.

Over a decade of teaching English as a second/foreign language, I was increasingly struck by the range of internet-facilitated, English-language encounters, that my students and the students of colleagues seemed to be having on a regular basis. Kids who were chronic homework-shirkers but avid Call of Duty players disrupting lessons with shouts of “FIRE IN THE HOLE!!”; adults who were shy in class – and not necessarily very ‘advanced’ from a formal perspective – but could be drawn into discussions about their participation in English-language Facebook groups – one chap was a keen amateur astronomer and moved in English-language astronomy spaces online; young adults working in global-facing companies that needed to use English in very ‘real’ situations. I was fascinated by these little windows into the L2 lives of my students, and in particular by the fact that they didn’t seem to do these things to ‘practice their English’ – these were not learning activities per se.

I also reflected on my own Spanish development while living in Spain.  I had some semi-formal one-on-one lessons and spent a fair amount of time doing grammar activities on the beach, but when I was actually interacting within the local community – renting an apartment, grocery shopping at the market, arguing with my bank about unfair account charges – I didn’t feel at all that I was a Spanish ‘learner’ in those moments.  I was just getting things done with my Spanish – pretty important things sometimes, like registering the births of my twin daughters at the Registro Civil. I wasn’t there to learn Spanish, and yet I distinctly remember the word ‘hembra’ – ‘female’ – lodging itself in my long-term memory after that particular experience.

It seemed to me that there was much more to language learning than the language classroom. I certainly felt that I grew the most as a Spanish speaker in those meaning-driven interactions, and I could see that same kind of development in the kinds of students mentioned above – even though I was fortunate enough to be living in an immersion environment and they were not. Could the internet be providing opportunities for the kinds of interactions and exposure more typically associated with ‘live-abroad’ learning? And what should I be doing about it as a language teacher?

These observations and interests came together in the research underlying Second Language Use Online and its Integration in Formal Learning.  The book explores L2 English use online, its effects on language learning, and how classroom practices can and must adapt to embrace learners’ online interactions. It reports on a survey undertaken in partnership with Cambridge University Press that garnered over 10,000 responses from L2 English users in 157 different countries, providing an empirical evidence base of unprecedented scope attesting to online interactions, concerns, and difficulties. This is partnered with a corpus analysis of the Cambridge and Nottingham E-Language Corpus, exploring the idiosyncratic ways in which English is used in different forms of computer-mediated communication. Together these form the basis for a needs analysis for the 21st century, hyper-connected English learner, and a proposal for addressing these needs in the classroom.

I’m hugely grateful to everyone at Multilingual Matters for facilitating the publication of this work, and genuinely proud to be able to contribute a volume to a book series that has provided so much inspiration for my own academic work and development.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Second Language Literacy Practices and Language Learning Outside the Classroom by Miho Inaba.

Nurturing the Vocabulary Studies Tree

We recently published Vocabulary Theory, Patterning and Teaching edited by Paweł Szudarski and Samuel Barclay. In this post the editors discuss their book’s contribution to the flourishing field of vocabulary studies.

Let’s step back in time. It is the 1940s and we are sitting in the back of an English language class. The teacher is standing at the front reading a dialogue aloud. After listening, we voice first one character and then the other before completing substitution, transformation, and chain drills. Forty-five minutes later we recite the dialogue perfectly and leave the classroom smiling.

Cut to thirty years later, the 1970s, and the teacher has embraced the communicative approach. We are interacting with our classmates, completing discussion and problem-solving activities. We are encouraged to focus on transacting meaning and communicating fluently, and after another, slightly noisier, forty-five minutes we stand up to leave.

These two scenarios represent markedly different views of language, learning, and learners and yet they are similar in one very important way: neither adopts a principled approach to the teaching and learning of vocabulary. In 2021, although many curricula may still lack a systematic process of vocabulary selection, instruction, and recycling, the picture looks, on the whole, lexically richer, at least when it comes to empirical findings and a growing interest in this area. Vocabulary plays an increasingly central role in language teaching, and research into lexical studies has flourished over the past few decades. The field then, is in a healthy state.

This situation has not come about by chance but rather is the result of the consistent endeavour of a handful of individuals. These researchers nurtured the foundations of the field, providing the roots upon which current research activity proudly stands, actively cultivating the field from an overlooked sapling into the position of prominence it holds today. One of these scholars is Professor Norbert Schmitt, in whose honour this edited volume is written. Anyone who knows Second Language Acquisition and Vocabulary Studies knows Norbert from his considerable research contributions over the last 30 years, and perhaps also the colourful Tigger t-shirts he wears to conferences. He has written about various aspects of the field – teaching and learning, formulaic language, assessment, theory – and, crucially, for a variety of audiences – from textbooks for students and introductory books for instructors, to research manuals and reports for those who are more research oriented. In doing so, he has helped to ignite and sustain research interest in vocabulary, while nurturing the next generation of scholars and ensuring that students of applied linguistics have a positive educational experience.

This volume is, however, much more than an extended thank-you letter to Norbert. It presents cutting-edge research from prominent scholars in the field. There are nine experimental chapters organised into three sections – theory and assessment, formulaic language, and teaching and learning. Each section also contains an opening chapter written by leading scholars in the field of Vocabulary Studies, where they offer their perspective on the reported findings, their place within the wider area of lexical and applied linguistic research, and also make suggestions for future studies. In this way, the volume acts as a microcosm of Norbert’s career; it contains thought-provoking and innovative designs and methodologies, but also seeks to foster future research activity. There is also a fascinating preface written by Michael McCarthy and a hilarious afterword penned by Zoltan Dornyei, both of whom were Norbert’s colleagues and collaborators during his career at the University of Nottingham. The volume represents, to continue the metaphor started above, that the vocabulary tree is strong and healthy. It has solid roots and is growing ever bigger, expanding in different directions, and becoming denser in certain key areas. Thankfully, the more it develops, the more ground it has the capacity to influence, the more nutrients its products feed into the educational ecosystem. The image on the front cover of this volume is this tree and we hope that the reported findings sufficiently contribute to the foliage. We may have stretched the metaphor a little too far now, so let us make one final point before wrapping up.

This volume would not have been possible without our gracious contributors. Specific thanks go to Ana Pellicer-Sanchez. Not only has she co-authored a chapter, but she also suggested we contact each other when first I (Paweł) and then I (Sam) called her to discuss an idea for an edited volume. What started as an innocent chat in a small café in London has now turned into an academic publication we are deeply proud of. It has been a great pleasure to have worked together on this volume for the past three years. It has not been all hops and barley, but our work as editors was made easier by the energy and positivity of all the collaborators. It is a sign of the esteem in which Norbert is held that each and every person we emailed about contributing to the volume replied enthusiastically. We hope that you are similarly enthusiastic about the volume and look forward to hearing your thoughts. Happy reading!

Paweł Szudarski and Sam Barclay

For more information about this book, please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Perspectives on the L2 Phrasicon by Sylviane Granger.

How to Effectively Use Tasks in Language Teaching

This month we published Using Tasks in Second Language Teaching edited by Craig Lambert and Rhonda Oliver. In this post, the editors give a detailed overview of the work and explain who they hope will benefit from it most.

Many teachers want to use tasks in their teaching but are unsure how to do so effectively in their own teaching contexts, where they may work with low proficiency or low motivation learners, large classes and be under pressure to prepare for discrete point tests.

The challenge facing teachers and course administrators in using tasks in many second and foreign language contexts around the world is thus to find an expedient solution which balances institutional requirements, available resources, and learners’ dispositions with their own professional skill sets.

The present volume addresses these concerns. The research in our new book is based on the experiences of practitioners and researchers using tasks in different educational, cultural and geographical contexts. They demonstrate how tasks have been used effectively in teaching and provide a range of insights into the issues associated with using tasks successfully in challenging contexts.

We divided the book into three parts so that a broad audience of readers can draw on different elements of the book according to their needs:

• Part 1 clarifies key issues when using tasks for second language instruction
• Part 2 describes approaches practitioners have adopted when using tasks in challenging contexts around the world
• Part 3 consists of studies which investigate the relationship between tasks and performance in a range of international contexts

Part 1 is made up of papers which clarify key issues facing practitioners in using tasks, including:

• The choice of an appropriate instructional framework
• Using tasks with low-proficiency learners
• Designing tasks to motivate general-purpose learners
• Using technology-mediated tasks
• Challenges in using tasks in test-oriented contexts
• The skill set teachers need to use tasks effectively

Part 2 then contains descriptive studies of how tasks have been used successfully by teachers and program designers in:

• Rural Australia
• Ukraine
• Brazil
• Mexico

Finally, Part 3 consists of studies on the effects of different approaches to task implementation in contexts including:

• Japan
• Iran
• Chile
• Spain
• The United States

We hope that the different parts of the book will appeal to a wide variety of readers. Many chapters reach out to pre-service and in-service teachers because of their content. This is particularly true of the initial chapters, which provide concrete advice about practical issues to address when using tasks in different contexts. Subsequent chapters then describe actual practices that have been used in various regions of the world, with different learners and through different media. On the other hand, later chapters in the book may be of more interest to second language acquisition (SLA) researchers and students in MA courses in that they provide observations from different regional contexts on the effects of implementing tasks in different ways on L2 performance.

This book will thus help teachers and course designers find useful solutions for incorporating tasks effectively given the expectations and constraints of the contexts in which they work. It provides a range of insights into the issues and constraints involved, how they have been successfully overcome, and the skills required by teachers to negotiate effective context-based solutions to using tasks effectively in their teaching.

For more information about this book please see our website. 

If you found this interesting, you might also like Reflections on Task-Based Language Teaching by Rod Ellis.