The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics) 1108420435, 9781108420433

Providing a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge work on second language learning, this Handbook, written by a team of l

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The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics)
 1108420435, 9781108420433

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Contents
Figures
Tables
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 - Formal Linguistic Approaches to Adult L2 Acquisition and Processing
2 - Cognitive Approaches to Second Language Acquisition
3 - The Qualitative Science of Vygotskian Sociocultural Psychology and L2 Development
4 - Theoretical Frameworks in L2 Acquisition
5 - Qualitative Classroom Methods
6 - Experimental Studies in L2 Classrooms
7 - Action Research Developments, Characteristics, and Future Directions
8 - Classroom Observation Research
9 - Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Methods
10 - Interaction in L2 Learning
11 - Speaking
12 - Second Language Listening Current Ideas, Current Issues
13 - Contemporary Perspectives on L2 Upper-Register Text Processing
14 - Language Learning Through Writing
15 - Working Memory in L2 Learning and Processing
16 - Language Aptitudes in L2 Acquisition
17 - Language Learner Motivation
18 - A New Look at “Age” Young and Old L2 Learners
19 - Identity
20 - Pedagogical Interventions to L2 Grammar Instruction
21 - Task-Based Language Learning
22 - Task and Syllabus Design for Morphologically Complex Languages
23 - Proficiency Guidelines and Frameworks
24 - Technology-Mediated Language Learning
25 - Content-Based L2 Teaching
26 - Conceptions of L2 Learning in Critical Language Pedagogy
27 - Bilingual Education and Policy
28 - Heritage Language Instruction
29 - Minority Languages at Home and Abroad Education and Acculturation
30 - Study Abroad and Immersion
31 - Teacher Education Past, Present, and Future
32 - Future Directions in Language Learning and Teaching
Index

Citation preview

The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning Providing a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge work on second language learning, this handbook, written by a team of leading experts, surveys the nature of second language learning and its implications for teaching. Prominent theories and methods from linguistics, psycholinguistics, ­processing-based, and cognitive approaches are covered and organized thematically across sections dealing with skill development, individual differences, pedagogical interventions and approaches, and context and environment. This state-of-the-art handbook will interest researchers in second language studies and language education, and will also reach out to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in these and other related areas. j o h n w . s c h w i e t e r is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics and Faculty of Arts Teaching Scholar at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has written and edited numerous books and articles including The Handbook of the Neuroscience of Multilingualism (2019), The Handbook of Translation and Cognition (2017, with Aline Ferreira), and The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Processing (Cambridge, 2015). He is also Founding Co-Editor of Cambridge Elements in Second Language Acquisition (with Alessandro Benati).

is a Professor of English and Applied Linguistics and the Head of the Department of English at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. He is author and editor of several books and articles including The Handbook of Advanced Proficiency in Second Language Acquisition (2018, with Paul A. Malovrh). He is also Founding Co-Editor of Cambridge Elements in Second Language Acquisition (with John W. Schwieter).

alessandro benati

cambridge handbooks in language and linguistics

Genuinely broad in scope, each handbook in this series provides a complete state-of-the-field overview of a major sub-discipline within language study and research. Grouped into broad thematic areas, the chapters in each volume encompass the most important issues and topics within each subject, offering a coherent picture of the latest theories and findings. Together, the volumes will build into an integrated overview of the discipline in its entirety.

Published titles The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, edited by Paul de Lacy The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching, edited by Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language, Second Edition, edited by Edith L. Bavin and Letitia Naigles The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, edited by Peter K. Austin and Julia Sallabank The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics, edited by Rajend Mesthrie The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, edited by Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt The Cambridge Handbook of Language Policy, edited by Bernard Spolsky The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, edited by Julia Herschensohn and Martha Young-Scholten The Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics, edited by Cedric Boeckx and Kleanthes K. Grohmann The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax, edited by Marcel den Dikken The Cambridge Handbook of Communication Disorders, edited by Louise Cummings The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, edited by Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, edited by N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman and Jack Sidnell The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics, edited by Douglas Biber and Randi Reppen The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Processing, edited by John W. Schwieter The Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research, edited by Sylviane Granger, Gaëtanelle Gilquin and Fanny Meunier The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Multicompetence, edited by Li Wei and Vivian Cook The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics, edited by Merja Kytö and Päivi Pahta The Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantics, edited by Maria Aloni and Paul Dekker The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology, edited by Andrew Hippisley and Greg Stump The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax, edited by Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology, edited by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics, edited by Raymond Hickey The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, edited by Barbara Dancygier

The Cambridge Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, edited by Yoko Hasegawa The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics, edited by Kimberly L. Geeslin The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism, edited by Annick De Houwer and Lourdes Ortega The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics, edited by H. Ekkehard Wolff The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics, edited by Geoff Thompson, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine, and David Schönthal

The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning Edited by John W. Schwieter Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada

Alesssandro Benati American University of Sharjah, UAE

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108420433 DOI: 10.1017/9781108333603 © Cambridge University Press 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in–Publication Data Names: Schwieter, John W., 1979– editor. | Benati, Alessandro G., editor. Title: The Cambridge handbook of language learning / edited by John Schwieter, Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario; Alesssandro Benati, American University of Sharjah, UAE. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Series: Cambridge handbooks in language and linguistics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018047193 | ISBN 9781108420433 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Second language acquisition. | Language and languages – Study and teaching. | BISAC: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General. Classification: LCC P118.2 .C3554 2019 | DDC 401/.93–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047193 ISBN 978-1-108-42043-3 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy ­ ublication of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this p and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors Acknowledgements

page x xi xiii xxv

Introduction  John W. Schwieter and Alessandro Benati 1 Part I Theories 11   1 Formal Linguistic Approaches to Adult L2 Acquisition and Processing  Jason Rothman, Fatih Bayram, Ian Cunnings, and Jorge González Alonso13   2 Cognitive Approaches to Second Language Acquisition  Nick C. Ellis and Stefanie Wulff41   3 The Qualitative Science of Vygotskian Sociocultural Psychology and L2 Development  Rémi A. van Compernolle62   4 Theoretical Frameworks in L2 Acquisition  John Truscott and Michael Sharwood Smith84 Part II Methods 109   5 Qualitative Classroom Methods  Peter I. De Costa, Wendy Li, and Hima Rawal111   6 Experimental Studies in L2 Classrooms  Charlene Polio and Jongbong Lee137   7 Action Research: Developments, Characteristics, and Future Directions  Anne Burns166   8 Classroom Observation Research  Nina Spada 186   9 Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Methods  Leah Roberts 208

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Part III Skill Development 231 10 Interaction in L2 Learning  Jaemyung Goo 233 11 Speaking  Dustin Crowther and Susan M. Gass 258 12 Second Language Listening: Current Ideas, Current Issues  John Field283 13 Contemporary Perspectives on L2 Upper-Register Text Processing  Elizabeth B. Bernhardt and Cici Malik Leffell320 14 Language Learning Through Writing: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Evidence  Rosa M. Manchón and Olena Vasylets341 Part IV Individual Differences 363 15 Working Memory in L2 Learning and Processing  Zhisheng (Edward) Wen and Shaofeng Li365 16 Language Aptitudes in L2 Acquisition  Gisela Granena 390 17 Language Learner Motivation: What Motivates Motivation Researchers?  Stephen Ryan409 18 A New Look at “Age”: Young and Old L2 Learners  Carmen Muñoz430 19 Identity  Ron Darvin and Bonny Norton 451 475 Part V Pedagogical Interventions and Approaches 20 Pedagogical Interventions to L2 Grammar Instruction  Alessandro Benati and John W. Schwieter477 21 Task-Based Language Learning  Michael H. Long, Jiyong Lee, and Kyoko Kobayashi Hillman500 22 Task and Syllabus Design for Morphologically Complex Languages  Roger Gilabert and Joan Castellví527 23 Proficiency Guidelines and Frameworks  David Little 550 24 Technology-Mediated Language Learning  Carol A. Chapelle 575 25 Content-Based L2 Teaching  Hossein Nassaji and Eva Kartchava 597 26 Conceptions of L2 Learning in Critical Language Pedagogy  Graham Crookes621 Part VI Context and Environment 647 27 Bilingual Education and Policy  Christine Hélot and Ofelia García 649 28 Heritage Language Instruction  Kim Potowski and Sarah J. Shin 673 29 Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation  Aline Ferreira, Viola G. Miglio, and John W. Schwieter696 30 Study Abroad and Immersion  Jane Jackson and John W. Schwieter727 31 Teacher Education: Past, Present, and Future  Peter Swanson 751

Contents

Part VII Moving Forward 775 32 Future Directions in Language Learning and Teaching  Susan M. Gass777 Index 799

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Figures

  4.1. Simplified MOGUL architecture. page 91 11.1. ACTFL spring 2017 results for speaking, listening, and reading. 260 12.1. Simplified cognitive model of the listening process. 286 12.2. Topics favoured in L2 listening research. 295 14.1. Overview of the origin and development of research on the language learning potential of writing and WCF. 342 14.2. Main directions of research on the language learning potential of WCF. 353 19.1. Darvin and Norton’s (2015) Model of Investment. 457 28.1. Number of languages spoken in the fifteen largest metro areas in the United States. 678 28.2. The cultural iceberg model (adapted from Hall, 1976/1989).683 32.1. Article types appearing in Language Learning 1967–1972 and 1973–1979. 782

Tables

  2.1. A contingency table showing the four possible combinations of events showing the presence or absence of a target Cue and an Outcome. page 50   5.1. CBQR paradigms. 116   6.1. Recent experimental classroom studies. 149 11.1. Number of students who took proficiency tests administered at Michigan State University from 2014–2017 in four languages. 259 17.1. Four stages in the development of L2 motivation theory and research. 421 21.1. Grammar-based and task-based language learning and teaching. 521 22.1. Terminological clarification of complexity and difficulty. 532 23.1. Summary of ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines for speaking. 555 23.2. CEFR self-assessment grid. 557 23.3. CEFR descriptors relevant to spoken interaction 560 at level A2. 23.4. One-directional alignment of ACTFL assessments 562 with the CEFR. 23.5. Length of time needed to achieve Novice, Intermediate, and pre-Advanced proficiency levels as specified in ACTFL Performance Guidelines for K–12.566 682 28.1. Factors related to heritage language (HL) proficiency. 28.2. Resources for heritage language educators. 687 29.1. The top ten languages, after English, spoken at home 700 in California. 29.2. Linguistic competence of Basque in the Basque 712 Autonomous Community in 1981 and 2011.

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29.3. Linguistic competence of Basque in the Basque Autonomous Community by age group in 1981 and 2011. 29.4. Attitudes towards the promotion of Basque among 16+ year-olds across different historically Basque communities in 1991 and 2012. 29.5. Use of Basque in the BAC according to social context in 1991 and 2016. 32.1. SLRF conferences and themes from 1990–2018.

712 714 714 783

Contributors

The C ontributors are international experts based at and/or affiliated with institutions and research centres in Australia, Canada, England, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Ireland, Macau, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and the United States. These scholars include: Fatih Bayram is a Marie Sktodowska – Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the UiT the Arctic University of Norway. His research covers various types of child and adult bilingualism with a primary focus on heritage language bilinguals, a specific subtype of bilingual first language learners. His research uses online and offline psycholinguistic methods to study language development and processing in later childhood and outcomes of development in adulthood. alessandro benati is a Professor of English and Applied Linguistics and the Head of the Department of English at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. He is author and editor of several books and articles including The Handbook of Advanced Proficiency in Second Language Acquisition (2018, with Paul A. Malovrh). He is also Founding Co-Editor of Cambridge Elements in Second Language Acquisition (with John W. Schwieter). Elizabeth B. Bernhardt is a Professor of German Studies and the John Roberts Hale Director of the Stanford Language Center at Stanford University. She has spoken and written on second-language reading, teacher education, and policy and planning for foreign- and second-­ language programmes. Her book, Reading Development in a Second Language (1991), earned the Modern Language Association’s Mildenburger Prize as well as the Edward Fry Award from the National Reading Conference as an outstanding contribution to literacy research. She is the author of Understanding Advanced Second Language Reading (2010). Anne Burns is a Professor of TESOL at the University of New South Wales, Professor Emerita at Aston University, and an Honorary Professor at the

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University of Sydney and Education University in Hong Kong. She is a co-academic advisor for the Oxford Applied Linguistics book series (with Diane Larsen Freeman) and co-editor of the Research and Resources in Language Teaching book series (with Jill Hadfield). Her research interests span second language teacher education, discourse analysis, the teaching of speaking, and action and qualitative research in applied linguistics. Her latest book is The Cambridge Guide to Learning a Second Language (Cambridge, 2018, with Jack C. Richards). Joan Castellví is an Associate Professor in the Slavic Studies section of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and English Studies at the University of Barcelona. His teaching activity is centred on Russian language and linguistics and his current research focuses on second language acquisition, teaching Russian as a foreign language, task based language teaching, and task design. He is a member of the research group CLiC (the Language and Computation Centre). His most recent publications deal with task design for learning morphologically rich languages, the acquisition of vocabulary, and teaching Russian as a foreign language outside the language environment. Carol A. Chapelle is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University. She is editor of The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (2013) and co-editor of the Cambridge Applied Linguistics book series (with Susan Hunston). She is past president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and former editor of TESOL Quarterly. Her recent books include The Handbook of Technology and Second Language Teaching and Learning (2017, with Shannon Sauro) and Teaching Culture in Introductory Foreign Language Textbooks (2016). She is currently working on projects that help to connect evaluation methods for learning materials and validation methods for assessment. Graham V. Crookes is a Professor (and at the time of writing, Chair) of the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai’i. His main research interests are critical language pedagogy and development of language teachers’ philosophies of teaching. His recent books are Critical ELT in Action (2013) and Values, Philosophies, and Beliefs in TESOL: Making a Statement (Cambridge, 2009). Dustin Crowther holds a PhD in Second Language Studies from Michigan State University. He previously completed his MA in Applied Linguistics at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. His research interests include second language pronunciation, the promotion of mutual intelligibility in multilingual and multicultural contact, World Englishes, and research methodologies. His research has been published in a wide range of journals, including Studies in Second Language Acquisition, The Modern Language Journal, and TESOL Quarterly. Ian Cunnings is a Lecturer in Psycholinguistics at the University of Reading. Before arriving at Reading, he completed his PhD in Psycholinguistics

List of Contributors

and Neurolinguistics at the University of Essex and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are in psycholinguistics and multilingualism. In particular, he conducts research that investigates the similarities and differences between native and non-native sentence comprehension. His most recent research examines how the working memory operations that subserve successful sentence processing can help our understanding of native and non-native language comprehension. Ron Darvin is a Lecturer and Vanier Scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. His research interests include identity, social class, and digital literacy, and he has published articles in TESOL Quarterly, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, and Journal of Language, Identity and Education. He is the recipient of the 2017 Language and Social Processes SIG Emerging Scholar Award of the American Educational Research Association and a corecipient of the 2016 TESOL Award for Distinguished Research. Peter I. De Costa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages at Michigan State University, where he also holds a joint appointment in the department of Teacher Education in the College of Education. He is the author of The Power of Identity and Ideology in Language Learning: Designer Immigrants Learning English in Singapore (2016) and editor of Ethics in Applied Linguistics: Language Researcher Narratives (2016). His work has appeared in ELT Journal, Language Learning, Language Policy, Language Teaching, Research in the Teaching of English, System, TESOL Journal, TESOL Quarterly, and The Modern Language Journal. He is the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly (with Charlene Polio). Nick C. Ellis is a Professor of Psychology and Linguistics and Research Scientist in the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan. His research interests include language acquisition, cognition, emergentism, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, and psycholinguistics. His recent books include Usage-Based Approaches to Language Acquisition and Processing: Cognitive and Corpus Investigations of Construction Grammar (2016, with Ute Römer and Matthew O’Donnell), Language as a Complex Adaptive System (2009, with Diane Larsen-Freeman), and The Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (2008, with Peter Robinson). He serves as General Editor of Language Learning. Aline Ferreira is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she is the Director of the Bilingualism, Translation, and Cognition Laboratory. She is the co-editor with John W. Schwieter of The Handbook of Translation and Cognition (2017), Psycholinguistic and Cognitive Inquiries into Translation and Interpreting (2015), and The Development of Translation Competence: Theories and Methodologies from Psycholinguistics and Cognitive

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Science (2014). She has also published studies in journals such as Intercultural Education, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Reading and Writing, Translation and Interpreting Studies, and Translation, Cognition and Behavior, among others. John Field is Reader in Cognitive Approaches to Language Learning in the Centre for Research in English Language Learning and Assessment at the University of Bedfordshire, where he conducts research and advises on the testing of second language listening. He formerly taught psycholinguistics at the University of Reading and has researched and written on second language listening for some thirty-five years. His Listening in the Language Classroom (Cambridge, 2008) is a standard text in the area. His thinking is informed by his background in psycholinguistics, which provides insights into the listening process and into the cognitive demands faced by second language listeners. An earlier career as an ELT teacher-trainer, schools inspector, and materials writer enables him to build bridges between theory and practice. His most recent publication, Rethinking the Second Language Listening Test (2018), challenges many received assumptions about how second language listening can be validly assessed. Ofelia García is a Professor in the PhD programmes in Urban Education and Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Literatures and Languages at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the General Editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language and the Co-Editor of Language Policy (with Helen Kelly-Holmes). Among her best-known books are Bilingual Education in the 21st Century (2009) and the BAAL Book Award recipient Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education (2014, with Li Wei, 2015). In 2017, she received the Charles Ferguson Award in Applied Linguistics from the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC, and the Lifetime Career Award from the Bilingual Education special interest group of the American Educational Research Association. Susan M. Gass is a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, where she serves, at the time of writing, as Director of the English Language Center, Co-Director of the Center for Language Education and Research, and the Co-Director of the Center for Language Teaching Advancement. She has published more than thirty books and more than 150 articles in the field of second language acquisition, with works translated into Arabic, Russian, Korean, and Chinese. She is the co-author of Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course (1994, with Larry Selinker) and of Second Language Research: Methodology and Design (2005, with Alison Mackey). She is the winner of many local, national, and international awards. She has served as President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and of the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée (International Association of Applied Linguistics). She is currently Editor of Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

List of Contributors

Roger Gilabert is an Associate Professor and researcher at the University of Barcelona. His research interests include second and foreign language production and acquisition, task design and task complexity, and individual differences in second language production and acquisition. He is involved in a project within the language acquisition research group (GRAL) led and coordinated by Carmen Muñoz that investigates the effects of subtitling in series and film on second language learning. He is also involved in a reading and technology project called iRead. He has published extensively in the areas of task design, task complexity, and complexity, accuracy, and fluency. His most recent publications include research on writing and its potential for second language learning. Jorge González Alonso is a Postdoctoral Researcher within the Language Acquisition, Variation and Attrition (LAVA) research group at UiT the Arctic University of Norway. His main lines of research concern the processing of morphology and morphosyntax by native and non-native speakers of English and Spanish, as well as determining the source(s) of cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition with the help of psycholinguistic methodologies. Jaemyung Goo is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Education at Gwangju National University of Education. He obtained his PhD in Applied Linguistics at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Subsequently, he began his teaching career as a Visiting Assistant Professor teaching graduate courses in the Department of Second Language Studies at Indiana University. His research articles have appeared in various journals including Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language Learning, and Language Teaching. He has also contributed book chapters and encyclopedia entries on such issues as interaction, corrective feedback, working memory, and implicit and explicit instruction. His research interests include, but are not limited to, task-based language teaching, cognitive individual differences and second language acquisition, age factor, second language research methods, and instructed second language acquisition. Gisela Granena is an Associate Professor in the School of Languages of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She has published research on the role of cognitive aptitudes in both instructed and naturalistic contexts, aptitude-treatment interactions, task-based language teaching, measures of implicit and explicit language knowledge, and the effects of early and late bilingualism on long-term second language achievement. Recent co-edited books include Sensitive Periods, Language Aptitude, and Ultimate L2 Attainment (2013, with Michael Long) and Cognitive Individual Differences in Second Language Processing and Acquisition (2016, with Daniel O. Jackson and Yucel Yilmaz). Christine Hélot is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Strasbourg. She taught courses in sociolinguistics, bilingual education,

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and didactics of plurilingualism at the Graduate School of Education of the University of Strasbourg from 1991. Previously she held a post of Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the National University of Ireland (Maynooth College), where she was the Director of the Language Centre. As a sociolinguist, her research focuses on language in education policies in France and in Europe, bi-multilingual education, intercultural education, language awareness, early childhood education, and children’s literature and multiliteracy. Her most recent publications include: L’éducation bilingue en France: Politiques linguistiques, modèles et pratiques (2016, with Jürgen Erfurt) and Children’s Literature in Multilingual Classrooms (2014, with Raymonde Sneddon & Nicola Daly). Kyoko Kobayashi Hillman is a PhD candidate in the Second Language Acquisition programme at the University of Maryland. Her research interests include needs analysis and input elaboration in task-based language teaching, second language research methodology, such as reaction times in psycholinguistic experiments, and incidental vocabulary learning in instructed second language acquisition. Her co-authored article “Achieving Epistemic Alignment in a Psycholinguistic Experiment” recently appeared in Applied Linguistics Review (2017, with Steven Ross and Gabriele Kasper). Jane Jackson is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research centres on study abroad, intercultural communication, language and identity, eLearning, and internationalization. She is the recipient of the University’s 2013 Education Award and the Hong Kong University Grant Council’s (2016– 2018) Prestigious Fellowship under the Humanities and Social Science Scheme. Her recent authored books include Online Intercultural Education and Study Abroad: Theory into Practice (2019), Interculturality in International Education (2018), and Introducing Language and Intercultural Communication (2014). Her recent edited and co-edited books include Intercultural Interventions in Study Abroad (2018, with Susan Oguro) and The Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication (2012). Eva Kartchava is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Carleton University. Her main research interest is to explore the processes involved in the acquisition of a second language in the classroom setting. She has published research on the relationship between corrective feedback and second language learning, noticeability of feedback, and the role of individual differences in the language learning process. Her recent book is Corrective Feedback in Second Language Teaching and Learning: Research, Theory, Applications, Implications (2017, with Hossein Nassaji), and her forthcoming books are Noticing Oral Corrective Feedback in the Second-Language Classroom: Background and Evidence and The Cambridge Handbook of Corrective Feedback in Language Learning and Teaching (Cambridge, with Hossein Nassaji). Jiyong Lee is a PhD student in the Second Language Acquisition programme at the University of Maryland. Her research interests include the

List of Contributors

validation of task complexity manipulations, relationships among task complexity, language aptitude, working memory, and second language performance, negative feedback, and age affects and maturational constraints on second language acquisition. Jongbong Lee is a PhD student in the Second Language Studies programme at Michigan State University. He has taught English and Korean in various locations in Korea and the United States. His research interests include second language writing, corpus linguistics, interactional feedback, and language assessment. Shaofeng Li is an Associate Professor of Second/Foreign Language Education at Florida State University and a Yunshan Chair Professor at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. He received his PhD from Michigan State University and has worked in China, New Zealand, and the US. He has extensive teaching experience in various instructional and cultural settings. His main research interests include language aptitude, working memory, form-focused instruction, task-based language teaching, corrective feedback, and research methods. His publications have appeared in Applied Linguistics, International Review of Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Language Teaching Research, The Modern Language Journal, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition, among others. Wendy Li is a PhD student in the Second Language Studies programme at Michigan State University. Before joining the programme in 2015, she taught English as a foreign language in different educational institutions in China for more than two years. Her research interests include instructed second language acquisition, language teacher identity, agency, emotions, and language socialization. She holds an MA in TESOL from Lancaster University. David Little is a Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin, where he established the Centre for Language and Communication Studies in 1979. His principal research interests are the theory and practice of learner autonomy in language education, the exploitation of linguistic diversity in schools and classrooms, and the application of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages to the design of second language curricula, teaching, and assessment. He wrote one of the preparatory studies for the CEFR, on strategic competence, and between 2000 and 2010 he was in turn Member, Vice-Chair, and Chair of the European Language Portfolio Validation Committee. Michael H. Long is a Professor of Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland. He is the author of over 100 journal articles and book chapters; his recent books include The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (2003, with Catherine J. Doughty), Second Language Needs Analysis (Cambridge, 2005), Problems in SLA (2007), The Handbook of Language Teaching (2009, with Catherine J. Doughty), Sensitive Periods, Language Aptitude, and

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Ultimate L2 Attainment (2013, with Gisela Granena), and Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching (2015). In 2009, he was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa by Stockholm University for his contributions to the field of second language acquisition. In 2017, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association for Task-Based Language Teaching. Cici Malik Leffell is the Research Coordinator of the Language Center at Stanford University where she collaborates on second-language research projects with Elizabeth Bernhardt. She holds a certificate in language programme management from the Center and has also taught and published on Iberian language and literature. Rosa M. Manchón is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Murcia, where she teaches undergraduate courses in second language acquisition, as well as postgraduate courses in research methodology and second language learning and teaching. Her research interests and publications focus on cognitive aspects of instructed second language acquisition and, especially, second language writing. She has published extensively on the language learning potential of second language writing and written corrective feedback processing in the form of journal articles, book chapters, and edited books. Her recent books include Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching, and Research (2009), Learning to Write and Writing to Learn in an Additional Language (2011), L2 Writing Development: Multiple Perspectives (2012), Task-Based Language Learning—Insights from and for L2 Writing (2014, with Heidi Byrnes), Handbook of Second and Foreign Language Writing (2016, with Paul Matsuda) Writing and Language Learning: Advancing Research Agendas (forthcoming), and The Handbook of SLA and Writing (with Charlene Polio, forthcoming). She is the former Editor of the Journal of Second Language Writing. Viola G. Miglio is a Professor of Linguistics and Barandiaran Endowed Chair of Basque Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an affiliated faculty member at the University of Iceland. She trained in Germanic philology (University of Edinburgh) and linguistics (University of Maryland), and has taught at several institutions in Iceland, Italy, Mexico, and the US. She has published articles on linguistics, translation, and cultural and Basque studies and a book titled Interactions between Markedness and Faithfulness Constraints in Vowel Systems (2012). She has also co-edited Language Rights and Cultural Diversity (2013, with Xabier Irujo), The Protection of Cultural Diversity (2014), Basque Whaling in Iceland in the XVII Century (2015, with Xabier Irujo), and Approaches to Evidentiality in Romance (2015, with Josep Martines). Carmen Muñoz is a Professor of Applied English Linguistics at the University of Barcelona. Her research interests include the effects of age and context on second language acquisition, young learners in instructed

List of Contributors

settings, individual differences, and multimodality in language learning. She is the founder and coordinator of the GRAL research group at the University of Barcelona, where she has coordinated a dozen research projects with national and international funding, such as the BAF Project. She has edited books such as Intensive Exposure Experiences in Second Language Learning (2012) and Age and the Rate of Foreign Language Learning (2006). Some of her recent publications have appeared in journals such as Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, System, and Language Learning. Hossein Nassaji is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Victoria. He has authored and co-­authored numerous publications in the areas of second language acquisition, corrective feedback, form-focused instruction, grammar instruction, and task-based teaching. His recent books include Perspectives on Language as Action (2019, with Mari Haneda), Corrective Feedback in Second Language Teaching and Learning: Research, Theory, Applications, Implications (2017, with Eva Kartchava), and Interactional Feedback Dimension in Instructed Second Language Learning (2015). His forthcoming book is The Cambridge Handbook of Corrective Feedback in Language Learning and Teaching (Cambridge, with Eva Kartchava). Bonny Norton, FRSC, is a Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her primary research interests are identity and language learning, critical literacy, and international development. Recent publications include a 2017 special issue on language teacher identity in The Modern Language Journal and a 2013 second edition of Identity and Language Learning. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Educational Research Association, she has a 2010 AERA Senior Research Leadership Award and was a 2016 corecipient of the TESOL Distinguished Research Award. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, German, and French. Charlene Polio is a Professor in the Second Language Studies Program at Michigan State University. Her main area of research is second language writing, and she is particularly interested in the various research methods and measures used in studying writing, as well as the interface between the fields of second language writing and second language acquisition. She is the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly (with Peter De Costa), and her recent books include Understanding, Evaluating, and Conducting Second Language Writing Research (2016, with Debra Friedman) and Authentic Materials Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching (2017, with Eve Zyzik). Kim Potowski is a Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Hispanic & Italian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she also holds appointments in Latin American and Latino Studies, Curriculum and Instruction, and an affiliation with the Social Justice Initiative.

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She is the Director of the Spanish for Heritage Speakers Programme and is the Founding Director of the heritage speaker study abroad programme in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has authored and edited books including IntraLatino Language and Identity: MexiRican Spanish (2016), El español de los Estados Unidos (2015, with Anna Maria Escobar), Heritage Language Teaching: Research and Practice (2014, with Sara Beaudrie and Cynthia Ducar), and Language Diversity in the USA (2011), as well as a heritage Spanish textbook Conversaciones escritas (2nd edn., 2017). Hima Rawal is a PhD student in the Second Language Studies programme at Michigan State University. She earned her MA in TESOL from Michigan State University and an MA in English Education from Tribhuvan University. She taught English as a foreign language for more than a decade at both K-12 and university levels (teacher education and teacher training) in Nepal. Her research interests are teacher identity and emotion, translanguaging, and heritage language acquisition in immigrant families. Leah Roberts is a Professor and Leader of the Centre for Language Learning and Use at the University of York. She works on real-time sentence comprehension in second language learners and bilinguals, using psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods, with a particular focus on cross-linguistic influences on grammatical processing. Jason Rothman is a Professor of Linguistics at UiT the Arctic University of Norway and an affiliate Professor in the Facul ad de Lenguas Education at Universidad Nebrija. He is the Executive Editor of the journal Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism as well as Editor of the book series Studies in Bilingualism. Rothman’s research focuses on language acquisition and processing in children and adults in addition to the interface between domain general cognition and language. Some of his recent research has appeared in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Second Language Research, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, and Frontiers in Psychology. Stephen Ryan is a Professor in the School of Culture, Media and Society at Waseda University, Tokyo. His research and publications cover various aspects of psychology in language learning, with his most recent books being The Psychology of the Language Learner Revisited (2015, with Zoltán Dörnyei) and Exploring Psychology in Language Learning and Teaching (2015, with Marion Williams and Sarah Mercer). He is currently Co-Editor of the Psychology in Language Learning and Teaching book series. john w. schwieter is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics and Faculty of Arts Teaching Scholar at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has written and edited numerous books and articles including The Handbook of the Neuroscience of Multilingualism (2019), The Handbook of Translation and Cognition (2017, with Aline Ferreira), and The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Processing (Cambridge, 2015). He is also Founding

List of Contributors

Co-Editor of Cambridge Elements in Second Language Acquisition (with Alessandro Benati). Michael Sharwood Smith is an Emeritus Professor at Heriot-Watt University and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He is a Founding Editor of Second Language Research and has authored Introduction to Language and Cognition (2017), The Multilingual Mind: A Modular Processing Perspective (Cambridge, 2014, with John Truscott), and The Internal Context of Bilingual Processing (2019, with John Truscott). Although his current research interest is in language and cognition, he has also published widely on both theoretical and applied topics on various aspects of language learning and performance. Sarah J. Shin is a Professor of Education at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She is an expert in bilingualism, heritage language education, and TESOL teacher preparation, and the author of Bilingualism in Schools and Society (2018), English Language Teaching as a Second Career (2017), and Developing in Two Languages (2005). She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education and The International Multilingual Research Journal. Nina Spada is a Professor Emerita at the University of Toronto where she teaches courses in second language acquisition, classroom research in second language teaching and learning, and research methods. Her research investigates the effects of different types of form and meaning-based instruction on second language development. She is co-author of the award-winning book How Languages are Learned (1993, with Patsy Lightbown). She is the Co-Editor of the Language Learning and Teaching book series and the Oxford Key Concepts for the Language Classroom series. She is a past president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics. Peter Swanson is a Professor of Foreign Language Education at Georgia State University and is serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. His research focuses on the characteristics of highly effective language teachers, recruitment and retention of language teachers, and the integration of technology into instruction. He is the author of five books and his research has been published in the US and abroad in journals such as the Canadian Modern Language Review, Hispania, and Foreign Language Annals. Currently, he serves as Past President of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. John Truscott is a Professor in the Institute of Learning Sciences and Technologies and Adjunct Professor in the Center for Teacher Education at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. His primary research interest is the Modular Online Growth and Use of Language (MOGUL) framework, but he has also published extensively on the topic of error correction and in other areas of second language acquisition. He is the author

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of Consciousness and Second Language Learning (2015) and co-author of The Multilingual Mind: A Modular Processing Perspective (Cambridge, 2014, with Mike Sharwood Smith) and The Internal Context of Bilingual Processing (2019, with Michael Sharwood Smith). Rémi A. van Compernolle is an Associate Professor and William S. Dietrich II Career Development Professor of Second Language Acquisition and French and Francophone Studies at the Carnegie Mellon University and is a Project Coordinator for the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research at the Pennsylvania State University. His research extends cultural-historical psychology to second language development, with specific focus on second language pragmatics and sociolinguistics, concept-based instruction, dynamic assessment, and pedagogical interaction. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, he has published two monographs, Sociocultural Theory and L2 Instructional Pragmatics (2014) and Interaction and Second Language Development: A Vygotskian Perspective (2015). Olena Vasylets is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and English Studies at the University of Barcelona. Her areas of research are cognitive processes in language learning, language-learning potential of second language writing, computer-assisted language learning, the role of mode (oral, written, multimodality) in second language acquisition, and language disorders. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Language Learning and Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. Zhisheng (Edward) Wen is an Associate Professor at Macao Polytechnic Institute, Macau SAR, China. He received his PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has teaching and research interests in second language acquisition, cognitive sciences, and translation studies. His latest books include: Working Memory in Second Language Acquisition and Processing (2015, with Mailce Borges Mota and Arthur McNeill), Working Memory and Second Language Learning (2016), and Language Aptitude: Advancing Theory, Testing, Research and Practice (2019, with Peter Skehan, Adriana Biedron, Shaofeng Li, and Richard Sparks). Forthcoming is Researching L2 Task Performance and Pedagogy: In Honor of Peter Skehan (with Mohammad Ahmadian). Stefanie Wulff is an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Florida. Her research interests are in quantitative corpus linguistics, second language acquisition, and student writing development. She is the author of Rethinking Idiomaticity (2008) and various journal articles and contributions to edited volumes. She is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory and Co-Editor of the Cognitive Linguistics in Practice series (with Carita Paradis). She is the co-PI of the National Science Foundation-funded Technical Writing Project, a corpus-based research project seeking to improve technical student writing in the STEM disciplines.

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to Helen Barton, Commissioning Editor (Linguistics) at Cambridge University Press for having suggested this timely handbook idea to us and for her efficient assistance throughout this project. We also acknowledge the excellent work, correspondance, and professionalism of Stephanie Taylor, Senior Editorial Assistant (Humanities & Social Sciences) at Cambridge University Press. We are also grateful to our editorial assistant, Rebecca Mueller, for her excellent work during the preparation of the manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge that financial support to hire an editorial assistant was received from a grant by Wilfrid Laurier University and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Institutional Grant. Needless to say, The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning would not exist had it not been for the dedication and hard work of individuals who contributed chapters. They have helped to build a comprehensive handbook which showcases prominent theories and findings on language learning, which we feel is a much-needed addition to the field of second language acquisition. Finally, we are extremely grateful to the more than sixty scholars— both internal and external to this project—who accepted our invitation to serve as anonymous peer-reviewers of the chapters. It is without a doubt that their knowledge and expertise have strengthened the content of this handbook and its implications for future research.

Introduction John W. Schwieter and Alessandro Benati

Second language learning is the study of how learners come to create a new language system with an often limited exposure to the second language. It is the study of how they can make use of that system during comprehension and speech production. In a general sense, a second language (L2) refers to a language that is acquired after the first language (L1) has been established in early childhood. Theory and research in second language acquisition has emphasized the complexity of acquisition processes. How learners process language, how they intake it and accommodate it into the new language system, and how they access the information for speech production are key areas of research in second language acquisition. Scholars in this field are mainly interested in exploring what the processes and key factors involved in language acquisition are. Research carried out in this context is often about learners and learning. However, the main findings of this research have implications for teachers and teaching. The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning builds on this impetus and reports on topical areas and findings that have formulated and continue to define research trajectories in the field of L2 acquisition today. The authoritative, state-of-the-art works in this handbook are organized across the following seven parts: Part I: Theories Part II: Methods Part III: Skill Development Part IV: Individual Differences Part V: Pedagogical Interventions and Approaches Part VI: Context and Environment Part VII: Moving Forward

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In Part I, the handbook opens with a set of chapters that are dedicated to discussing prominent theories and frameworks in L2 learning. Chapter 1 by Jason Rothman, Fatih Bayram, Ian Cunnings, and Jorge González Alonso opens the section with an exhaustive overview of the major contemporary theories, models, and hypotheses that drive formal linguistic and psycholinguistic research in adult L2 acquisition and processing. The authors focus on morphosyntax proper and its interfaces with semantics, pragmatics, and phonology (prosody). In addition to a historical overview of how the main questions of the paradigm have been refocused over time as formal linguistic and acquisition theories evolved, the chapter also presents how typically used methodologies have expanded, especially in the past decade or so. In Chapter 2, Nick C. Ellis and Stefanie Wulff present an overview of cognitive approaches to L2 learning which hypothesize that L2 learners acquire constructions (form–function mappings, conventionalized in a speech community) from language usage by means of general cognitive mechanisms (exemplar-based, rational, associative learning). The authors present a usage-based analysis of this in terms of fundamental principles of associative learning: low salience, low contingency, and redundancy all lead to form–function mappings being less well learned. From the review of experimental work of learned attention and blocking in L2 learning, the chapter presents educational interventions such as form-focused instruction which recruits learners’ explicit, conscious processing capacities and allows them to notice novel L2 constructions. Chapter 3 by Rémi A. van Compernolle presents a critical overview of the primary characteristics of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory and how they relate to the qualitative science of L2 learning. The author makes extensions to these theories such that it can be invoked as an analytic lens for interpreting “naturalistic” data and can also be used as the basis for designing educational opportunities. Chapter 4 by John Truscott and Michael Sharwood Smith concludes Part I. In this chapter, the authors review four examples of narrow theoretical frameworks (interlanguage theory, creative construction approach, generative approach, and processability theory) that have served to guide L2 research. Following this, two broad frameworks are discussed: the complex adaptive systems approach, particularly as realized in the position paper of the Five Graces Group (2009), and the MOGUL framework of Sharwood Smith and Truscott (2014). The authors’ critical analysis of theoretical frameworks suggests that a broad framework to L2 learning should be emphasized in which assumptions about the nature of language, learning, and the mind must be made explicit and critically examined. Part II presents important methodological approaches in L2 learning research. Peter I. De Costa, Wendy Li, and Hima Rawal in Chapter 5 offer insight on several qualitative methodologies (e.g., case studies,

Introduction

ethnographies) that have been used in L2 classroom-based research along with methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups, observations) that are used in conjunction. The authors also review key theories in L2 acquisition, discourse analytic approaches, and discourse analytic tools that are generally adopted. The chapter demonstrates how some quantitative methods can effectively be paired with qualitative methods and contemporary constructs such as emotions and language ideologies in order to extend this research agenda, thereby creating a holistic understanding of the dynamics surrounding language acquisition. In Chapter 6, Charlene Polio and Jongbong Lee focus on experimental classroom research. They first present its historical context by explaining what early research investigated as well as some of the problems with the early research. Following this, the authors provide a summary of experimental classroom research published in the last ten years in which the researchers manipulated an independent variable within a classroom setting. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the drawbacks and challenges in experimental classroom research including the lack of random assignment or control groups and issues related to internal validity such as controlling for teacher and student variables. Chapter 7 by Anne Burns tracks the development of action research, a methodological approach used by practitioners in language educational contexts which takes a socio-constructivist approach and views teachers as agentive actors and investigators within their own social contexts. The author considers recent initiatives that have contributed to the spread of action research and discusses the findings about the impact on teachers who conduct action research. Nina Spada transitions to classroom observation research in Chapter 8. This method, often referred to as interaction analysis, typically involves the use of observation instruments that focus on broad-based, macro-level descriptions (e.g., the communicative orientation of instruction) as well as those that focus on micro-level analyses of specific instructional features (e.g., corrective feedback). Spada offers examples of both types and examines their structure and organization, the type of features included, and coding procedures. She also evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the interaction analysis approach to L2 classroom observation in relation to other approaches such as discourse analysis and ethnographies. The last chapter of the section is Leah Roberts’ Chapter 9 which provides a state-of-the-art and critical overview of psycholinguistic and neurophysiological methods currently being used in L2 learning and processing. Some of the questions addressed by these methods include the extent to which L2 real-time processing is similar to or different from that of native speakers, how individual differences in factors such as proficiency and cognitive capacity affect L2 processing, and what the influences are of a

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learner’s first language on the processes of production and comprehension. The methods reviewed by the author allow researchers to examine potentially distinct, qualitative changes in brain signatures that correlate with increased linguistic knowledge as well as learners’ error- and ­feedback-related responses to L2 linguistic stimuli. Part III reviews research on the development of various L2 skills. In Chapter 10, Jaemyung Goo illustrates the importance of interaction as a valuable opportunity for learners to refine their interlanguage through negotiation for meaning. The author discusses several factors that affect the benefits of interaction including noticing, feedback type, modified output opportunities, task type and complexity, cognitive individual differences, and language aptitude. Through these observations, Goo notes key issues that merit further research to gain a better understanding of L2 learning through interaction. Dustin Crowther and Susan M. Gass provide insight on the development of L2 speaking in Chapter 11. The authors begin by addressing the contract of L2 speaking from both a macro- and micro-perspective, drawing on a corpus of oral proficiency interviews across foreign languages (e.g., French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese). The authors also review phonology-, fluency-, and sociolinguistic-based factors that intersect with listener perceptions of L2 speech performance. The chapter finishes with a discussion on some of the variables that may influence the development of L2 speaking ability. John Field discusses the development of L2 listening in Chapter 12. The author first reviews the conventional comprehension approach to L2 listening and highlights recent arguments that demonstrate the shortcomings of these conventional approaches. Three recent developments are then discussed. The first is the notion of subdividing the skill of L2 listening into its component parts to enable them to be practised individually. A second development concerns the extent to which learners’ difficulties in L2 comprehension derive from the phonetic characteristics of connected speech. A third issue is the role of authentic speech in an L2 listening programme and the nature of the compensatory strategies in which L2 learners engage. In Chapter 13, Elizabeth B. Bernhardt and Cici Malik Leffell shift readers’ focus towards L2 reading. Their review of the state of the field shows that a significant amount of research in this area has focused on word- and sentence-level processing. The authors argue that this narrow focus diverts attention from two critical elements that have not been widely discussed: the implications of L2 extended text; and L2 comprehension. As such, Bernhardt and Malik Leffell explore the comprehension of complicated, extended L2 discourse, and their treatment of the interactive compensatory framework, as well as other research methodologies, suggests promising new insights into L2 upper-register text processing.

Introduction

Chapter 14 by Rosa M. Manchón and Olena Vasylets closes the section by offering a review of research on how and why writing can be a site for L2 learning. The authors comment on empirical L2-oriented writing research looking at how writing and feedback processing can lead to language development, especially areas of development concerned with: (1) language processing in different conditions (individual and collaborative writing) and environments (pen-and-paper and computer-mediated writing); (2) task-related issues, including task complexity, task repetition, and task modality effects; and (3) attentional processes and potential learning outcomes during feedback processing. The authors conclude by ascertaining the implications of the theory and research reviewed and suggest ways of advancing research agendas in the area. Part IV synthesizes work on the role of individual learner differences in L2 learning. Zhisheng (Edward) Wen and Shaofeng Li report on working memory in Chapter 15. The authors discuss the nature and structure of the limited capacity of the human working memory (WM) system and elaborate on the implications of individual differences in WM has on L2 developmental domains including vocabulary, formulaic sequences and chunks, and morpho-syntactic constructions. Wen and Li also discuss the distinctive roles of executive WM components and functions in selective processes during L2 sub-skills learning and performance such as listening, speaking, reading, writing, and simultaneous interpreting. In Gisela Granena’s Chapter 16, the author explores the role of language aptitude in L2 learning and offers an approach to understanding and measuring aptitude components and functions in L2 learning. In addition to providing a review of past and present research on language aptitude, Granena addresses its predictive validity in naturalistic and instructed L2 contexts and analyses the implications for L2 teaching. Chapter 17 by Stephen Ryan examines some of the key shifts in recent thinking about the motivation to learn an L2, some of the methodological challenges these changes have posed, and some of the ways in which the field has responded to these challenges. The author situates motivation uniquely among learners’ individual differences and demonstrates that it has been enthusiastically embraced by both researchers and classroom practitioners, resulting in a fast-changing and expanding theoretical landscape. Ryan concludes the chapter by considering the implications of this period of high research activity and major upheaval for the future development of the field. In Chapter 18, Carmen Muñoz reviews research on age with respect to L2 learning. Recently, this body of work has acquired new perspectives, such as the concern with native-likeness, the view of age as a factor in isolation from other learner internal and external factors, or the generalization of age-related findings across different learning settings. Muñoz discusses these issues and argues for a revamping of

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research on age and L2 learning to account for new priorities. Especially, the author notes that further research must investigate the two extremes of the age continuum, that of the very young school learners and that of older learners who may be learning an L2 because of immigration or as a hobby. Ron Darvin and Bonny Norton in Chapter 19 discuss L2 learner identity as a key factor in L2 acquisition. Through the lens of L2 learning as a social practice implicated in relations of power, the authors show how identity categories impact interactions in diverse learning contexts, positioning learners in different and sometimes unequal ways. Consequently, how L2 learners are recognized as legitimate speakers in these contexts shapes the extent to which they invest in their learning. On this backdrop, Darvin and Norton examine the notion that learners in the digital era need to navigate more complex, fluid spaces in which developing broader linguistic repertoires becomes increasingly crucial in negotiating their existing and imagined identities. The chapter demonstrates how an understanding of the complexities of learners’ identities can inform L2 teaching that extends the range of identities and opportunities available to L2 learners around the globe. Part V engages readers with a dialogue on the pedagogical interventions that facilitate L2 learning. Alessandro Benati and John W. Schwieter, in Chapter 20, examine how different pedagogical interventions to L2 grammar instruction have been addressed from a variety of theoretical frameworks (linguistic, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic) and pedagogical perspectives (input, interaction, and output). The authors argue that although grammar instruction is limited and constrained due to several linguistic and processing factors, non-traditional pedagogical interventions might have some beneficial effects in terms of speeding up the rate of acquisition. After examining the characteristics, empirical evidence, and theoretical and pedagogical implications of different pedagogical interventions, the chapter outlines guiding principles which should be considered in language pedagogy. Michael H. Long, Jiyong Lee, and Kyoko Kobayashi Hillman discuss taskbased L2 learning in Chapter 21. The authors review a substantial body of research concerning several dimensions of tasks and task-based language learning, including task criticality, frequency, complexity, and difficulty, and the conditions under which tasks are performed. The chapter also synthesizes practical issues in the design and implementation of taskbased language teaching and with ways of dealing with problems that can arise in the field. A central issue in task-based L2 learning is how language may be attended to and processed in lessons in which the main focus is on meaning, and how such linguistic processing may interact with task design. Such is the topic of Chapter 22 by Roger Gilabert and Joan Castellví

Introduction

in which the authors address this issue with regard to morphologically rich languages such as Russian. The chapter provides an overview of communicative language teaching methods and then explores the issue of models of task design and task complexity and how they conceptualize the issue of linguistic complexity. The role of L2 proficiency and the use of tasks at lower levels of proficiency is addressed, and recommendations are made for researchers, syllabus designers, and educators who work with task-based programmes of morphologically-rich languages. In Chapter 23, David Little reviews the two most widely used proficiency guidelines and frameworks in L2 education worldwide: the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Proficiency Guidelines and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The ACTFL guidelines comprise detailed descriptions of what learners can do at different proficiency levels, whereas the CEFR uses scaled descriptors to illustrate a taxonomic account of language use and the learner’s competences. The author explores the origin and objectives of both frameworks, considers their different approaches to language proficiency as language use, and gauges their impact on L2 learning, teaching, and assessment. Chapter 24 by Carol A. Chapelle reports on technology-mediated L2 learning and how technology has affected L2 pedagogical interventions. The author synthesizes work done on new pedagogies that motivate the creation of learning activities which operationalize theoretically-based learning principles. Within this synthesis is an overview of the technological affordances underlying new pedagogies for grammar, vocabulary, reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as pedagogical approaches that have been created or enriched through the use of technology (e.g., blended learning, technology-assisted taskbased language learning, and distance learning). In addition to reviewing research and evaluation methods used to investigate students’ use of technology for language learning, Chapelle highlights how research and development in this area has contributed to the study of L2 learning. In Chapter 25 by Hossein Nassaji and Eva Kartchava, the authors report on content-based language teaching (CBLT), an instructional method that combines the teaching of academic subjects (e.g., math, science, history) and L2 learning. The chapter outlines the main characteristics of CBLT in general and discusses its origins, various types, and contexts of use. The benefits and shortcomings of CBLT are assessed, as are pedagogical strategies that can address those shortcomings. The chapter concludes with implications for theory and practice and what the future landscape of CBLT research is likely to look like. The last topic of the section is Graham Crookes’ Chapter 26, in which the author discusses critical L2 pedagogy, specifically teaching approaches that draw on social justice. Crookes notes a considerable increase in research conducted in this area in recent

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decades, with practical work first appearing in the 1980s and more theoretical work and increased examples of practice since the turn of the century. The chapter demonstrates that critical language pedagogy has taken for granted theories of L2 learning which are critical in nature, though little attention has been paid to characterizing them in detail. The author reports on what is implied by critical theories of L2 learning and offers possible alternatives. Within this discussion is the concept of praxis, the integration of theory and practice, which is considered to be of central importance throughout the wider area of critical pedagogy. Part VI considers the role of context, environment, and other factors in L2 learning. Bilingual education and policy is the first topic presented. In Chapter 27, Christine Hélot and Ofelia García argue that because learners, as well as ideologies about bilingualism vary, bilingual education implies many things in different contexts. As such, the chapter differentiates various types of learners and bilingualism, and describes how the main factor of differentiation has to do with power itself. These power differentials have a significant impact on which bilingual education programmes are implemented in different societies, as well as the pedagogical practices used and the resources that are available. This complicated landscape for bilingual education is discussed in the context of a globalizing world, and considerations are made for L2 learners, especially those who are minoritized. In Chapter 28, Kim Potowski and Sarah J. Shin report on heritage language instruction. The authors organize this discussion around four important questions. What is a useful working definition of heritage language learners? What are the major heritage languages around the world, and why are they important? What makes heritage language instruction different from teaching an L2? And what resources are available for educators working with heritage learners? The chapter concludes by advocating for a fundamental shift in societal attitudes towards heritage languages and speakers of those languages in order to accomplish a language competent society. Aline Ferreira, Viola G. Miglio, and John W. Schwieter in Chapter 29 discuss minority languages and learners in both home and abroad contexts. The authors specifically focus on the role that education and acculturation play in relation to language learning and maintenance. They also compare results in historical minorities in their own countries and heritage language speakers abroad. Examples include Spanish and Chinese as heritage languages in the United States and Canada, respectively, and minority languages in Europe. The chapter demonstrates that although speakers of a minority language constantly face issues like L1 attrition, some alternatives have helped immigrants to maintain their language abroad. In the case of minority speakers within their own country, new policies are decisive in maintaining languages alive in places where they

Introduction

have a secondary, inferior, legal status. In Chapter 30 by Jane Jackson and John W. Schwieter, the authors report on L2 learning in study abroad and immersion contexts. The chapter specifically focuses on L2 intercultural learning and the internal and external factors that can result in differing sojourn outcomes. As well as summarizing key findings, the chapter raises awareness of the theories and methodologies that characterize research in L2 study abroad settings and also calls on researchers to take a closer look at what actually happens during stays abroad so that study abroad educators and administrators can advocate for research-driven, t­ heory based pedagogical interventions that deepen language and intercultural learning at all stages of the study abroad cycle: pre-sojourn, sojourn, and post-sojourn. In Chapter 31, Peter Swanson discusses the past, present, and future of teacher education in the United States and juxtaposes this development with the highly successful system in Finland. His review, spanning over two centuries, advocates that teacher education holds many benefits and that care must be taken to advance the profession, continuously seek to improve learner achievement, and develop globally-minded citizens. Swanson’s depiction of L2 teaching and learning is a testament that it contributes to these goals. Part VII concludes the handbook with thought-provoking future trajectories in L2 learning and teaching. Chapter 32 by Susan M. Gass begins by first discussing early foundations of L2 learning by focusing on (1) the relationship between L2 teaching and learning; (2) the general growth of the field of L2 learning; and (3) changes in emphases suggesting a narrowing of the gap. Through her metaphoric crystal ball based on current research trends, Gass contemplates the future from three perspectives: the content of the field (based on past emphases); methodologies and statistical techniques; and research instruments. The author ties together the growth of L2 teaching and L2 learning with observations of ways in which the two continue to feed one another. The chapter concludes with comments about the overall development of the field of L2 learning, basing these observations on study quality, methodological rigour, and statistical sophistication. Throughout The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning, findings from research have provided a shift in the way we understand L2 learning and the roles played by both teachers and students in the classroom. Current findings from research provide a much clearer picture on how learning another language happens. Understanding more about L2 learning pushes language teachers to question the prevailing methods and approaches in language teaching. Such is the aim of this handbook: to take readers on this journey in which they will learn about the main implications of research and theories for language teaching and the vast territory that is yet to be chartered.

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1 Formal Linguistic Approaches to Adult L2 Acquisition and Processing Jason Rothman, Fatih Bayram, Ian Cunnings, and Jorge González Alonso 1.1 Introduction The relative conformity with which (typically developing) children attain adult grammatical competence—ultimate attainment—and the similarity in developmental paths along which they progress is remarkable (e.g., Ambridge & Lieven, 2011; Clark, 2003; Guasti, 2002; Synder, 2007). This achievement is, however, so ubiquitous and mundane that we seldom marvel at it. Of course, monolingual adult grammars may also differ from one another, especially for some domains of grammar (e.g., Dąbrowska, 1997, 2012), but such variability pales in comparison to the variation in adult non-native second language (L2) grammars. Indeed, the path and outcomes of L2 acquisition can be highly variable from one individual to another, even under seemingly comparable contexts. Individual and group-level factors in adulthood that either do not apply or apply with much less consequence in young childhood conspire to explain at least some of the gamut of L2 variability. Adults are less likely to be exposed to high or sufficient quantities and qualities of (native) input, which provide the indispensable raw material for specific grammar building (e.g., Carroll, 2001; Rankin & Unsworth, 2016; Rothman & Guijarro Fuentes, 2010). It is possible that adults do not maintain the same linguistic and/or cognitive abilities to acquire (e.g., Bley-Vroman, 1989, 2009; DeKeyser, 2000; Hawkins & Casillas, 2008; Long, 2005; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007) and/or process language (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, 2006b, 2018; Grüter & Rohde, 2013; Grüter, Rohde, & Schafer, 2016) as children have. Whether or not the underlying mechanisms for language acquisition and processing are one and the same across the lifespan, one should expect factors such as motivation, influence from the first language (L1), cognitive differences (e.g., working memory),

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context of learning (classroom versus naturalistic immersion), and linguistic aptitude, among other variables, to contribute to the range of individual differences in adult L2 path and ultimate attainment (e.g., Dörnyei, 1998, 2003, 2014; Linck et al., 2014; Rankin, 2017; Robinson, 2001, 2005, 2013; Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996; White, 2003). We are all increasingly mindful of the inherent comparative fallacy implicated in most—but not all—monolingual to bilingual comparisons (e.g., Bley-Vroman, 1983; Ortega, 2013, 2016; Rothman & Iverson, 2010). It would, however, be inaccurate to pretend, even with contemporary calls to examine bilingualism in its own right, that the study of adult L2 acquisition is not motivated in large part by the goal of understanding what underlies typical L1 → L2 differences. No one denies that we need to understand the constitution of adult L2 grammars as the independent entities they are and in more ecologically valid terms. However, doing so completely devoid of the traditional comparison goes beyond simply abnegating the past research agendas that paved the way to modern second language acquisition (SLA) studies. Most calls for the bilingual turn in SLA challenging the monolingual as a golden standard benchmark also recognize the intense curiosity one has to understand L1 versus L2 differences, and the value of understanding this further. Such calls remind us, above all, that we are comparing various types of apples to each other, if not apples to oranges. Sometimes it is quite useful, if not necessary, to compare apples to oranges, as long as we are aware we are doing so. Thus, L1 to L2 comparisons are not dead, nor should they be. Alternatively, we need to be cautious of what we claim from L1–L2 difference comparisons and ask ourselves, juxtaposed against specific questions, if such a comparison is necessary and/or particularly insightful. We will be mindful of this discussion throughout this chapter; however, we will also be faithful to what has been done in the field within its proper (temporal) context, highlighting where some questions have been modified over time as advances in theory and otherwise shifting views have necessitated. Forty plus years into the modern study of adult SLA, various paradigms of linguistic inquiry (e.g., generative grammar, construction grammar, lexical functional grammar, cognitive grammar, etc.) have been adopted as a backdrop against which subfields of SLA have emerged to frame and research adult non-native language acquisition and processing. The goal of the present chapter is to focus on one such approach, that is, generative approaches to SLA (GenSLA). GenSLA research has always been focused on describing and explaining the implicit knowledge of L2 representations in the mind or brain of the learner (see Rothman & Slabakova, 2018; White, 2018, for recent state-of-the-science reviews). The role that Universal Grammar (UG) may continue to play—in part or in whole—in restricting the hypothesis space for L2 grammatical learning—distinguishing

Formal Linguistic Approaches to Adult L2 Acquisition and Processing

between knowledge that is clearly acquired on the basis of exposure to L2 input and that which is more reflective of universal linguistic principles— has featured prominently in GenSLA for the entirety of the field’s tradition, starting in the early 1980s. By the late 1990s, as we will see, GenSLA had expanded considerably beyond the focus on whether or not there was UG-accessibility after puberty. Indeed, GenSLA applies the tenets of formal generative linguistic theory (e.g., Chomsky, 1965, 1981, 1995) to guide the questions asked, make predictions about L2 linguistic behaviour along the developmental continuum, inspire and define the selection of domains of grammar on which to empirically focus, and interpret the data and from them hypothesize about the constitution of non-native mental linguistic competence (i.e., I-language). In the remainder of this chapter, we contextualize what is meant by formal linguistics (past and present) as applied to non-native language studies, address what makes GenSLA different from other theories of SLA, and briefly review the history of GenSLA over the past three plus decades, with special consideration of how it has expanded since the early 2000s to include work on non-native processing using psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methodologies.

1.2  The Main Tenets of Generative Linguistic Theory Universal Grammar (UG) is claimed to provide a biological blueprint of sorts for efficient and constrained language learning, at least in children. Indeed, over the past two decades in particular there has been much discussion among generative theorists as to what precisely the innate language faculty offers. To be sure, discussion, debate, and change at the level of formal theory have inevitable consequences for the evolution of and application in GenSLA theory; however, this is of less consequence than one might think. GenSLA—like all approaches to SLA—is an empirical field that generates tried and true data of its own. Data collected with sound methodology exist (somewhat) orthogonally to any specific theory used to try to explain them. As formal theories get modified on the basis of advancements that run in parallel to, or as a result of, applying generative theory to (non-native) language acquisition, GenSLA’s database stands the test of time, able to adjust to any then-current theory and/or serve as evidence to support it or reject it a priori (see also Schwartz & Sprouse, 2000). This said, the formation of theories, hypotheses, predictions, constructs, interpretations, and more within GenSLA finds its roots within particular instantiations of then-current generative linguistic theory. And so, in a handbook chapter such as this, it is useful to cursorily outline its main tenets as well as a few specific versions of generative theory along the past decades in which GenSLA has existed in parallel.

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Perhaps the most well-known theory that GenSLA has drawn from is the Principles and Parameters (P&P) approach from the days of Government and Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981). UG was argued to provide a blueprint of constraints, known as principles and parameters. Principles are constraints on the form that any potential human language can take for a given domain. Parameters are, essentially, principles with choices: a universal property that reflects limited variation in the world’s languages. For example, in all languages, a sentence must minimally have a subject and a verbal predicate (with optional object arguments depending on the verbal argument structure): SV(O). All verbs in context have an intended subject, whether expressed phonetically or not. This principle—a truism of grammar—was captured under the Extended Projection Principle (EPP; Chomsky, 1982). To the extent that the EPP is a proper universal principle, all utterances with a verb in all languages must always respect it. For example, sentences like *Robert thinks that __ like dogs more than cats is ungrammatical because it violates the EPP. The verb “like” in English is left without a specified subject that cannot be recovered alternatively, and so the universal rule that all verbs have a reliably interpretable subject is violated. As it turns out, not all subjects are overtly expressed, even in English, and so absence of an overt subject does not necessarily mean the EPP is violated. For example, in control structures like I want to go to the movies: [Ii want [CPPROi to go to the movies]], the EPP is satisfied by accessing the features of the higher subject. In other words, “I” serves as the subject of the matrix verb as well as the antecedent for co-­reference of the empty category subject (PRO) of the embedded verb. Equally with coordinated clause structures, as in I live in the UK and ___ teach at the University of Reading, the syntactic structure is such that the EPP is fulfilled by the presence of the first expressed pronoun “I”, accessible via coordination. With the few exceptions above, it is fair to say that English-type languages require overt pronouns to always be pronounced. This is clearly not true of all languages in the world. For languages like Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, and Korean, most subject pronoun positions in relation to verbs are phonetically unrealized. How could such languages exist if the EPP is truly a principle of grammar? The EPP merely states that all verbs have a readily accessible subject for interpretation; it does not stipulate how languages can vary in how this requirement is fulfilled. A related principle of grammar that provides a limited amount of choices for specific grammars to select is known as the Null-Subject Parameter (NSP). Whereas English is negatively valued for the NSP, thus requiring overt subjects ubiquitously, Spanish-type languages are positively valued and thus make use of other linguistic means to fulfill the EPP requirement. Consider (1) and (2) in Spanish and (3) and (4) in Turkish below:

Formal Linguistic Approaches to Adult L2 Acquisition and Processing

(1) Yo creo que aquí nosotros vivimos bien. I believe-1PS that here we pro live-1PP well. “I believe that we live well here.” (2) ___ Creo que aquí ___ vivimos bien. pro believe-1PS that here pro live-1PP well. “I believe that we live well here.” (3) Ben inanıyorum ki biz burada iyi yaşıyoruz. I believe-1PS that we here well live-1PL “I believe that we live well here.” (4) ___ İnanıyorum ki ___ burada iyi yaşıyoruz. pro believe-1PS that pro here well live-1PL “I believe that we live well here.” In (1) and (3), the EPP is fulfilled ostensibly in the same way as in English— or in principle can be—via the use of overt pronouns in the canonical subject positions. In (2) and (4), the subjects are phonetically null (in main and embedded clauses alike), but the EPP is satisfied by the verbal morphology (in bold), which uniquely specifies the person and number of the only understandable subject, an impossibility in English given its weak verbal morphology. And so, while it can be said that all languages respect the EPP as a universal principle, parametric variation is captured under the NSP relating to how the EPP can be satisfied in various languages. With the advent of Minimalism (Chomsky 1995, 2001), the proliferation of parameters and thus their very ecological validity was questioned. Over the years, the list of proposed principles and parameters (P&P) had grown into the hundreds, reasonably making one wonder how the mind could encode so much information at a zero state and indeed why it would do so in the first place. Minimalism, as the name would suggest, called for a more streamlined, elegant approach to describing the same facts of language that P&P uncovered. It was argued that properties previously formalized under so-called principles and parameters were likely not specific mental constraints themselves, but rather consequences of core grammatical operations where functional features encoded on lexical items (including morphology) fulfilled their remit. And so, the EPP above was reduced to an AGREE(ment) operation, for example, between features associated with the subject position (Spec IP/TP) and the feature carried in languages like Spanish and Turkish on person and number morphology. The details are quite abstract, and their specificity is not really relevant to our purposes here. What is important, however, is the acknowledgement within Minimalism that a more reductionist approach was needed, but crucially one that could provide the same level of descriptive adequacy that decades of generative work had achieved. Indeed, as Ellis (1998) stated, “it is the assumptions of UG that are under attack [by connectionist and other competing cognitive approaches], not the generative grammar descriptions of the relations between the linguistic units” (p. 633). We respectfully

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disagree with his underlying reasoning and, like Bruhn de Garavito (2011), we would point out that the “generative grammar descriptions of the relations between linguistic units” that Ellis concedes are not problematic are in fact, often although not always, incompatible with theories that rely (virtually) solely on input and domain-general cognition. Nonetheless, it is prudent to point out that descriptions within generative theory at the level to which Ellis (1998, p. 633) refers are regarded even by competing theories as at least descriptively accurate, and as a result must be accounted for by all iterations of theory, generative and otherwise. The minimalist framework sets out to explain three basic properties claimed to be specific to human language syntax: (i) human language syntax is non-linear (except in production and parsing, including morphology and phonology/phonetics) as compared to non-human primates; (ii) hierarchical structure affects meaning and interpretation; and (iii) hierarchical structure is seemingly infinite (i.e., recursive; Berwick & Chomsky, 2017; Fitch, Hauser, & Chomsky, 2005; Fitch & Hauser, 2004; Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002). It was proposed that these three properties together comprised the fewest explanatory, but necessary, variables of language and, therefore, the best candidate for a single operation for the building of syntactic structures, which later became formalized as MERGE (Chomsky, 2001). Merge, simplistically speaking, is responsible for forming and hierarchically ordering syntactic objects (i.e., sets). In this respect, UG then accounts for the Basic Property of Language (BPL)—very simply put—because it is proposed to be an internal computational system responsible for the hierarchical building of human language syntactic sets (i.e., Merge) that interfaces with both external components such as production (phonology/phonetics), parsing, and morphology (word building), as well as conceptual systems (i.e., cognition) for appropriate inference making and interpretation. Whatever UG’s actual composition turns out to be, its main functions will always be a gap-filler and an accelerator, providing an answer to how language can be acquired so effortlessly and rapidly despite the complexity of the task and in light of seemingly incomplete input. UG must also be the proverbial agent that reduces the hypothesis space the mind considers from all logical possibilities to those that are compositionally and computationally parsimonious with natural human language—why children make only a subset of all reasonably possible errors. Whether this turns out to be (a) a truly minimal set of core mental operations specific to language such as MERGE, (b) an inventory of formal (functional) features of grammar, or (c) more akin to an actual blueprint of principles of universal linguistic well-formedness with room for language specific (parametric) variation, the general abstraction of UG remains the same: UG will be the smallest amount of innate structure needed to explain outcome competence that ultimately cannot be reduced to deduction from the input and domain-general cognition alone.

Formal Linguistic Approaches to Adult L2 Acquisition and Processing

1.3 What Makes GenSLA Different (and Not So Different) from Other SLA Approaches? All SLA theories that focus on language as a cognitive phenomenon—as opposed to those in which learner-external factors take centre stage—are broadly concerned with describing the process by which child and adult non-native learners come to produce and understand utterances in the L2, to variable degrees of communicative efficiency and native-­likeness. In an argument that very much parallels debate in first language acquisition (FLA), the fundamental difference between GenSLA and other approaches is the extent to which the different theories consider some L2 knowledge to be acquirable solely from an interaction between the available input and domain-general cognitive systems. To be sure, any GenSLA scholar would agree that meaningful input and domain-general mechanisms are fundamental ingredients of L2 acquisition. The increasingly central position that input quantity and quality is assuming in generative SLA studies in recent times (see, e.g., Rankin & Unsworth, 2016; Slabakova, 2013; Yang & Montrul, 2017) represents perhaps the largest area of crossover between GenSLA and so-called data-driven approaches (see Rothman & Slabakova, 2018, for a detailed discussion of what generative and usage-based paradigms share beyond their differences in focus). Notwithstanding the above, a significant part of the knowledge that a typical L2 learner acquires poses a problem for theories that do not contemplate the involvement of domain-specific machinery. In the 1980s, a few scholars (e.g., Bley-Vroman, 1989; White, 1985) began considering the question of whether one could indeed speak of a logical problem of second language acquisition, very much in the same way that had been proposed for FLA. In the case of children, the logical problem relates to the baffling complexity and uniformity of language acquisition outcomes, in light of the quantity and quality of input to which they are typically exposed. In other words, how do typical human children (and not other species) come to acquire language in very similar ways, to very much the same degree (notwithstanding third-degree factors such as dialectal differences), without instruction, irrespective of differences in cognitive capacities (e.g., general intelligence, working memory)? How is it that children are able to produce utterances—and, most importantly, make errors—that do not (cannot) form part of the input they receive? The generative answer to these questions is that only by assuming some type of innate, domain-­ specific knowledge like UG can we begin to understand the discrepancies between the (never optimal) input children receive and the complex, rich adult grammars they target and successfully acquire. To be sure, much of the path of child acquisition can be accounted for on the basis

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of an interaction with environmental input and constraints traceable to domain-general cognition. However, the fact that not all of the complexity of linguistic computational grammars can be reduced to this interaction in light of the overwhelming success of virtually all children still leaves “little hope that much of the structure of the language can be learned by an organism initially uninformed as to its general character” (Chomsky, 1965, p. 58). While uniformity in ultimate attainment across learners is much less robust in L2 acquisition, it is still the case that the input available to the learner often underrepresents, or underdetermines, the kind of subtle knowledge that L2ers nevertheless come to possess. And so, there is also a logical problem of explanation for adult L2 acquisition, even if the typical path of development and ultimately attained grammars do not display the same conformities overall as FLA (Schwartz, 1998). The input underrepresentation is compounded by the fact that most input consists of positive evidence, that is, naturalistic input (both in L1 and L2 acquisition) is made up of grammatical sentences, which means that the only direct evidence learners get is about what can be done in a particular grammar, but they are rarely—and definitely never reliably—provided with evidence of what cannot be done (i.e., negative evidence). This does not mean that L2 learners, especially in a classroom setting, are not corrected in various ways, both directly and indirectly (e.g., recasting). The type of correction given, however, is not always likely to induce grammatical changes at the level of representation, especially because it is typically inconsistent and obtains on the basis of needing to correct truth-value or due to a lack of intelligibility. To understand this, one need look no further than the most ubiquitous errors of L2 English, and the fact that they are fairly consistently corrected, to begin to appreciate the limitations of overt corrections in adult L2 acquisition. Obligatory morphology such as third person –s or past tense –ed are often omitted or overused by L2 learners—interestingly irrespective of their L1, although there is a clear L1 effect in terms of how this distributes. These properties are taught explicitly in a repeated fashion and are often corrected, yet they persist to a high degree. Details aside on how and why this happens, the point to be made is that mental L2 grammars have their own time course of development—as in L1 acquisition—despite what explicit correction might hope to achieve. The argument that the linguistic input often underrepresents the actual complexity of the target grammar, also known as the poverty of the stimulus (PoS) problem (see Berwick, Chomsky, & Piattelli-Palmarini, 2012; Berwick et al., 2011; Kam & Fodor, 2012; Crain, 2012; Lasnik & Lidz, 2017; Schwartz & Sprouse, 2013, for updated reviews of PoS in general and its applicability to L2 acquisition), has been one of the guiding questions in SLA research from a generative perspective, although, as we will see, whether or not UG

Formal Linguistic Approaches to Adult L2 Acquisition and Processing

remains accessible in adulthood to fill the gap between the input and the output of L2 acquisition has been, and continues to be, the source of much debate. Reasonably, much work in usage-based approaches to language has been dedicated to falsifying the basic claim of the PoS argument—i.e., that the input does indeed lack sufficient evidence of certain subtle contrasts that learners do eventually acquire. Most recent proposals argue that primary linguistic data might indeed contain indirect negative evidence of what have traditionally been defined as PoS properties, even if no utterance in the input explicitly exemplifies those properties (e.g., Lewis & Elman, 2001; Reali & Christiansen, 2003, 2005). However, simulations using sophisticated statistical learning have not yet succeeded in replicating the acquisition of this kind of fine-grained contrasts from arguably comparable input (see, e.g., Kam, Stoyneshka, Tornyova, Fodor, & Sakas 2008, in response to Reali & Christiansen, 2005). One of the issues that non-generative approaches have to address is that PoS is not merely articulated around the extremely low frequency of binary outcomes—i.e., the lack of direct evidence of whether something is allowed in the grammar or not—but also around very subtle conditions for optionality. In other words, some things are not just allowed or disallowed in the grammar, they are simply interpreted differently depending on tacit distinctions that vary across languages. Let us illustrate this with a well-known example of this type of property which relates in ways to the EPP and the NSP discussed above—in whatever form a then-current theory uses to explain their general observations—precisely because it embodies a highly specific constraint on interpretation of overt pronouns in null-subject languages: the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC; Montalbetti, 1984). Recall that in section 2, we ended our discussion of the NSP by stating that null-subject languages like Spanish or Turkish also respect the EPP, because even when subjects are phonetically null, they are recoverable from some combination of the verbal morphology and available discourse or context information. One might then be tempted to assume that null and overt subjects are equally acceptable in all contexts in, for example, Spanish, or that subjects are interpreted more or less in the same way whether or not they are phonetically realized. Neither of these assumptions would be correct. There are, indeed, well established patterns as to the general distribution of when overt and null subjects tend to be used pragmatically (e.g., overt pronouns in contrastive focus contexts), or when the grammar forces a null subject, such as in expletive contexts (e.g., subjects of existentials where there is no semantic meaning of the subject: ___ hay tres hombres en la sala. “(There) are three men in the room.” But, what about interpretation? Subject pronouns in English embedded clauses can be interpreted as referring back to a noun phrase (NP) in the main clause—whether this is a referential NP, a quantified expression

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like someone or everybody, or a wh- word or phrase—or, alternatively, to an extra-sentential antecedent that can be recovered from discourse without any grammatical restrictions, even if reference back to the matrix subject is preferred. Consider the examples in 6a–c and 7a–c (drawn from White, 2003): (6)

a. [Maryi thinks [that shei will win.]] b. [Everyonei thinks [that shei will win.]] c. [Whoi thinks [that shei will win?]]

(7)

a. Janeti is a great athlete. [Maryj thinks [that shei will win.]] b. Janeti is a great athlete. [Everyonej thinks [that shei will win.]] c. Janeti is a great athlete. [Whoj thinks [that shei will win?]]

In 6a–c, the pronoun she is coreferential with the subject of the main clause, which in 6b is a quantified expression and in 6c is a wh- phrase. In 7a–c, on the other hand, she refers to Janet, an antecedent which can be found earlier in the discourse but does not belong to the same sentence as the pronoun. Because each of the sentences in 6 is identical in form to the second sentence in the corresponding example from 7, the hearer/reader needs to rely on contextual information to assign the correct referent. Things, however, are not so straightforward in a null-subject language like Spanish. While both overt and null pronouns can have discourse antecedents (the type of referents we saw in 7), they behave differently when it comes to referring back to the main clause (matrix) subject. In short, null pronouns can have both referential and quantified NPs as their antecedents, whereas overt pronouns cannot refer back to a quantified expression (in theoretical jargon, they cannot have bound variable interpretations). Consider now the examples in 8 (for null pronouns) and 9 (for overt pronouns): (8)

a. [Martai considera [que __ i debería entrar la primera.]] Marta considers that (null) should go in the first. “Marta considers that [Marta] should go in first.” b. [Algunai considera [que __ i debería entrar la primera.]] Some(one) considers that (null) should go in the first. “Some of them consider that [they] should go in first.”

(9)

a. [Martai considera [que ellai debería entrar la primera.]] Marta considers that she should go in the first. “Marta considers that [Marta] should go in first.” b. *[Algunai considera [que ellai debería entrar la primera.]] Some(one) considers that she should go in the first. “Some of them consider that [they] should go in first.”



As we can see, null pronouns in 8a–b admit both a referential (8a) and a quantified (8b) NP as their antecedent, whereas this correferential

Formal Linguistic Approaches to Adult L2 Acquisition and Processing

interpretation with a quantified expression is impossible for the overt pronoun in 9b. In fact, a sentence like 9b forces a discourse antecedent interpretation where the pronominal subject ella is interpreted to refer back to some antecedent in discourse, but crucially not to the quantifier alguna: (10) [Algunai considera [que ellaj debería entrar la primera.]] Some(one) considers that she should go in the first. “Some of them consider that [she, i.e., someone else] should go in first.”

In short, there is a highly specific restriction at play. Although Spanish has processing induced preferences in how this distributes, all null subjects can freely co-refer to all matrix and disjoint referent antecedents, especially in consideration of the discourse context. This, however, is not true of overt subjects. Embedded overt subjects cannot co-refer to the matrix clause only when the antecedent is a variable expression (quantified NP/wh- phrase). Of course, this is never taught. In fact, it is a fact about null subject languages that flies under the radar unless one is a linguist. What makes this property such a subtle contrast is the fact that there is no apparent reason why the string in 9b should be ungrammatical. However, the string is exactly the same as in 10, and yet no direct evidence in the input will suggest to the learner that some readings (coreferential with the main clause subject) are not possible in some sub-cases (quantified expression in the subject of the main clause) of a subtype (overt pronoun in the subject of the embedded clause) of embedded clauses in Spanish (and other null subject languages). And in fact, discourse context between two interlocutors would not necessarily help either, because taking a disjoint versus a matrix antecedent interpretation typically would not cause an obvious breakdown in communication, even if the two speakers unbeknownst to themselves understand distinctly the same utterance. Although many have examined this property since, Pérez-Leroux and Glass (1997, 1999) and Kanno (1997, 1998) were the first to focus on the acquisition of the OPC in L2 Spanish and L2 Japanese, respectively, by native speakers of English. These are particularly relevant groups because, as we have just seen, the OPC does not apply in English, and it is never taught in Spanish or Japanese lessons (see Kanno, 1997, and Pérez-Leroux & Glass, 1997, for discussion). In sum, the OPC does not receive support from direct evidence in the L2 input, is not explicitly taught in these learners’ lessons, and cannot be transferred from their L1, which makes it a perfect example of a PoS property and thus a good candidate to test whether UG guides, or constrains, the acquisition of non-native languages. Kanno (1997) tested the interpretation of sentences of the type 6–10 above in the L2 Japanese of twenty-eight native speakers of English, as compared to the judgments of twenty L1 Japanese speakers. She found

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that, like the natives, L2 learners majoritarily rejected a quantified NP as the antecedent of an overt pronoun in the embedded clause (87% of the time, as compared to 98% for the native speakers). Moreover, native and non-native speakers even displayed similar preferences when both interpretations were optionally available for the overt pronoun, that is, when the main clause subject was a referential NP. In those cases, both groups chose a coreferential interpretation only half of the time—the other half, they selected a discourse antecedent. Kanno’s (1997) results are particularly relevant because they not only point to the acquisition of a subtle, PoS property, but even to similar preferences in anaphora resolution where no constraints on distribution or interpretation seem to be in place in the native grammar. Similarly, Pérez-Leroux and Glass (1997; see also discussion in PérezLeroux & Glass, 1999) tested the same constraint in the L2 Spanish of three groups of non-native speakers (total n = 98) divided by proficiency, as compared to a control group of native speakers of different varieties of Latin American and European Spanish. The experiment, a translation task, elicited production data based on a fixed interpretation that was strongly suggested by the context provided before each sentence. Some contexts promoted a bound-variable interpretation (i.e., they suggested that the null or overt pronoun should be coreferential with the main clause subject, whether this was a referential or a quantified NP), whereas others fixated an interpretation in which the null or overt pronoun in the embedded clause referred back to a discourse antecedent. An example is provided in 11 (Pérez-Leroux & Glass, 1999): (11) a. Referential Story In the O. J. Simpson trial, it is clear that the press has a negative bias against the defendant in their reporting. Some journalist said that he was a wifebeater. To translate: “But no journalist said that he is guilty.” b. Bound-Variable Story The court charged that some journalists had been in contact with the jurors. Several of them were questioned by the judge. To translate: “No journalist admitted that he had talked to the jurors.”

The logic of the experiment is simple. If participants obey the OPC, they should never translate the pronominal subject of the embedded clause— bolded in our reproduction of the examples—as an overt pronoun in 11b, where the pronoun is forced to refer back to a quantified NP. However, they should be able to use both null and overt pronouns in 11a, where the referential NP is a possible antecedent for either. Pérez-Leroux and Glass found that all groups made a distinction between those contexts in which only null pronouns should be used (bound-variable stories) and

Formal Linguistic Approaches to Adult L2 Acquisition and Processing

those in which either an overt or a null pronoun were acceptable (referential stories). While some of the learner groups displayed some violations of the OPC, this did not differ significantly from the native controls, who did in fact show some violations themselves—the authors attribute this to the effect of Caribbean Spanish, one of the varieties present in the sample, which overuses overt pronouns with respect to other varieties. Importantly, Pérez-Leroux and Glass’s (1997) results demonstrate that the OPC is operative from very early on in L2 development. Taken together, the results of these two studies strongly suggest that some type of domain-specific knowledge—not accessible via L1 transfer—actively constrains the acquisition process. The case is indeed compelling: from very early stages, L2 learners unfamiliar with any language where the OPC operates, and with no indication of its existence from their classroom instruction, manage to acquire (i) a restriction on the interpretation of a subset within a subset of grammatical sentences, for which there is no direct (negative) evidence in the input stream, and (ii) a similar distribution of anaphora resolution preferences in those contexts where both overt and null pronouns can be interpreted in similar ways. It is difficult to account for this type of evidence on the basis of L2 input and domain-general cognition alone, that is, without positing the existence of some innate knowledge that is able to fill in the gap between the notable scarcity of evidence, linguistic or otherwise, in the input and these learners’ successful acquisition of the OPC. Empirical evidence of this and other PoS properties being acquired by learners who are exposed to an L2 after puberty provides support for two different but interrelated positions. The first, relevant to cross-paradigm debates, is the one we have discussed as distinctive of GenSLA approaches: that domain-specific knowledge of a UG type must be invoked if we are to explain the relative ease with which L2 learners overcome this and other similar learnability problems. The second position, which applies internally to GenSLA, is that access to UG remains intact throughout the lifespan and across multiple iterations of language acquisition—i.e., L2/L3/L4/Ln. From very early on, differences in developmental sequence and ultimate attainment between L1 and L2 acquisition were ascribed by numerous authors to a complete or partial inaccessibility of the same underlying mechanisms that guide child L1 acquisition (e.g., Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2008, 2009; Bylund, Abrahamsson, & Hyltenstam, 2012, 2013; Bley-Vroman, 1989, 2009; Clahsen & Muysken, 1989; Coppetiers, 1987; DeKeyser, 2000; Granena & Long, 2013; Hawkins & Casillas, 2008; Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Johnson, 1992; Johnson & Newport, 1989; Long, 2005; Meisel, 2011; Schachter, 1988; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007). These arguments dovetail with claims that a critical period (Lenneberg, 1967) exists for language acquisition, direct evidence of which had become

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available in the late 1970s through the case of Genie, a feral child who had been abused and deprived of the most basic linguistic interaction (e.g., Curtiss, 1977). Essentially, the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) as applied to L2 acquisition argued that, due to a decrease in brain plasticity after a certain age (loosely identified with puberty), adults are unable to acquire new languages in qualitatively the same way as children do (e.g., DeKeyser, 2000; Franceschina, 2005; Long, 2005). Two main bodies of evidence problematize the above type of claims. The first is that extremely successful—i.e., native-like—adult L2 learners are indeed uncommon, but also not truly exceptional. However, a strong hypothesis like the CPH should not tolerate such exceptions, because its core argument is universally applicable: all brains mature, and therefore any maturational constraint one wishes to posit will inevitably encompass all adult learners. Under such a logic, that a majority of L2 learners do not achieve native-like proficiency must mean they cannot; any evidence to the contrary—i.e., any native-like L2 learner or the acquisition of specific properties that should not be acquirable by a much larger cohort of L2 learners (not just the super talented and highly advanced ones)—escapes the scope of such a position’s predictions and poses a serious challenge to it (see Rothman, 2008; Schwartz, 1986, for similar arguments). There of course exists the possibility that different neurocognitive mechanisms underlie seemingly identical behaviour. In other words, it might be that successful L2 learners manage to perform in very much the same way as natives making use of fundamentally different tools (e.g., Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, 2006b, 2018; Paradis, 2009; Prévost & White, 2000; Ullman, 2005, 2016). The second body of evidence is in fact relevant to this claim. First, research in cognitive neuropsychology has shown that the existence of a post-pubescent cutoff in neuroplasticity or even very sharp declines is simply not so (Fuchs & Flügge, 2014, for review). Second, asserting that different cognitive or processing mechanisms underlie the linguistic performance of native and non-native speakers generates very specific predictions that are amenable to testing directly through methodologies that are increasingly familiar to the field—electro- and magnetoencephalography (EEG, MEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), etc. Together with the improved sensitivity of implicit, real-time behavioural measures such as eye-tracking, online processing methodologies allow us to evaluate the claim that native and non-native language use are underlain by neuro-functionally different processes, despite occasional appearance of convergence. Similarly to the previous claim, such a theory is falsified if L2 learners are shown to (i) match native speakers in performance, while (ii) displaying comparable indices of online processing. A growing body of evidence suggests that this might indeed be the case (see, e.g., Roberts et al.,

Formal Linguistic Approaches to Adult L2 Acquisition and Processing

2018, for discussion). Indeed, the field of non-native processing research, to which we now turn, is a good friend to GenSLA and vice versa.

1.4  GenSLA and Language Processing Beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, L2 researchers began in earnest to utilize experimental methodologies from the fields of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics to investigate not only L2 knowledge and representation but also how such knowledge is utilized during real-time language processing. This involved expanding the set of methodologies used in GenSLA research from “offline” measures, such as acceptability judgments, that index the final interpretation or judgment given to a sentence, to “online” measures, such as reaction times, that allow the researcher to investigate the moment-to-moment processes involved in language processing as a sentence unfolds in real-time (see Chapter 9 in the current volume by Roberts, for further discussion of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods). Early research in this regard included studies on the processing of so-called wh- dependencies (e.g., Juffs & Harrington 1995, 1996). Consider, for example, (12a) and (12b). In (12a) the verb “read” and its direct object “the book” are adjacent to each other. In the wh- question (12b), “which book” is also interpreted as the direct object of “read”, but does not appear adjacent to it. Correct interpretation in this case requires a linguistic dependency to be formed between the verb and the displaced wh- constituent. Although wh- questions can span several clauses, as in (12c), subjacency or “island” constraints restrict wh- dependency formation (Ross, 1967). For example, a dependency cannot be formed between a wh- constituent and a verb inside a relative clause, as in (12d). Whether L2 learners can acquire knowledge of restrictions on grammatical and ungrammatical wh- dependencies has been widely studied in the GenSLA literature (e.g., Johnson & Newport, 1991; Martohardjono, 1993; Schachter, 1990; White, 1992). Juffs and Harrington (1995, 1996) utilized self-paced reading to investigate how processing influences wh- dependency formation in L2 learners. (12)

a. The boy read the book. b. Which book did the boy read? c. Which book did the boy say that the girl read? d. *Which book did the boy who read?

Two types of sentences that Juffs and Harrington examined include those in (13). In (13a), the wh- constituent “who” must be interpreted as the subject of “to fire”, while in (13b) it is interpreted as its object. Interestingly,

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as first observed by Schachter and Yip (1990), L2 learners of English are less accurate in accepting sentences like (13b) compared to (13a), even though both are grammatical. This might be taken as evidence suggesting that L2 learners have difficulty acquiring knowledge of wh- dependencies in English, but Juffs and Harrington explored whether a processing-based explanation can account for the judgments given by L2 learners. (13)

a. Who does Tom expect to fire the manager? b. Who does Tom expect to fire?

In particular, although in (13a) “who” is ultimately interpreted as the subject of “to fire”, arriving at this interpretation during incremental sentence processing may involve several stages of reanalysis. For example, during processing “who” may initially be interpreted as the direct object of “expect” (“Who does Tom expect?”) and then the direct object of “to fire” (“Who does Tom expect to fire?”). It is only when “the manager” is reached that “who” can unambiguously be interpreted as the subject of “to fire”. Based on reaction time data, Juffs and Harrington argued that it is this reanalysis during processing that causes L2ers to judge such sentences as ungrammatical, rather than an inability to acquire the relevant knowledge of wh- dependencies. These results indicate that, like L1 speakers, L2 learners process wh- dependencies incrementally (see also Williams, Möbius, & Kims, 2001), and provide an example of how parsing considerations during real-time sentence processing can influence our understanding of the knowledge acquired by L2 learners. In their influential review of this and other related research on L2 sentence processing, Clahsen and Felser (2006a, 2006b) proposed the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) as an account of the similarities and differences in L1 and L2 processing. The SSH posits that L2ers have difficulty utilizing syntactic information during sentence processing, and instead rely more on semantic and discourse-level information. The hypothesis that syntactic processing might be the locus of difficulty during L2 sentence parsing sparked considerable interest in the SLA community, and motivated a great deal of research over the following decade that increasingly used online methodologies to investigate the role of syntactic and non-syntactic information during L2 acquisition and processing. For example, Felser et al. (2012) adopted a design previously used in L1 processing by Traxler and Pickering (1996) to investigate the application of island constraints during L2 processing. In (14a) and (14b), “the magazine” and “the shampoo” respectively are both ultimately the direct object of “about” but may initially be interpreted as the direct object of “read” during incremental processing. While both (14a) and (14b) are equally plausible at “about”, (14b) is implausible at “read”. In (14c), however, this initial dependency at “read” should be ruled out because it appears inside

Formal Linguistic Approaches to Adult L2 Acquisition and Processing

of a relative clause. Felser et al. (2012) monitored the eye-movements of L1 English speakers and German L2 English learners as they read sentences like those in (14) and observed longer reading times at “read” in (14b) than (14a) in both groups, suggesting both L1 and L2 groups formed a dependency at the earliest available point. This contrast in plausibility at “read” was not seen in sentences like (14c), suggesting that both groups did not attempt to form a dependency when the verb appeared inside a relative clause. These results suggest L2 learners are able to utilize knowledge of island constraints to restrict dependency resolution during processing (see also Omaki & Schulz, 2011; but see Kim, Baek, & Tremblay, 2015, for a potential influence of transfer). (14)

a. Everyone liked the magazine that the hairdresser read extensively and with such enormous enthusiasm about before going to the salon. b. Everyone liked the shampoo that the hairdresser read extensively and with such enormous enthusiasm about before going to the salon. c. Everyone liked the magazine/the shampoo that the hairdresser who read extensively and with such enormous enthusiasm bought before going to the salon.

In investigating the role of syntactic information during L2 processing, other studies examined how L2ers utilize syntactic binding constraints on anaphora resolution during sentence comprehension (Felser & Cunnings, 2012; Felser, Sato, & Bertenshaw, 2009; Patterson, Trompelt, & Felser, 2014). Consider (15a), for example, where the reflexive “himself” must refer to “the boy”, and (15b), where the pronoun “him” must refer to “the man”. In the linguistics literature, constraints on the interpretation of reflexives and pronouns have typically been described in terms of syntactic binding constraints (Chomsky, 1981), such that reflexives, but not pronouns, must be bound by a local antecedent (i.e. “the boy”). (15)

a. The man said that the boy hurt himself. b. The man said that the boy hurt him.

In line with the long tradition of GenSLA research investigating whether L2ers can or cannot acquire such constraints (see Hawkins, 2001; White, 2003), Felser and Cunnings (2012) investigated the processing of binding constraints on reflexives in texts like (16). They found that L1 English speakers had longer reading times at the reflexive in (16b), when it mismatched with the stereotypical gender of the local antecedent “the soldier”, compared to (16a), when there was a stereotypical gender match (replicating Sturt, 2003). When they first encountered the reflexive during reading, however, German L2 learners had longer reading times when the non-local antecedent (She/He) mismatched the gender of the reflexive. The L2ers did indicate native-like knowledge of binding constraints in an offline task however, and their reading times after the reflexive were

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affected by the stereotypical gender manipulation. These results suggest the L2ers had acquired the binding constraints on reflexives in English, but temporarily violated them during processing. (16)



a. James/Helen has worked in the army hospital for years. He/She noticed that the soldier had wounded himself while on duty in the Far East. b. James/Helen has worked in the army hospital for years. He/She noticed that the soldier had wounded herself while on duty in the Far East.

In addition to studies that have manipulated gender congruence as a means of testing the application of syntactic binding constraints during processing, a number of studies have manipulated gender or number congruence to investigate L2 processing of morphosyntactic agreement. Much of this research has been motivated by long-standing questions in the GenSLA literature regarding whether L2 learners can acquire syntactic features not instantiated in their L1 and has adopted paradigms testing sentences like (17). Here, participants’ reading times at critical regions of text are recorded as an implicit measure of whether L2ers are sensitive to the (un)grammaticality of sentences like (17a) and (17b). In (17), longer reading times at “was” in ungrammatical (17b) than grammatical (17a) would be taken as evidence of L2 acquisition of the relevant agreement feature. (17)

a. The boy unsurprisingly was late for school again. b. *The boys unsurprisingly was late for school again.

The extent to which L2 learners show native-like sensitivity to such agreement violations has been widely debated. Jiang (2004, 2007), for example, claimed that Chinese L2 learners of English are insensitive to number agreement violations during processing, suggesting L2ers may have difficulty in acquiring agreement features (in this case number) not instantiated in the L1. A number of studies have since investigated which factors may influence L2 learners’ native-like sensitivity to agreement violations (e.g., Coughlin & Tremblay, 2013; Foote, 2011; Keating, 2009; Sagarra & Herschensohn, 2010, 2011, 2013). This has included work that has utilized neurolinguistic techniques such as event-related brain potentials (ERPs), where electrical activity in the brain is recorded as an implicit measure of language processing. Alemán Bañón, Fiorentino, and Gabriele (2014), for example, tested grammatical and ungrammatical gender agreement in Spanish, as in (18). (18)

a. El cuadro es auténtico y el grabado también. “The painting-MASC is authentic-MASC and the engraving too.” b. El cuadro es auténtica y el grabado también. “The painting-MASC is authentic-FEM and the engraving too.”

Formal Linguistic Approaches to Adult L2 Acquisition and Processing

In (18a), the form of the adjective “auténtico” matches the gender of the noun “El cuadro”, and as such the sentence is grammatical, while (18b) is ungrammatical as the adjective is feminine while the noun is masculine. In recording participants’ brain responses to such sentences, Alemán Bañón, Fiorentino, and Gabriele (2014) were interested in testing whether both L1 and L2 speakers exhibit the so-called P600 effect (e.g., Friederici, Pfeiffer, & Hahne, 1993; Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992; Osterhout et al., 1996; Kaan et al., 2000) as an index of sensitivity to the (un)grammaticality of (18 a/b) at the critical adjective. Alemán Bañón, Fiorentino, and Gabriele indeed reported P600 effects for ungrammatical sentences for both L1 and L2 Spanish speakers. These results were interpreted as indicating that L2 learners can indeed acquire morphosyntactic features (in this case gender) that are not instantiated in the L1 (see also Alemán Bañón, Miller, & Rothman, 2017). In sum, the past decade of research in L2 sentence processing has brought considerable new insight into the role of processing in L2 acquisition and has led some researchers to reconsider the source of potential differences between L1 and L2 processing. In a recent review of research on L2 comprehension, Clahsen and Felser (2018) maintained the SSH as a viable account of L2 sentence processing, but alternative accounts have also been proposed. Cunnings (2017) proposed that L2ers construct similarly well-specified syntactic structures during processing as L1ers, but argued that L1–L2 differences that persist at high levels of L2 proficiency are best described in how information held in memory during sentence processing is accessed rather than shallow syntactic parsing. Other GenSLA (friendly) accounts have claimed that the primary source of difficulty during L2 processing relates to how lexical information is accessed during processing (Hopp, 2013) or a reduced ability to predict and anticipate upcoming information (Grüter, Rohde & Schafer, 2017). These different accounts provide different perspectives on the role of sentence processing in SLA, and will no doubt motivate further research that will provide new insight into L2 acquisition and processing in the future.

1.5 Conclusions As can be appreciated in this chapter via a rather reduced (by necessity) review of a subset of available GenSLA work in acquisition and processing, the remit of GenSLA is mainly focused on understanding the constraints on and the shape of mental L2 linguistic competence and how such knowledge interacts with L2 language processing. It is probably fair to say that while the paradigm is not focused on L2 language learning in the traditional sense, there is no question that the two are inherently related. Earnest and promising attempts at bridging GenSLA with

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language learning and teaching in the past few years in particular have been made (e.g., Marsden & Slabakova, 2017; Marsden, Whong, & Gil, 2018; Whong, Gil, & Marsden, 2013). The links, nevertheless, are inherent and have thus always existed. Uncovering how L2 acquisition and processing unfold in a cognitive sense is important for L2 language learning and classroom practice because they inform what is potentially more difficult and challenging in L2 learning, the relative role of certain variables that will either need to be compensated for or can be excluded from further consideration in pedagogical construction and intervention, what needs to be explicitly taught, and potentially what, over time and good quality exposure, comes for free, and so much more. Modelling language learning and application of what cognitive research reveals can increase L2 learning success if properly applied; after all, time is a rich and a scarce commodity, and so maximizing its use most effectively in adult L2 language teaching is not to be understated. One variable that will contribute to the best use of time and better construction of more effective pedagogical materials is the increased understanding of how the mind actually acquires and processes language in adulthood. Understanding if it is truly fundamentally different, and if so how, will reveal better paths for applied language learning and teaching. In this chapter, we have seen that there are two observable facts one should attempt to reconcile in order to provide an explanatorily adequate theory of L2 acquisition and processing in a cognitive sense, which can thus provide the grounds for an informed applied linguistics agenda for language teaching. First, that despite the ubiquity in L2 differences as compared to FLA, L2 grammars much more widely instantiate gems of successful acquisition and indications of fundamentally similar processing, which should not be expected under critical and sensitive period approaches. As we do not want to miss the forest for the trees by focusing only on global differences in L2 acquisition, it is important to herald all the predictions of claiming there is a critical or sensitive period for L2 syntax when evidence abounds that problematizes it. Such a claim does not simply intend that L2 syntax will look different from L1 syntax and/or be processed differently, it also claims that new properties such as the OPC, detailed in section 1.3, should not obtain in L2 grammars if not transferable from the L1—yet, as we have seen, they reliably do. Second, that despite this testament to the possibility of native-like proficiency, the majority of L2 learners reach a stable state at a level that is not comparable to native speakers. Since tapping underlying processing mechanisms is the only reliable way to determine if these differences are indeed representational or simply operational (or neither, or a combination of the two), GenSLA will continue, as it has recently, to direct considerable attention to processing methodologies. Doing so also helps build stronger bridges with applied linguistics.

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Lasnik, H., & Lidz, J. (2017). The argument from the poverty of the stimulus. In I. Roberts (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Universal Grammar (pp. 221–249). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lenneberg, E. (1967). Biological foundations of language. New York: Wiley. Lewis, J. D., & Elman, J. L. (2001). Learnability and the statistical structure of language: Poverty of stimulus arguments revisited. In B. Skarabela, S. Fish, & A. H. J. Do (eds.), Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 359–370). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla. Linck, J. A., Osthus, P., Koeth, J. T., & Bunting, M. F. (2014). Working memory and second language comprehension and production: A meta-­ analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 21(4), 861–883. Long, M. (2005). Problems with supposed counter-evidence to the critical period hypothesis. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 43(4), 287–317. Marsden, H. L., & Slabakova, R. (2017). Grammatical meaning and the second language classroom: introduction. Language Teaching Research, 1–11. Marsden, H. L., Whong, M., & Gil, K. H. (2018). What’s in the textbook and what’s in the mind: Polarity item “any” in learner English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(1), 1–28. Martohardjono, G. (1993). Wh-movement in the acquisition of a second language: A cross-linguistic study of 3 languages with and without overt movement. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Cornell University. Meisel, J. M. (2011). First and second language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montalbetti, M. (1984). After binding: On the interpretation of pronouns. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Massachusets Institute of Technology. Omaki, A., & Schulz, B. (2011). Filler-gap dependencies and island constraints in second-language sentence processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33(4), 563–588. Ortega, L. (2013). SLA for the 21st century: Disciplinary progress, transdisciplinary relevance, and the bi/multilingual turn. Language Learning, 63(S1), 1–24. Ortega, L. (2016). Multi-competence in second language acquisition: Inroads into the mainstream. In V. Cook and L. Wei (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Multi-Competence (pp. 50–76). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osterhout, L., & Holcomb, P. J. (1992). Event-related brain potentials elicited by syntactic anomaly. Journal of Memory and Language, 31(6), 785–806. Osterhout, L., McKinnon, R., Bersick, M., & Corey, V. (1996). On the language specificity of the brain response to syntactic anomalies: Is the syntactic positive shift a member of the P300 family? Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 8(6), 507–526. Paradis, M. (2009). Declarative and procedural determinants of second languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Rothman, J., & Guijarro-Fuentes, P. (2010). Input quality matters: Some comments on input type and age-effects in adult SLA. Applied Linguistics, 31(2), 301–306. Rothman, J., & Iverson, M. (2010). Independent normative assessments for bi/multilingualism, Where art thou. In M. Cruz-Ferrera (ed.), Multilingual norms (pp. 33–51). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Rothman, J., & Slabakova, R. (2018). State of the scholarship: The generative approach to SLA and its place in modern second language studies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(2), 417–442. Sagarra, N., & Herschensohn, J. (2010). The role of proficiency and working memory in gender and number agreement processing in L1 and L2 Spanish. Lingua, 120(8), 2022–2039. Sagarra, N., & Herschensohn, J. (2011). Proficiency and animacy effects on L2 gender agreement processes during comprehension. Language Learning, 61(1), 80–116. Sagarra, N., & Herschensohn, J. (2013). Processing of gender and number agreement in late Spanish bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 17(5), 607–627. Schachter, J. (1988). Second language acquisition and its relation to Universal Grammar. Applied Linguistics, 9, 219–235. Schachter, J. (1990). On the issue of completeness in second language acquisition. Interlanguage Studies Bulletin (Utrecht), 6(2), 93–124. Schachter, J., & Yip, V. (1990). Grammaticality judgements: Why does anyone object to subject extraction. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 12, 379–392. Schwartz, B. D. (1986). The epistemological status of second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 2, 120–159. Schwartz, B. D. (1998). The second language instinct. Lingua, 106, 133–160. Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the full transfer/full access model. Second Language Research, 12, 40–72. Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (2000). When syntactic theories evolve: Consequences for L2 acquisition research. In J. Archibald (ed.), Second language acquisition and linguistic theory (pp. 156–186). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (2013). Generative approaches and the poverty of the stimulus. In J. Herschensohn & M. Young-Scholten (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 137–158). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slabakova, R. (2013). Adult second language acquisition: A selective overview with a focus on the learner linguistic system. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 3, 48–72. Sturt, P. (2003). The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 48(3), 542–562.

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2 Cognitive Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Nick C. Ellis and Stefanie Wulff 2.1 Introduction Cognitive approaches to L2 acquisition minimally share these two assumptions: • The primary source for both first (L1) and second language (L2) learning is the learner’s participative, contextualized experience of language. Language learning is largely usage-based. Humans use language in order to communicate and make meaning. • The cognitive mechanisms that learners employ in language learning are not exclusive to language learning, but are general cognitive mechanisms associated with learning of any kind. In this chapter, we describe the constructs and working assumptions that characterize such approaches to language learning, with a particular focus on their cognitive underpinnings and how these explain differences between the linguistic forms that distinguish L1 and L2 speakers. We first define constructions as the targets of language learning and then describe the processes of construction learning in terms of ­ exemplar-­ based, rational, associative learning. Not all constructions are equally learnable by all learners: naturalistic second language learners process open-class words more efficiently than grammatical cues even though the grammatical cues may be more frequent. We outline a usage-based account of this phenomenon in terms of salience, contingency, and redundancy, and explain how effects of learned attention and blocking further limit learning in adult L2 learners. We describe educational interventions taking these findings into consideration and conclude with further readings on usage-based approaches to L2 acquisition.

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There are other relevant and interesting aspects of usage-based second language acquisition (SLA) that we simply cannot deal with here. We have made the conscious choice to focus in this chapter upon L1–L2 differences in morphosyntax. In the final section, we provide pointers to more social, interactional, and meaning-based investigations of L2 cognition.

2.2  Constructions as the Targets of L2 Acquisition Learning a language involves the learning of constructions, which are the conventionalized form–meaning mappings used in a speech community. Constructions include morphemes—the smallest pairing of form and meaning in language—as well as words, phrases, and syntactic frames (Goldberg, 2006; Trousdale & Hoffmann, 2013). Simple morphemes such as –aholic (meaning “being addicted to something”) are constructions in the same way as simple words like nut (meaning “a fruit consisting of a hard or tough shell around an edible kernel”), idioms like It is driving me nuts (meaning “It is greatly frustrating me”), and abstract syntactic frames like Subject–Verb–Object–Object (meaning that something is being transferred to someone, as realized in sentences as diverse as Max gave the squirrel a nut, Nick gave Max a hug, or Steffi baked Max a cake, where nuts, hugs, and cakes are being transferred, respectively). Including abstract syntactic frames means that not all constructions carry meaning in the traditional sense, but rather serve a functional or meaningful purpose. For example, the passive construction serves the function of shifting the attentional focus in an utterance from the agent of the action to the patient undergoing the action (compare the passive A cake was baked for Max with its active counterpart Steffi baked Max a cake). From this, it follows that constructions have to be stored in multiple forms simultaneously that differ in their level of complexity and abstraction. For instance, the word nut and the plural –s morpheme are both simple constructions that are also stored as constituent parts of the more complex construction nuts (“more than one nut”). Different levels of constructional abstraction (also referred to as schematization) are evident in the fully lexicalized formula You’re welcome versus the partially schematized slot-and-frame greeting pattern [Good + (time of day)], which renders lexicalized phrases like Good afternoon and Good evening, and the completely schematic [Adjective + Noun Phrase] construction, which in turn could be lexically specified as happy baby, delicious cake, or grand opening, to give just three examples. This wide definition of constructions entails a blurred dividing line between the lexicon and the grammar, or what traditional approaches have labelled words and rules: from a construction grammar perspective,

Cognitive Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

a sentence is not the product of applying a rule that strings a number of words into a particular order, but the product of combining a number of constructions—some simple, some complex, some lexically specific, some abstract—in a particular way. A sentence like What did Max give the squirrel, for instance, combines the following constructions: • • • •

Max, squirrel, give, what, do constructions VP, NP constructions Subject–Verb–Object–Object construction Subject–Auxiliary inversion question construction.

We can therefore equate an adult speaker’s knowledge of their language(s) to a huge warehouse of constructions that vary in terms of complexity and abstraction. Constructions have properties that specify if and how they can combine with other constructions; these properties are mostly semantically and/or functionally motivated such that constructions can only be combined if their meanings or functions are compatible or can at least temporarily attain compatibility in a specific context or discourse situation (Goldberg, 2006). Constructional compatibility is crucially solidified by the frequency with which they are used (and therefore, heard) together: the more often they co-occur, the more entrenched that particular constructional arrangement becomes. Likewise, L2 learners will acquire constructions first in the contexts of the constructions with which they most often co-occur in the input before they gradually expand the repertoire of combinations to less frequent combinations and even acceptable novel combinations.

2.3 The Processes of L2 Acquisition: Exemplar-Based Rational Contingency Analysis In other words, language learning means learning the associations within and between constructions. Constructionist accounts of language acquisition involve the distributional analysis of the language stream and the parallel analysis of meaning in terms of contingent perceptual experience, with abstract constructions being learned from the conspiracy of concrete exemplars of usage following statistical learning mechanisms relating input and learner cognition (see Rebuschat & Williams, 2012, on statistical learning mechanisms). Psychological analyses of this learning of constructions is informed by the literature on the associative learning of cue–outcome contingencies that hinge on both construction-related and learner-related factors. For constructions, their frequency of experience, salience of form, significance of meaning, prototypicality, redundancy versus surprise value, and the contingency of form and function seem to

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be relevant factors; for learners, cognitive factors like learned attention, automaticity, transfer, overshadowing, and blocking each play important roles (Ellis, 2008b). These various psycholinguistic factors conspire in the acquisition and use of any linguistic construction (see Ellis & Wulff, 2015a, 2015b, for a detailed discussion of each factor). Psycholinguistic research has demonstrated that, generally, the more frequently a construction (or combination of constructions) is experienced, the earlier it is acquired and the more fluently it is processed (Ellis, 2002). Words such as one or give occur more frequently than sixteen or syndicate, and the learner’s perceptual system accordingly attunes to the probabilities of these constructions in the input. When a learner notices a construction for the first time, this can result in a unitary representation in memory that binds all its properties (i.e., phonological make-up, spelling, etc.) together. This representation is subsequently activated whenever the construction’s properties are noticed in the language environment, so it serves as a form of detector or pattern-­ recognition unit. Whenever the detector unit’s activation threshold is met, it will fire. With each firing, the resting level of activation of the detector unit increases (and correspondingly, the threshold for firing decreases)—in other words, it is readied, or primed, for re-activation. This priming effect accrues over a speaker’s lifespan such that frequently occurring constructions and the properties associated with them obtain habitually high resting activation levels. In the same fashion, the form–function mappings between a phonological form and its interpretation are strengthened through continued use: every encounter of /wʌn/ as one strengthens the association between the two; every encounter of /wʌn/ signalling won is tallied as well; as is the association between /wʌn/ when it is the initial part of wonderland. After a first memory representation is formed, the language system compares each subsequent exemplar that the learner encounters in their language environment against that representation, and gradually modifies it to fit the accumulating experience of that construction, its properties, and its contexts. Since repeated encounters with exemplars of a construction manifest similar or identical properties time and again, prototypes emerge that then serve as the basis of comparison for future encounters. Prototypes are knowledge representations of the most typical properties of a construction. They are mental constructs in the sense that they are abstractions of a learner’s accumulated encounters of sufficiently similar exemplars. Prototypes are the defining centrepieces of categories: they are maximally similar to other members of that category and maximally dissimilar to non-members of that category. For example, people are quicker to confirm that sparrows are birds than they are with other kinds of birds, like geese or albatrosses. This is because sparrows are more prototypical

Cognitive Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

birds: they unite the most typical characteristics of birds in terms of size, beak shape, wing length, etc. Importantly, this adaptive fine-tuning of a learner’s language representations is not conscious and explicit in nature, but happens unconsciously and implicitly. As far as properties of categories are concerned (whether it is a conceptual category like bird or a linguistic category like noun phrase), learners do not consciously inventory frequencies in the cognitive and linguistic environment; instead, statistical learning happens unconsciously (Ellis, 1994; Rebuschat, 2015). Another important tenet of usage-based theories in this context is that no principled distinction is drawn between linguistic and other cognitive categories. Psycholinguistic research has demonstrated prototypicality, neighbourhood, and other categorization effects in learning quasi-regular patterns of construction form. For instance, people are fastest when asked to produce regular forms (like, for example, plural sparrow + s), slower and less accurate at generating more marked forms (like finch + es), and slowest still to produce irregular forms (such as geese; Chater & Manning, 2006; Seidenberg & Plaut, 2014).

2.4  Usage Leads to an Emerging Language System Through usage experience, form–function mappings are woven into a network of construction forms and their meanings. This language system is sometimes referred to as the “constructicon”. Through this network, activation spreads as a function of the learned probabilities of the different form–meaning associations that a speaker has formed over his or her lifespan. The resulting mental model is, at any time in language development, a custom-tailored, adaptively fine-tuned reflection of the learner’s summed language experience (Ellis, 2006a). In that sense, language learning is rational as defined in the field of rational cognition: a major impetus for human psychology is to adapt behaviour as best as possible to its environmental conditions (Anderson, 1989). Language learning is also emergent in the sense that the mechanisms that learners employ are few and simple, yet the knowledge networks that arise from employing these mechanisms over time are complex, dynamic, and adaptive (Ellis, 1998; Beckner et al., 2009; Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2009). Furthermore, language is a complex-adaptive system in the sense that it involves many agents (people communicating with each other) in many different configurations (individuals, groups, networks, and cultures), and it operates across many different levels of the system architecture (neurons, brains, and bodies; phonemes, constructions, interactions, and discourses), as well as on multiple time scales (evolution, epigenesis, ontogenesis, interactional,

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neuro-synchronic, and diachronic; Ellis, Römer, & O’Donnell, 2016; MacWhinney & O’Grady, 2015).

2.5 Lexical and Grammatical Constructions in L1 and L2 Acquisition As stated above, the frequency of use of a construction drives its learnability. That said, not all frequent constructions are equally learnable to all learners. In early stages of acquisition (and for many learners, even after years of language immersion), learners process open-class words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) more efficiently than grammatical cues. The limited ultimate attainment of L2 learners who remain at that stage stabilizes at a “Basic Variety” of interlanguage that is less grammatically sophisticated than that of native-like L1 ability (Klein & Perdue, 1992; Bardovi-Harlig, 1992). Although naturalistic L2 learners are exposed to rich target language input, only a subset of that input turns into intake that promotes further language development (Corder, 1967). A classic case study demonstrating the limitations of intake is that of the naturalistic language learner Wes, who was described as being very fluent, with high levels of strategic competence, but low levels of grammatical accuracy: “using 90% correct in obligatory contexts as the criterion for acquisition, none of the grammatical morphemes counted have changed from unacquired to acquired status over a five year period” (Schmidt, 1984, p. 5). The Basic Variety might be sufficient for everyday communicative purposes, but grammatical morphemes tend not to be put to full use (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 1992; Clahsen & Felser, 2006; Schmidt, 1984; VanPatten, 1996, 2007). For example, learners initially reference time by use of temporal adverbs, prepositional phrases, serialization, and calendric reference, with the grammatical expression of tense and aspect emerging only slowly thereafter, if at all (Bardovi-Harlig, 1992, 2000; Klein, 1998; Lee, 2002; Meisel, 1987; Noyau, Klein, & Dietrich, 1995). L2 learners have been found to prefer adverbial over inflectional cues to tense in naturalistic L2 acquisition (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Noyau, Klein, & Dietrich, 1995), training experiments (e.g., Cintrón-Valentín & Ellis, 2015; Ellis et al., 2014), and studies of L2 language processing alike (e.g., Sagarra & Ellis, 2013; VanPatten, 2007). A key challenge for L2 acquisition research is therefore to explain why closed-class constructions are more difficult to learn than open-class constructions, for some learners throughout their L2 career. Usage-based theories attribute this to three tenets of the psychology of learning: the learnability of a construction is affected by (i) salience, (ii) contingency of form–function association, and (iii) learned attention.

Cognitive Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

2.6  Salience and Learning Less salient cues are less readily learned than highly salient ones (Ellis, 2006c, 2017; Rescorla & Wagner, 1972). Salience refers to the property of a stimulus which makes it stand out from the rest and consequently more likely to be perceived, attended to, and entered into subsequent cognitive processing and learning. Salience can be determined independently by physics and the environment, and by our knowledge of the world: • The physical world, our embodiment, and our sensory systems jointly render certain sensations to be more intense (louder, brighter, heavier, etc.) than others. • As we experience the world, we learn from it, and our resultant knowledge values some associations higher than others (James, 1890, p. 82). A favoured stimulus stands out, either because of weighty associations ($500000.0 vs. $0.000005, however similar the number of pixels, characters, or ink in their sensation) or because it matches a motivational state (a meal when hungry but not when full). Psychological salience is experience-dependent: hotdog, sushi, and 寿司 mean different things to people of different cultural and linguistic experience. This is why, unlike sensation, the units of perception are subjective and therefore cannot simply be measured in physical terms. This is reflected in Miller’s definition of the units of short-term memory as “chunks”: “We are dealing here with a process of organizing or grouping the input into familiar units or chunks, and a great deal of learning has gone into the formation of these familiar units” (Miller, 1956, p. 91). Rescorla and Wagner (1972) presented a formal model of conditioning that describes the capacity of any cue (Conditioned Stimulus, CS; for example a bell in Pavlovian conditioning) to become associated with an outcome (Unconditioned Stimulus, US; for example food in Pavlovian conditioning) on any given encounter of their pairing. The formula below is arguably the most influential formula in the history of learning theory, encapsulating over eighty years of research. It elegantly unites psychophysical salience, psychological salience, and surprisal: dV = ab(L – V). The associative strength of the US to the CS is referred to by the letter V, and the change in this strength which occurs on each trial of conditioning is called dV. On the right-hand side, a is the salience of the US, b is the salience of the CS, and L is the amount of processing given to a completely unpredicted, surprising, US. Thus, both the salience of the cue (a) and the psychological importance of the outcome (b) are essential factors in any associative learning. As for (L – V), the more a CS is associated with a US,

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the less additional association the US can induce. As Beckett (1954) put it: “habit is a great deadener.” Alternatively, with novel associations where V is close to zero, there is much surprisal, and consequently much learning: first impressions, first love, first time … One factor determining the learning of construction form is psychophysical salience. In his landmark study of first language acquisition, Brown (1973) breaks down the measurement of perceptual salience, or “clarity of acoustical marking” (p. 343), into “such variables as amount of phonetic substance, stress level, usual serial position in a sentence, and so on” (p. 463). Temporal phrases (such as on my birthday, at Christmas, etc.), temporal adverbs (yesterday, tomorrow, later, etc.), and other lexical temporal cues (morning, winter, etc.) are salient and stressed in the speech stream, while verb inflections usually are not. Many grammatical form–function relationships in English, such as grammatical particles and inflections like the third person singular –s, are of low salience in the language stream. This is a consequence of the well-documented effect of frequency and automatization in the evolution of language. The basic principles of automatization apply to all kinds of motor activities and skills (like playing a sport or a musical instrument) as well as to languages across the world: through repetition, previously independent sequences of units come to be processed as a single unit or chunk (Ellis, 1996). The more frequently they use a form, the more speakers reduce it. Zipf (1949) summarized this in the principle of least effort— speakers want to minimize articulatory effort, and this leads to brevity and phonological reduction. They tend to choose the most frequent words, and the more they use them, automatization of production causes their shortening. Grammatical functors are the most frequent words of a language, and so they lose their emphasis and tend to become abbreviated and phonologically fused with surrounding material (Bybee, 2008; Jurafsky et al., 2001; Zuraw, 2003). In a corpus study by Cutler and Carter (1987), 86% of strong syllables occurred in open-class words and only 14% in closed-class words; for weak syllables, 72% occurred in closed-class words and 28% in open-class words. Since grammatical function words and bound inflections tend to be short and unstressed, they are difficult to perceive from the input. When words are clipped out of connected speech and presented in isolation, adult native speakers perceive open-class words (buy, four, know, ewe, etc.) 90 to 100% correctly, but grammatical function words (by, for, no, you, etc.) only 40% to 50% of the time (Herron & Bates, 1997). Clitics (accentless words or particles that depend accentually on an adjacent accented word and form a prosodic unit together with it) are the most extreme examples of this: the /s/ of “he’s”, /l/ of “I’ll” and /v/ of “I’ve” can never be

Cognitive Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

pronounced in isolation. If native speakers have trouble correctly perceiving grammatical function words in isolation, the task for the L2 learners is even greater. In sum, grammatical functors are extremely difficult to perceive based on bottom-up auditory evidence alone. Fluent language processors provide top-down schematic support to perceive these elements in continuous speech. However, this top-down knowledge is exactly what learners lack: they haven’t had sufficient experience in the L2 and corresponding retuning of their L1 system to develop a sufficiently schematized knowledge system (or constructicon) that would afford them the same levels of L2 top-down support as in fluent L1 processing. Thus, the low psychophysical salience of grammatical functors contributes to L2 learners’ difficulty in learning them (Ellis, 2006c; Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2001). Salience effects are compounded by redundancy. Grammatical morphemes often appear in redundant contexts where their interpretation is not essential for correct interpretation of the sentence (Schmidt, 2001; Terrell, 1991; VanPatten, 1996). For instance, tense markers often appear in contexts where other cues have already established the temporal reference (e.g. yesterday he walked), plural markers are accompanied by quantifiers or numerals (10 nuts), etc. Since their neglect does not result in communicative breakdown, they carry little psychological importance of the outcome (term b in the Rescorla–Wagner equation).

2.7  Contingency and Learning The degree to which animals (including humans) learn associations between cues and outcomes also depends upon the contingency of the relationship. In classical conditioning, it is the reliability of the bell as a predictor of food that determines how easily this association is acquired (Rescorla, 1968). In language learning, it is the reliability of the form as a predictor of an interpretation that determines its acquisition and processing (Ellis, 2006b; Gries & Ellis, 2015; Gries & Stefanowitsch, 2004; MacWhinney, 1987). The last thirty years of psychological research into humans’ sensitivity to cue–outcome contingencies (Shanks, 1995) demonstrates that when given sufficient exposure to a relationship, people’s judgments match the contingency specified by ΔP (the one-way dependency statistic; Allan, 1980). ΔP measures the directional association between a cue and an outcome, as illustrated in Table 2.1. a, b, c, and d represent frequencies of occurrence. For example, a is the frequency of conjunctions of the cue and the outcome, and c is the number of times the outcome occurred without the cue.

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Table 2.1.  A contingency table showing the four possible combinations of events showing the presence or absence of a target Cue and an Outcome. Outcome

No Outcome

Cue

a

b

No cue

c

d

ΔP is the probability of the outcome given the cue P(O|C) minus the probability of the outcome in the absence of the cue P(O|¬C), which can be calculated using this formula: a

c

ΔP = P(O|C) – P(O|¬C) = a + b – c + d When the outcome is just as likely when the cue is present as when it is not, there is no covariation between the two events, and ΔP amounts to 0. As the presence of the cue increases the likelihood of the outcome, ΔP approaches 1.0. A learnable cue is one where the outcome is there whenever the cue is there, and where the outcome is not there when the cue is not there either, i.e., where a and d are large and b and c are small. The less reliably a form is associated with a particular meaning or functional interpretation, the more difficult learning becomes (Ellis, 2006b; Shanks, 1995). Cues with multiple interpretations are ambiguous and thus hard to resolve; cue–outcome associations of high contingency are reliable and readily processed. Consider how, in the learning of the category of birds, while eyes and wings are equally frequently experienced features in the exemplars, it is wings which are distinctive in differentiating birds from other animals. Wings are important features to learning the category of birds because they are reliably associated with class membership while being absent from other categories of animals. Raw frequency of occurrence is therefore less important for construction learning than the contingency between cue and interpretation. In language, there are rarely 1:1 mappings between forms and their interpretations. Cue–outcome reliability can be reduced in two directions: either forms have multiple interpretations (polysemy and homophony) or interpretations are realized by more than one form (synonymy). The same usage-phenomenon that promotes the reduction of frequently used words also drives grammatical functors towards homophony: different functions associated with forms that were originally distinct eventually merge into the same shortened form. An example is the –s suffix in English: in modern English, it has come to encode a plural form (squirrels), it indicates

Cognitive Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

possession (Max’s toy), and it marks third person singular present (Nick sleeps). The –s form is abundantly frequent in learners’ input, but not reliably associated with any or just one of these meanings and functions (increasing b in Table 2.1). Conversely, the plural, possessive, and third person singular constructions are all realized by more than one form: they are all variably expressed by the allomorphs [s], [z], and [ɨz]. Thus, if we assess just one of these, say [ɨz], as a cue for one particular outcome, say plurality, then it is clear that there are many instances of that outcome in the absence of the cue (c in Table 2.1). In short, the low cue-interpretation contingency of plurals and many other highly frequent grammatical constructions (see Gries, 2015) makes them difficult to learn (DeKeyser, 2005; Ellis, 2008a; Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2001).

2.8  Learned Attention L2 acquisition is vulnerable to attentional biases that stem from the L2 learners’ knowledge of a prior language. For example, Ellis (2006a, 2006c) attributes L2 difficulties in acquiring inflectional morphology to an effect of learned attention known as “blocking” (Kamin, 1969; Kruschke, 2006; Kruschke & Blair, 2000; Mackintosh, 1975). Blocking is an associative learning phenomenon that occurs in animals and humans alike. It shifts the learner’s attention to selective aspects of the input as a result of prior experience (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972; Shanks, 1995; Wills, 2005). Knowing that a particular stimulus is associated with a particular outcome makes it harder to learn that another cue paired with that same outcome is also a good predictor of it, and so the prior association effectively “blocks” further associations. For example, all languages have lexical and phrasal means of expressing temporality, so anyone with knowledge of any first language is aware that there are reliable and frequently used lexical cues to temporal reference (words like German gestern, French hier, Spanish ayer, English yesterday). Such are cues to look out for in an L2 because of their frequency, their reliability of interpretation, and their salience. Learned attention theory holds that, once known, such cues block the acquisition of less salient and less reliable verb tense morphology from analysis of redundant utterances such as Yesterday I walked. Benati (2013) reviews a series of studies showing learners are better able to identify temporal reference when presented with temporal adverbs rather than verbal morphology. A number of theories of L2 acquisition incorporate related notions of transfer and learned attention. The Competition Model (MacWhinney, 2001; MacWhinney & Bates, 1989), for one, focuses on dealing with competition between multiple linguistic cues to interpretation. Similarly,

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Input Processing (IP) theory (VanPatten, 1996) includes a Lexical Preference Principle: “Learners will process lexical items for meaning before grammatical forms when both encode the same semantic information” (VanPatten, 2007, p. 118) as well as a Preference for Nonredundancy Principle: “Learners are more likely to process nonredundant meaningful grammatical markers before they process redundant meaningful markers” (VanPatten, 2007, p. 119). The basic mechanisms of learned attention in SLA have been examined through a series of experiments in which participants learned a small number of Latin expressions and their English translations. Ellis and Sagarra (2011) included three groups: an Adverb Pretraining, Verb Pretraining, and Control group. In Phase 1, the Adverb Pretraining group learned two adverbs and their temporal reference—hodie “today” and heri “yesterday”; the Verb Pretraining group learned verbs (shown in either first, second, or third person) and their temporal reference—e.g., cogito present or cogitavisti past; and the Control group had no pretraining. In Phase 2, all groups were shown sentences which appropriately combined an adverb and a verb (e.g. heri cogitavi, hodie cogitas, cras cogitabis) and learned whether these sentences referred to the past, the present, or the future. In Phase 3, the Reception test, all combinations of adverb and verb tense marking were presented individually and participants were asked to judge whether each sentence referred to the past, present, or future. The logic of the design was that in Phase 2, every utterance contained two temporal references—an adverb and a verb inflection. If participants paid equal attention to both cues, their judgments in Phase 3 should be equally affected by them. If, in contrast, they paid more attention to adverb (or verb) cues, then their judgments would be biased towards them in Phase 3. The results showed that the three groups reacted to the cues in very different ways—the Adverb Pretraining group followed the adverb cue, the Verb Pretraining group tended to follow the verb cue, and the Control group fell in between. Multiple regression analyses, one for each group, with the group mean temporal interpretation for each of the Phase 3 strings as the dependent variable and the information conveyed by the adverbial and verbal inflection cues as independent variables, showed in standardized ß coefficients, Adverb Group Time = 0.99Adverb – 0.01Verb; Verb Group Time = 0.76Adverb + 0.60Verb; Control Group Time = 0.93Adverb + 0.17Verb. This experiment demonstrated how short-term instructional manipulations affect attention to language. Ellis and Sagarra (2010, 2011) furthermore illustrated long-term language transfer effects from the L1. They found that the nature of learners’ first language (+/– verb tense morphology) biased the acquisition of morphological versus lexical cues to temporal reference in the same subset of Latin. First language speakers of Chinese (no tense morphology) were less able than first language

Cognitive Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

speakers of Spanish or Russian (rich morphology) to acquire inflectional cues from the same language experience where adverbial and verbal cues were equally available, with learned attention to tense morphology being in standardized ß coefficients: Chinese (–0.02) < English (0.17) < Russian (0.22) < Spanish (0.41) (Ellis & Sagarra, 2011, Table 4). Ellis et al. (2014) replicated Ellis and Sagarra (2010), extending the investigation using eye-tracking measures to determine the extent to which short-term learned attention biases in the acquisition of temporal reference in L2 Latin in English as a foreign language (EFL) learners are overt or covert biases. The results indicated that prior experience of particular cue dimensions affected upon what participants overtly focused during subsequent language processing, which in turn resulted in covert attentional biases in comprehension and in productive knowledge. These learned attention effects include elements of both positive and negative transfer. Prior use of adverbial cues causes participants to pay more attention to adverbs, i.e., a positive effect of entrenchment of the practised cue. At the same time, however, increased sensitivity to adverb cues is accompanied by a reduced sensitivity to morphological cues—blocking. A meta-analysis of the combined results of Ellis and Sagarra (2010, 2011) demonstrated that the average effect size of entrenchment was large (+1.23) while that of blocking was moderate (–0.52). Sagarra and Ellis (2013) showed the results of blocking over years of learning in intermediate and advanced learners of Spanish (as opposed to one hour of learning Latin). 120 English (a morphologically simple language) and Romanian (a morphologically rich language) learners of Spanish (also a morphologically rich language) and 98 English, Romanian, and Spanish monolinguals read sentences in L2 Spanish (or their L1 for the monolinguals) containing adverb–verb or verb–adverb congruencies or incongruencies. Eye-tracking data revealed significant effects of incongruency (all participants were sensitive to tense incongruencies), cue location in the sentence (participants spent more time at their preferred cue), L1 experience (learners and monolinguals with morphologically rich L1s looked longer at verbs than learners and monolinguals with morphologically simple L1s), and L2 experience (intermediate learners read more slowly and regressed longer than advanced learners). Experience with the second language is shaded by attentional biases and other types of interference from the first language (Flege, 2002; Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008; Lado, 1957; MacWhinney, 1997; Odlin, 1989). As a result of this interference, second language learning is rarely entirely native-like in outcome, even if the learner is surrounded by dense input. Since everything is filtered through the lens of the L1, not all of the relevant input can be taken advantage of (hence Corder’s distinction between input and intake; Corder, 1967).

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It is important to emphasize here that the limitations of L2 learning do not license the conclusion that L2 learning is qualitatively different from L1 learning. Second language learners employ the same statistical learning mechanisms that they employed when they acquired their first language. Rather, first language learning is (nearly always) so incredibly successful that it—somewhat ironically—hampers second language learning.

2.9  Implications for Language Teaching The fact that L2 learners have to learn to adjust the attention biases they obtained through their L1 has consequences for L2 instruction. Children acquire their first language primarily in an implicit manner. Implicit learning is the learning of complex information without conscious attention to what is being learned. In contrast, L2 acquisition is largely characterized by explicit learning. For reviews on implicit and explicit language learning, see Ellis (1994) and Rebuschat (2015). Schmidt’s (2001) Noticing Hypothesis holds that “people learn about the things they attend to and do not learn much about the things they do not attend to” (Schmidt, 2001, p. 30). That is, in order to successfully acquire specific aspects of their L2, learners must pay conscious and selective (i.e., focused) attention to the target structures. Given the bottleneck effect of input versus intake discussed above, even in dense-input, immersive environments, explicit learning and teaching gain even more relevance for the second language learners in foreign language environments with only limited L2 input. This holds in particular for aspects of form in the L2 that are redundant or polysemous and/or lack perceptual salience as discussed above. Form-focused instruction (FFI) thus attempts to encourage noticing, drawing learners’ attention to linguistic forms that might otherwise be ignored (Ellis, 2012). Different variants of FFI vary in the degree and manner in which they recruit learner consciousness and in the role of the learner’s metalinguistic awareness of the target forms (Ellis, 2005). Norris and Ortega (2000) compared the outcomes from studies that employed differing levels of explicitness of L2 input in a meta-analysis. Their results suggest that FFI instruction results in substantial target-oriented L2 gains, that explicit types of instruction are more effective than implicit types, and that the L2 instruction has durable effects. Similarly, more recent meta-analyses of effects of type of instruction by Spada and Tomita (2010) and Goo et al. (2015) report large advantages of explicit instruction in L2 acquisition. However, the studies gathered in these meta-analyses used a wide variety of types of instruction, learner, targeted feature, and method of assessment that future research should control to determine how robust effects of FFI are.

Cognitive Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

Cintrón-Valentín and Ellis (2015, 2016) used eye-tracking to investigate whether different types of FFI can aid learners in overcoming learned attention and blocking biases. English and Chinese native speakers viewed Latin utterances combining lexical and morphological cues to temporality under control conditions (CC) and three types of explicit focus on form (FonF): verb grammar instruction (VG); verb salience with textual enhancement (VS); and verb pretraining (VP). All participants completed an exposure phase, comprehension test, and production test. VG participants viewed a short lesson on Latin tense morphology prior to exposure; VS participants saw the verb inflections highlighted in bold and red during exposure; and VP participants had an additional introductory phase where they were trained on solitary verb forms and their English translations (the rationale being that when the verb is presented in isolation rather than in potentially redundant combination with adverbial cues, there is less scope for blocking). CC participants were significantly more sensitive to the adverbs than verb morphology, while instructed participants showed greater sensitivity to morphological cues in comprehension and production. Such results demonstrate that form-focused instruction recruits learners’ explicit, conscious processing capacities and allows them to consolidate unitized form–function bindings of novel L2 constructions (Ellis, 2005). When a construction is learned this way, its use in subsequent implicit processing can update the statistical tallying of its frequency of usage and probabilities of form–function mapping.

2.10  Conclusion and Further Reading This chapter has focused upon salience, contingency, and learned-attention in usage-based accounts of the L2 acquisition of morphology. In so doing, we have covered in detail just one facet of usage-based approaches to the L2 acquisition of linguistic form. Ellis and Wulff (2015a, 2015b) and Ortega et al. (2016) provide broader descriptions. Ellis et al. (2016) describe a large body of complementary work showing the joint effects of typetoken frequency, contingency, and prototypicality in the usage-based L1 and L2 acquisition and processing of verb-argument constructions. There are many other relevant and interesting aspects of usage-based SLA relating to social and cultural motivations: The target for many second language learners is not just “to speak another language”, but to become part of the social and cultural environment in which the language is used. This entails frequent and rich participation in the second-language life worlds into which the learner “bricolages” his or her way. (Wagner, 2015, p. 75)

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Digital technologies give increasing opportunities for rich “rewilding” of education (Thorne, 2018), and such embodied, environmentally embedded, enacted, socially encultured, and situated environments support rich language learning (Eskildsen & Wagner, 2015). Beckner et al. (2009), Cadierno and Eskildsen (2015), Douglas Fir Group (2016), Hulstijn et al. (2014), and Ellis (2019) outline how the cognitive underpinnings of usage-based approaches can be integrated with a social perspective on SLA. Robinson and Ellis (2008), Littlemore (2009), and Tyler (2012) give broader overviews of applied cognitive-linguistic research in L2 learning and teaching.

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Psycholinguistic perspectives (pp. 113–142). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. MacWhinney, B. (2001). The Competition Model: The input, the context, and the brain. In P. Robinson (ed.), Cognition and second language instruction (pp. 69–90). New York: Cambridge University Press. MacWhinney, B., & Bates, E. (1989). The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacWhinney, B., & O’Grady, W. (eds.) (2015). The handbook of language emergence. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Meisel, J. (1987). Reference to past events and actions in the development of natural second language acquisition. In C. Pfaff (ed.), First and second language acquisition (pp. 206–224). New York: Newbury House. Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97. Norris, J., & Ortega, L. (2000). Effectiveness of L2 instruction: A research synthesis and quantitative meta-analysis. Language Learning, 50, 417–528. Noyau, C., Klein, W., & Dietrich, R. (1995). Acquisition of temporality in a second language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Odlin, T. (1989). Language transfer. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ortega, L., Tyler, A. E. In Park, H., & Uno, M. (eds.) (2016). The usagebased study of language learning and multilingualism. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Rebuschat, P. (ed.). (2015). Implicit and explicit learning of language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rebuschat, P., & Williams, J. N. (eds.) (2012). Statistical learning and language acquisition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Rescorla, R. A. (1968). Probability of shock in the presence and absence of CS in fear conditioning. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 66, 1–5. Rescorla, R. A., & Wagner, A. R. (1972). A theory of Pavlovian conditioning: Variations in the effectiveness of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. In A. H. Black & W. F. Prokasy (eds.), Classical conditioning II: Current theory and research (pp. 64–99). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Robinson, P., & Ellis, N. C. (eds.) (2008). Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition. London: Routledge. Sagarra, N., & Ellis, N. C. (2013). From seeing adverbs to seeing morphology. Language experience and adult acquisition of L2 tense. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35, 261–290. Schmidt, R. (1984). The strengths and limitations of acquisition: A case study of an untutored language learner. Language, Learning, and Communication, 3, 1–16. Schmidt, R. (2001). Attention. In P. Robinson (ed.), Cognition and second language instruction (pp. 3–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Seidenberg, M. S., & Plaut, D. C. (2014). Quasiregularity and its discontents: The legacy of the past tense debate. Cognitive Science, 38(6), 1190–1228. Shanks, D. R. (1995). The psychology of associative learning. New York: Cambridge University Press. Simon, H. A. (1957). Models of man: Social and rational. New York: Wiley and Sons. Slobin, D. (1996). From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking”. In J. J. Gumperz & S. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 70–96). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spada, N., & Tomita, Y. (2010). Interactions between type of instruction and type of language feature: A meta-analysis. Language Learning, 60, 263–308. Terrell, T. (1991). The role of grammar instruction in a communicative approach. The Modern Language Journal, 75, 52–63. Thorne, S. L. (2018). Technologies, morphologies of communicative action, and the rewilding of language education. Paper presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics, Chicago, IL. Trousdale, G., & Hoffmann, T. (eds.) (2013). Oxford handbook of construction grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tyler, A. (2012). Cognitive linguistics and second language learning: Theoretical basics and experimental evidence. Abingdon: Routledge. VanPatten, B. (1996). Input processing and grammar instruction in second language acquisition. New York: Ablex. VanPatten, B. (2007). Input processing in adult second language acquisition. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (pp. 115–135). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Wagner, J. (2015). Designing for language learning in the wild: Creating social infrastructures for second language learning. In T. Cadierno & S. W. Eskildsen (eds.), Usage-based perspectives on second language learning (pp. 75–101). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Wills, A. J. (2005). New directions in human associative learning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Zipf, G. K. (1949). Human behaviour and the principle of least effort: An introduction to human ecology. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley. Zuraw, K. (2003). Probability in language change. In R. Bod, J. Hay, & S. Jannedy (eds.), Probabilistic linguistics (pp. 139–176). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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3 The Qualitative Science of Vygotskian Sociocultural Psychology and L2 Development Rémi A. van Compernolle

3.1 Introduction Since the early papers of Frawley and Lantolf (1985; Lantolf & Frawley, 1984), Vygotskian psychology, often referred to as sociocultural theory (SCT), has gained prominence as one of several “mainstream” (Swain & Deters, 2007) or “alternative” (Atkinson, 2011) second language acquisition (SLA) theories. A central concern of the general theory is how sign systems (e.g., language, literacy, numeracy) are internalized to reorganize basic, or biologically endowed, psychological functions into higher, or culturally mediated, ones, which give rise to consciousness. In particular, Vygotsky (1986) focused on the role of language in constituting higher mental functions: language does not simply facilitate cognition, but it is part and parcel of it. In this way, Vygotsky’s semiotic analysis of consciousness and word meaning connects him not only to Marxian dialectical materialism, but also to the German psycholinguistic tradition inspired by such scholars as Hegel and Herder, as Leitch (2011) has pointed out: “Human consciousness is formed through linguistic interactions, and the language which constitutes consciousness is therefore always part of it, unable to be separated” (p. 306). This perspective on the constitutive role of language in the formation of consciousness has a number of important implications for how we operationalize and study SLA processes and outcomes, and why SCT research in general favours situated qualitative inquiry over the more common quantitative experimentalist model of science that derives from the logical positivism developed by the Vienna Circle in the early twentieth century (Packer, 2011).

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This chapter examines the extension of Vygotskian sociocultural psychology to second language (L2) research as a qualitative science of L2 development. To do so, I draw on Packer’s (2011) critique of social science that aims to turn contextualized human subjects into abstract objects through common qualitative research procedures such as the coding and thematic analysis of L2 data, interviews, and journals and diaries. I argue that Vygotsky’s theory compels us to situate rather than abstract L2 phenomena in relation to their histories and contexts of occurrence, focusing on the recontextualizability of principles rather than the generalizability of empirical observations. To make the case, I present an overview of the main tenets of Vygotsky’s theory and how they relate to qualitative science. I then present exemplar studies that highlight what Vygotsky (1986) referred to as the “individually specific” (p. 5) in terms of the unity of the social environment of L2 development and cognition. In concluding, I synthesize the discussion and make recommendations for future research in this domain of L2 studies. It should be noted from the outset that the current chapter has the aim of examining and illustrating the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of SCT research in its own right. The chapter does not set out to compare and contrast SCT with so-called mainstream SLA theories, nor does it propose to sketch out an SCT “perspective on” or “account of” mainstream SLA constructs such as input, implicit and explicit knowledge, feedback, predictable paths of development, and so on. Readers interested in such comparaisons are referred to the wellknown publications of Lantolf and Thorne (2006), as they will not be repeated here.

3.2  Qualitative Science and Vygotskian Psychology Packer (2011) opens his wide-ranging treatise on the scientific underpinnings of qualitative research with the following observation about research priorities in countries such as the United States: We are told repeatedly that there is a “gold standard” for research in the social sciences, the randomized clinical trial. Other kinds of research—typically cast as naturalistic, observational, and descriptive—are viewed as mere dross in comparison, good only for generating hypotheses, not for testing them. They are seen as lacking the rigor necessary for truly scientific research and as failing to offer practical solutions to pressing problems … Any suggestion that there might be inquiry that follows a logic … different from that of traditional experimental research is dismissed. The possibility that complex human phenomena might require a kind of investigation that traces them in time and space and explores how they are constituted is not considered. (p. 1)

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He goes on to observe that there exists a clichéd view of experimentalist quantitative research, such as the clinical trial, and qualitative research. While the former is seen to be objective, focused on causes and capable of testing hypotheses and providing explanations of phenomena, the latter is considered to be subjective, focused on experience (rather than facts) and only capable of describing phenomena and generating hypotheses to be tested in quantitative research (Packer, 2011, p. 19). Packer’s point, however, is not to pit quantitative against qualitative methods of data analysis; indeed, he argues throughout the book that qualitative science often involves quantification, especially in the descriptive phase of research. The problem, as he sees it, is that so-called “qualitative researchers” have for too long attempted to carry out their work within an incommensurable scientific paradigm: logical positivism, later modified by Popper (1959) to follow a “‘hypothetico-deductive’ logic” (Packer, 2011, p. 27).1 In other words, investigations are driven by research questions designed to test the null hypothesis (i.e., falsification), an epistemological orientation that requires researchers to make the ontological assumption that the component parts of an object of study (e.g., human behaviour) can be separated and investigated independently of one another. We see this play out especially in quantitative experimental research where a dependent variable (e.g., test scores) is studied in relation to such abstracted independent variables as treatment condition (e.g., control versus intervention) and individual characteristics (e.g., age, gender, socioeconomic status). Researchers who attempt to do the same by using qualitative materials (e.g., interviews, recorded interactions, field notes) run the risk of obscuring their object of study by removing it from its context of occurrence. Conducting thematic analyses of interviews and other qualitative materials (e.g., journals, natural interaction) so that the data become comparable (i.e., abstract, generalizable) across a defined population is a common example. Qualitative science, Packer argues, must follow an alternative logic, one that assumes the constituent pieces of a phenomenon have to be studied in situ, not as separable parts, but as a system of dynamic relations. Such relations are established in particular lived experiences and vary from one invidual to the next. This is why qualitative inquiry, and especially case study, is the key to understanding our phenomena of interest. Packer’s (2011) view of the science of qualitative research connects with Marxian dialectical logic, which expands “our notion of anything to include, as aspects of what it is, both the process by which it has become that and the broader interactive context in which it is found” (Ollman, 2003,  Discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter, but the interested reader is referred to Packer’s (2011, pp. 28–39)

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discussion of the project of the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, as well as his interpretation of Kuhn’s (1962) oft-cited book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in relation to social scientific research today.

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p. 18).2 This is what Packer (pp. 167–207) means when he describes the concept of constitution. Any given phenomenon has a history of formation; it is constituted in and by the conditions in which it comes into being. At the same time, the phenomenon in question shapes the conditions in which it occurs and in which it will recur, change, or disappear in the future. The process of mutual constitution continues indefinitely, in principle. Packer’s sentiments are reflected in the Vygotskian, or cultural-­historical, psychology literature as well. Commenting on the field of developmental psychology in general, Valsiner and van der Veer (2014) opine that: Developmental psychology has failed to put the premises of the developmental science into its theoretical and empirical practice. As the discipline continues toward accumulation of evidence across persons (large samples) and dismisses the historical linkages within a sample (Valsiner and Sato, 2006) it necessarily passes by the phenomena of development and makes methodological decisions that render the discovery of developmental principles conceptually impossible. Psychology’s efforts to “measure” characteristics that are created by the very act of such “measurement” have backfired in the construction of a vast variety of “variables” (Toomela and Valsiner, 2010). Such constructed entities are correlated with one another ad nauseam in contemporary psychology, using theoretical systems as superficial covers. Statistics has become a via regia for the road of psychology to be a “true Science”—resulting in an illustrious hell of pseudo-empiricist discourses—as Jan Smedslund (1979, 1997) has (pp. 148–149) claimed over the past thirty years.

It is important to highlight that this is not an argument against any and all uses of measurement and quantification; there are certainly appropriate times to measure, count, score, conduct statistical tests, and so on.3 But the problem to which Valsiner and van der Veer point is that the science of development, which is necessarily longitudinal (i.e., involving change over time) and qualitative (i.e., involves the formation of new functions), has been left by the wayside in favour of producing statistical findings, typically representing a single snapshot in time, for the sake of producing statistical findings. The solution to this problem, according to Valsiner and van der Veer (2014), may be found in two of Vygotsky’s most important concepts. The first, the zone of proximal development (ZPD), represents a transitional stage between two developmental states. It is the actual locus of development, when a particular function is no longer what it was in the past, but it has not yet matured into a new, qualitatively different form. Vygotsky’s  In the L2 field, Lantolf and Poehner (2014) have recently argued that dialectics is the metatheory that underpins

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Vygotskian SCT.  Indeed, Vygotsky and his colleagues frequently quantified aspects of the development of psychological functions

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(e.g., Vygotsky, 1978, 1986). However, quantification was used to describe phenomena at a general level; they then provided qualitative accounts of underlying processes.

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(1978) oft-referenced definition of the ZPD as the difference between what one is capable of achieving alone and what becomes possible under guidance from another person underscores an important aspect of the concept: with assistance, teaching, modelling, and so on, psychological functions that are not yet matured, but are in an embryonic state, can be brought into being. In so doing, performance under guidance shows that the person has advanced past a previous, more stable developmental state, but that he or she has not yet reached the next, or proximal, state of functioning. The ZPD is in a very real sense the zone in which a person is transitioning from one psychological state to a new, qualitatively different one. Valsiner and van der Veer (2014) argue that psychology tends to dismiss phenomena occurring in this transitional zone as “error” (p. 152) because they are messy, in constant flux, and hard—if not impossible—to quantify, preferring instead to measure the more stable states that precede and follow it. The result is that psychological research documents the end products of development in various states, but “is blind to the study of development [because it eliminates] developmental phenomena at the outset” (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2014, p. 152). By contrast, a qualitative science of L2 development is fundamentally interested in this messiness. The second concept, perezhivanie in Russian (in English, “personal experience”), is less well known than the ZPD, but it underpinned Vygotsky’s enterprise from his earliest work, The Psychology of Art (1971). Vygotsky used the term perezhivanie to refer to “the process of experiencing and the state of ‘living-through’” (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2014, p. 160), and this assumed a unity of both intellectual and affective processes occurring in concrete social contexts (Vygotsky, 1994; see also González Rey & Martínez, 2016; Mok, 2015; and Smagorinsky, 2011). For Vygotsky, developmental phenomena (i.e., the ZPD) were necessarily formed in, shaped by, and in turn shaped, perezhivanie—people think and feel as they experience the unique and ever-changing social situations in which they are developing, as they internalize the cultural tools (e.g., language and other sign systems) necessary for regulating their psychological functioning. Consequently, it becomes impossible to separate intellect from affect, or psychological functioning from the environment in which it is situated, because intellect, affect, and environment together form a unified whole (Chaiklin, 2002; Davydov, 1995; Zinchenko, 2009). It follows that, in contrast to psychology’s emphasis on accumulating statistical evidence across persons (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2014) and studying phenomena by breaking them into so-called component parts, what is necessary is to particularize the developmental trajectory of individuals through situated, qualitative investigations. This is because no two individuals could be expected to develop in the same way, even if the social situation of their development appears similar (or even the same, e.g., siblings in the

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same home, students in the same classroom), for the simple reason that no two individuals experience development in the same way. The concept of perezhivanie therefore compels researchers to investigate the constitution (Packer, 2011) of developmental phenomena as they occur in the ZPD, to examine how a person’s process of experiencing and livingthrough a particular moment in time (e.g., a minute, hour, day, week, year, decade) shapes his or her psychological development across their lifespan and in concrete practical activity. In other words, it is a holistic, or organic (Zinchenko, 2002, 2009), approach to studying and explaining the dynamics of development. Mok (2015) reminds us that Vygotsky (1994) distinguished psychology’s focus on an elemental approach to analysis (i.e., focusing on constituent parts, or elements) from his proposal of a unitary approach (i.e., focusing on holistic units), as embodied in the concept of perezhivanie. As Mok writes: Units and elements are both empirically identified actual parts (i.e., not merely analytic constructs) of the larger phenomenon under investigation. Where they differ is that units retain the dynamic relations (e.g., those characterizing its growth, development, and on-going operation) of the whole by maintaining a unity of what would otherwise be reduced to (p. 150) separate elements.

Vygotsky (1986) provided a well-known illustration of the difference between an analysis of elements and an analysis of units. Elemental analysis, writes Vygotsky, “may be compared to the chemical analysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen, neither of which possesses the properties of the whole and each of which possesses properties not present in the whole” (p. 4). Thus, studying the constituent parts of water—the elements of hydrogen and oxygen—may lead to generalization about each one but leaves unaddressed the question of how, for example, the unit of liquid water extinguishes fire since “hydrogen burns and oxygen sustains fire” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 4). A unitary analysis, by contrast, would focus not simply on the unit of water (H20) as a chemical formula but the behaviour of specific units of water in concrete circumstances and in relation to the larger whole of which they are a part. In fact, this is precisely what climate scientists are doing as they study the interconnections and behaviours of melting polar ice and tundra, the Gulf Stream, and extreme weather events such as tropical storms and flooding. The point, as Vygotsky wrote, is not to identify “[the phenomenon’s] most general characteristics” (pp. 4–5) but to understand “the individually specific” (p. 5).4 So it is in the study  It is important to recognize that identifying general characteristics can be important in many fields, including

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psychology. However, as Vygotsky (1986, p. 4) noted, this does not equate to explanatory analysis of the phenomenon under study, only a description of some basic features of the phenomenon that can be identified in most—if not all—circumstances. Unitary analysis seeks to explain a specific, concrete instantiation of a phenomenon rather than describe an idealized, abstracted version of it.

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of human cognition, including in L2 development. Indeed, as Levinson (2012) has pointed out, the “original sin” of cognitive science was to deny “variation and diversity in human cognition” (p. 397) by presuming a single universal and uniform mental capacity. Our interest, therefore, must be focused on generating an understanding of the specifics of an individual’s or a group’s developmental trajectory, and the dynamic relations that exist between its parts, rather than attempting to identify and correlate the most general characteristics of it.

3.3  Researching the Constitution of L2 Development Understanding the constitution of L2 development in general and in instructed contexts in particular, as we will see, creates challenges for researchers. Reasons for this are many, but a central one is that our field has a long history of attempting to produce generalizable findings that can be applied in, or at least inform, practice—namely, in the form of pedagogical implications. This is certainly an important goal, and one that has for a long time been embraced, and recently amplified, by SCT scholars as an “imperative” for the field (Lantolf & Poehner, 2014). However, as in most social sciences, the dominant paradigm of “‘hypothetico-deductive’ logic” (Packer, 2011, p. 27) has pushed the field to privilege (quasi)experimental quantitative research that engages in the analysis of elements over most other forms of investigation. Research syntheses in instructed SLA showing a statistical advantage of explicit instruction over implicit instruction (e.g., Norris & Ortega, 2000; Taguchi, 2015) are prime examples. Such research tells us that, at a general level, the provision of metalinguistic information tends to help most learners more than withholding such information, but the specific dynamic relations between how pedagogy is carried out on the ground and such elements as attention, perception, memory, learner histories, and social relations as they occur in the process of development are largely ignored. In other words, what we get is a description of decontextualized general characteristics correlated with measures of development (e.g., test scores, performance accuracy statistics) rather than an explanation of “the actual causal-dynamic relations that underlie” the phenomenon under study (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 62). The reader will note, of course, that quantitative research syntheses (e.g., meta-analysis) will exclude nonquantitative, nonexperimental research because the method of synthesis—statistics— cannot handle qualitative evidence. The result is that what is purported to be the collective knowledge of our field, which forms the basis for language education policy as well as teacher education, is severely limited in scope, not because a wider array of evidence is unavailable but because

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such evidence is inconvenient to include or even considered to be “mere dross” (Packer, 2011, p. 1) next to the numbers, p values, effect sizes, and so on that appear in experimental research reports. I want to reiterate here that quantification itself is not the issue. What qualitative science in general argues for is a different logic, one that understands “that human beings are in the world in the sense not of spatial inclusion but of practical involvement” in forms of life (Packer, 2011, p. 179). As noted, this logic is rooted in a focus on understanding the unity of constituent parts as they operate together as a whole in specific contexts, a position aligned well with Vygotskian psychology. This kind of research may very well involve quantification and statistical procedures, but the goal is to “replace object analysis [i.e., elements] by process analysis [i.e., units]” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 62). The role of quantification in qualitative L2 science is in describing some parts of a bigger picture; but it is not presumed to be the gold standard when it comes to providing explanations of the constitution of L2 development. Indeed, qualitative science opens up the possibility not only of including alternative forms of evidence for our existing questions about L2 development but, more importantly, it offers new possibilities for the kinds of research questions we can ask. For example, rather than asking what effect a given pedagogical intervention has on a group of learners, we might ask how the pedagogical intervention is experienced and lived through as a form of practical involvement in the world. Learning outcomes would certainly be relevant, as in hypothetic-deductive research, but the difference is that a qualitative inquiry would seek to understand the ways in which learning outcomes (or a lack thereof) are embedded in, and constituted by, the lived experiences of research participants, including accounts of the heterogeneity of outcomes, rather than correlating outcomes with some set of decontextualized and abstracted independent variables (e.g., treatment type, proficiency level, time on task, quantitative individual differences). In what follows, I present a selective review of recent L2 SCT work that exemplifies the principles of qualitative science. I have limited my review to studies published in the ten years preceding the writing of this chapter (2007–2017). This represents a surge of SCT scholarship inspired, at least in part, by Lantolf and Thorne’s (2006) landmark exegesis of the theory as it has been extended to L2 development scholarship. I have also limited my review to include only studies that include analytic focus on the situated experiences of participants in relation to their development over time. This is not meant to minimize the contribution of many other studies that have been more centrally focused on learning or developmental outcomes (e.g., communicative or test performance). However, since my concern here is on illustrating qualitative unitary analysis, using the concept of perezhivanie, studies that do not include sufficient information

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about participant experience cannot be included. Finally, in order to show the potential breadth of qualitative L2 science but at the same time include some depth in the discussion of methods and findings, I selected a single representative study to describe in detail for each of three contexts of research: study abroad, classroom praxis, and teacher education.

3.3.1  Study Abroad Kinginger (2008) reported on the language learning outcomes and individual experiences of a cohort of twenty-four US university students who participated in a semester-long study abroad (SA) programme in France during the spring of 2003. Building on research showing the heterogeneity of SA as a context of language learning, the study had the aim of “‘digging deeper’ into the nature of the study abroad experience and of students’ contributions to language learning abroad” (p. 12). Digging deeper, according to Kinginger, means going beyond the documentation of general characteristics of the SA experience that may be generalized across participants and correlated with learning outcomes: In addition to knowing what students do, for how long, and in what language, it is also helpful to see why they choose to study abroad and, in this context, what language learning means to them. It is useful to scrutinize the accessibility of language learning resources within host communities (Kinginger, 2008, p. 12) and the students’ stances toward them.

A clear indication of a break from hypothetic-deductive logic and a move towards the analysis of units such as perezhivanie is in Kinginger’s statement about the twenty-four students involved in the study. Noting that Vygotskian theory sees human activity as historically, socially, and institutionally situated, she writes, “these participants are not bundles of variables or mosaics of individual differences, but intentional human agents who invest in language competence to varying degrees and for a host of diverse reasons” (Kinginger, 2008, p. 12). Kinginger’s study involved a range of data sources that allowed her to analyse the SA experience in relation to language learning outcomes. Pre-SA and post-SA data for the entire cohort included a standardized language competence test (Test de français international), language awareness interviews, and communicative performances elicited in role-play tasks. In addition, Kinginger traced individual case histories of six students, through the narrative analysis of journal entries and audiorecorded interviews that were collected throughout the SA programme. This design allowed Kinginger to document general characteristics of language learning in SA in a first phase of research (i.e., pre-post comparisons), and then to delve into the sources of variation found in the data in a second phase of research focused on explaining “the individually specific”, as Vygotsky (1986, p. 5) wrote.

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Overall, the cohort made significant gains in terms of reading and listening abilities, pragmatics (i.e., awareness and use of second-person pronouns, awareness of leave-taking speech acts), and colloquial French (i.e., informal or everyday vocabulary and expressions not typically taught in a classroom). However, the data also showed a great deal of individual variation in the cohort. Through qualitative analysis of case histories, Kinginger was able to situate learning outcomes within the lived experiences of her participants. For instance, a recurring theme in the students’ experiences was political discourse and actions in France against the US invasion of Iraq, which coincided with their sojourn in France. Hannah, for instance, reported becoming estranged from her host mother after a particular dinner-time incident in which the mother was criticizing US energy and foreign policy (i.e., “war for oil”). She wrote the following in a journal entry from March 2003: She made me lose my appetite. I realise [sic] that everyone has their own opinions, but this was personal. All of a sudden, her husband told her to stop talking about it in front of me because it was really rude. He started defending me saying that, “here we have an american [sic] that is a guest in our house, and she hears criticism of her own country all of the time, do you think she really wants to hear more?” The whole time I was holding back the tears, but it just took a load off of my shoulders because here was a french [sic] person defending exactly what I was thinking! I felt this huge release that someone actually understood what it felt like, and then (Kinginger, 2008, p. 65) I started to cry.

Clearly, this was a salient, emotionally laden experience for Hannah, especially because she felt that she did not have the linguistic resources in French to stand up for herself in the face of perceived criticism. However, it is more than an external context for her SA experience and language learning. Indeed, as Kinginger points out, estrangement from the host mother reduced Hannah’s access to French at home, which shaped her eventual learning outcomes. In addition, the broader socio-political landscape, including Franco-American tensions stemming from the war, compelled Hannah and other students to seek out information in Englishlanguage media through the internet, and to “stick together … [and] keep their own company rather than to strike out on their own” (p. 65). To be sure, not all students in the study isolated themselves away from perceived negative experiences. For example, although at first hesitant about the perception of Americans in France following the invasion of Iraq, Beatrice reportedly established a positive rapport with her host sisters through her telling of stories about her ex-boyfriend, which led to opportunities to learn everyday French vocabulary and pragmatics (p. 70). She also provided evidence of the emotional dimension of language learning and use in a journal entry she recorded about two-and-a-half months

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into her sojourn, where she expressed joy and pride in relation to her progress, and even charted out a future for her professional involvement with French (i.e., as a teacher). I just love speaking French. (…) I just really enjoy learning it and being able to hear the progress and the difference on my accent and my rapidity of speech. I’ve pretty much decided that I want to be a French teacher at some point in my life. I know I still have so much progress to make before I do that but I really think that that will be my ultimate career goal in the end. (Kinginger, 2008, p. 70)

The point is that the qualities of Beatrice’s L2 French development, as well as those of the other learners, were embedded in a broader nexus of socio-political discourse, particular emotional experiences, and access to French-language resources controlled by, and negotiated with, native speakers (e.g., host families in study abroad; see also Fernández, 2016; Shively, 2016). Note also, as Coleman (2013) contends, that language learning itself is rarely the process or experience that is most salient to or transformative for participants: Ask any applied linguist confidentially, in the corner of a bar, about their own time abroad as a student, and the emphasis will never be on enhanced TL [target language] lexis and mean length of utterance, but rather on romance, on discovery of self and others, on people and places.  (p. 29)

Thus, understanding L2 development in study abroad requires an understanding of the particular systems of experience that participants live through (i.e., perezhivanie).

3.3.2  Classroom Praxis The relevance of lived experience for L2 development is of course not limited to study abroad contexts. In classrooms, students think, feel, and relate to one another and their teachers in ways that are shaped by their histories and in turn shape their futures, including the qualities of their L2 development. Motives for learning languages (i.e., the goals in which one is investing) can be dynamic and change in response to positive and negative experiences in the classroom and the way in which classroom praxis is perceived by students to enhance or limit L2 resources deemed to be valuable for learning to occur (Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2001). Consequently, a qualitative scientific inquiry into the outcomes of instructed L2 learning requires researchers to examine the ways in which language learning and teaching are integral parts of individuals’ lives, past, present, and future. Van Compernolle and Williams (2012) reported two case studies of intermediate-level US university learners of French who were enrolled in a class in which the teaching of sociolinguistic and pragmatic variation

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had been integrated into the curriculum in the hopes of developing learners’ abilities to vary their level of discourse (e.g., formality, politeness) in socially appropriate ways. Overall results from the study indicated a high degree of individual variation in learning outcomes measuring conventionally appropriate use of sociolinguistic and pragmatic variants in performance tasks. Because the researchers had included metalinguistic tasks and interviews in the study, however, they were able to probe “the individually specific” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 5) experiences, attitudes, and goals of the learners and how these dimensions of learners’ engagement with pedagogy shaped the observed outcomes. The two young women focused upon in the report, Casey and Melanie, represented two dramatically different orientations to the learning of sociolinguistic and pragmatic variation. Consequently, rather than posing the question of whether such variation is teachable and learnable in the classroom, based on a standard or universal outcome measure, van Compernolle and Williams aimed to account for the ways in which learners might appropriate, negotiate, modify, resist, or reject what is taught in relation to their histories as language learners and the imagined role of the L2 in their futures. Casey, for instance, was described by van Compernolle and Williams (2012) as a bit of a loner (no negative connotation intended), who had begun studying French in junior high school after becoming dissatisfied with her Spanish teacher. She oriented to the learning of French as an individual academic pursuit, and her principal goal was to be able to access literary works rather than to engage in social interaction with other French speakers.5 Casey had no plans for using French in the future beyond her individual interests (e.g., reading books). During her time in class, she was grade-focused: she earned As on virtually all coursework, including tasks centred on sociolinguistics and pragmatics. On end-of-term metalinguistic tasks and in interviews, she demonstrated a good understanding of how variation works and the possible social meanings of target forms (e.g., address pronouns). However, in her performances, she opted to maintain a formal stance: she used virtually no informal or everyday discourse features that had been taught in the class, even in tasks (e.g., role plays) where the use of more formal language would typically be considered socio-contextually inappropriate. What was gleaned from interviews with Casey was that while she understood how variation worked and what it could mean, she simply preferred the more formal variants because, on one hand, she was more used to them and, on the other, they fit better with her own history as a language learner and goals for the future (e.g., reading French literature).  Van Compernolle and Williams (2012) note that Casey only mentioned using French with other people in the

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context of practising her French to become more grammatically correct. In other words, the social aspect of communication in French was about language learning rather than developing social relationships.

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Melanie, by contrast, oriented to language learning as a social-relational endeavour and imagined herself as a developing multilingual. She was an early bilingual (born in Mexico, and Spanish and English were spoken by her parents), and she was studying Japanese in addition to French at the time of the study. Because her father had been in the military, she had lived in Australia, the UK, and Germany before moving to the US. These experiences resulted in Melanie having a keen sense for the relationship between language use and people in a social context. She saw language learning as a “key to another door” and was interested exclusively in learning “the way people do things in real life” (p. 243). Van Compernolle and Williams argued that Melanie’s previous experiences in intercultural and diverse linguistic environments led her to appropriate the new, more informal L2 resources taught in the class at the expense of the more formal textbook-style forms she had previously learned: as the term progressed, Melanie began to use the informal variants across most communicative contexts, including in an interview with her teacher. While this could be seen as overgeneralizing the appropriateness of the new forms, Melanie’s sociolinguistic and pragmatic behaviour aligned with her stated goals for learning French, which included making French-speaking friends, travelling abroad and conversing with everyday people, and so on. In other words, she was less concerned with being grammatically correct, and more concerned with using French in a way that would help her develop intimate personal relationships. What van Compernolle and Williams demonstrated was that L2 development outcomes were only properly understood by situating them within the lived experiences and imagined futures of the learners under study, not by measuring the frequency, accuracy, or appropriateness of language form use, metalinguistic knowledge, and so on against a predetermined normative baseline (e.g., native speaker conventions). This is because L2 learning is a form of life that connects with, shapes, and is shaped by what it means to be a person, one’s sense of self, and the identities one performs across the lifespan (Blommaert & Varnis, 2013). It bears pointing out that van Compernolle and Williams also included a psycholinguistic explanation for the performance data, namely, following variable competence models introduced in the 1980s (e.g., Tarone, 1988, 2007) and later modified and expanded (e.g., Adamson, 2009; Fasold & Preston, 2007), they explained their findings in relation to attention paid to speech. They posited that conscious attention to form underpinned both Casey’s and Melanie’s development. The difference was that because the two women had different goals, their motives for attending to the new forms introduced in the course were different. Casey was comfortable continuing to use more standard, formal French, about which she did not need to think much, since this was the register that fit her future goals (she only

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attended to her speech and use of informal features when she needed to do so for a graded task). By contrast, Melanie was consciously attempting to use the new informal forms as much as she could in hopes that they would become more automatic in her speech. Thus, although on the surface outcomes were very different, the underlying explanatory principals related to motives, identities, learner histories, and conscious attention were the same for both participants. The concept of perezhivanie is apt here because, as Mok (2015) contends, it is in lived experience that the social environment of development connects with lower, biologically endowed psychological processes, such as attention. These findings have since been corroborated and expanded in a series of related studies involving different learners in different instructional contexts (van Compernolle, 2014, 2016; van Compernolle & Henery, 2014; van Compernolle, Gomez-Laich, & Weber, 2016).

3.3.3  Teacher Education The development of teachers, particular during their early formation in educational settings, is another important domain of L2 qualitative science. Although the focus of such work is not typically on learning processes and outcomes of language learners, teacher cognition, development, and practice determine the qualities of language instruction that learners encounter in the classroom. Donato and Davin (in press) make an important contribution to this line of inquiry by tracing teacher development in relation to history-in-person processes, defined by Holland et  al. (1998) as “the sediment from past experiences upon which one improvises, using the cultural resources available, in response to the subject positions afforded one in the present” (p. 18). This perspective holds that an individual’s history (i.e., the diverse perezhivanie that account for one’s development; my interpretation) is dialectically united with one’s way of interacting with the world in the present as one looks towards the future: history shapes, but it is also shaped by, the present, inasmuch as it is remembered and made relevant by one’s present circumstances and future goals. Importantly, the concept of history-in-person connects micro- and macro-phenomena ranging from the moment-to-moment discursive practices one engages in day to day to the larger societal, political, and institutional affordances and constraints within which one operates. Donato and Davin present two case studies of preservice teachers in a certification programme at a Midwestern US university: Brian, a twentyeight-year-old master’s student seeking his initial French teaching certification, and Sue, a nineteen-year-old undergraduate student seeking her certification for teaching Spanish. The two were selected in order to illustrate two different kinds of history-in-person processes. As the authors note,

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While the case of Brian illustrates how history-in-person may influence present discursive practice [i.e., teaching in the classroom], the case of Sue offers a paradigm example of how both history-in-person and history in institutionalized struggles can result in local contentious practice. (p. 7)

“Thought-based” and “practice-based” data were collected in order to examine teacher beliefs and histories (e.g., through written reflections, autobiographical narratives) in addition to what the two participants did in the classroom (e.g., through field notes from classroom observation, analysis of transcripts of classroom interaction). In the case of Brian, thought-based findings included expressions of “frustration and humiliation while learning French in France” (p. 7) after six years of study in the US. For example, he reported receiving 0 out of 20 points on an assignment because he had made twenty mistakes, and that, in his words, “[teachers] humiliate students … they call them dumb and stuff” (as quoted by Donato and Davin, in press, p. 7). Brian’s experience in France challenged his perceived identity as a proficient user of French, especially in one case where he was unable to distinguish between words on a dictation exercise. Because so much of his negative experience in France had focused on pronunciation, he developed an orientation to language learning and teaching that emphasized the teaching of correct pronunciation and speaking before introducing the written language, but was based on “naïve beliefs about phonological systems” (p. 8). As Donato and Davin note, in Brian’s view, “a good deal of the teacher’s instructional responsibilities was reductively defined as producing and hearing French sounds” (p. 8). His beliefs about what constituted good teaching were borne out of the practice-based data. Analysis of classroom interactions revealed that he created a safe, comforting environment in order to avoid potentially embarrassing or humiliating students, as had been his experience in France, and that the main focus of his teaching was on perceived correct pronunciation. For example, in a lesson on irregular subjunctives, Brian provided feedback on and explicit evaluation of the pronunciation of target forms; his stated goal, as revealed in a written lesson reflection, was “to say [the verb] as many times as possible to kind of stick it in there” (p. 8). It is important to point out that, in contrast to Sue’s case, described below, Brian faced few institutional challenges or constraints: the cooperating teacher allowed him to develop and carry out his lessons with relative independence, and since the learners were serious and dedicated advanced placement students, he faced few classroom disruptions. Together, these circumstances afforded Brian the freedom to enact his history-in-person without contention. By contrast, Sue faced considerable practical and institutional challenges that forced her to negotiate the relationship between her ­history-in-person and the circumstances in which she found herself teaching. Prior to the

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beginning of her student teaching experience, Sue wrote that “a foreign language is learned primarily through speaking and listening” (quoted by Donato and Davin, in press, p. 12). She also claimed to adhere to one interpretation of communicative language teaching, focusing on contextualized language use (nearly) exclusive target language use in the classroom, and an emphasis on spoken language. Donato and Davin traced Sue’s beliefs about language learning and teaching to her high school experience as a language learner. Sue’s Spanish II and IV teacher spoke exclusively in Spanish and encouraged her students to do the same, using “enthusiasm and dramatic mannerisms” (p. 12) to support learning of new vocabulary. This was an overwhelmingly positive experience for Sue. It bears highlighting that Sue actually identified an instance of L2 learning in a written reflection: In the beginning of my Spanish II class, one student said something in English and my teacher freaked out. She said, “Pones un cuchillo en mi corazón. Hay un fuente de sangre! ¿Por qué?” [“You put a knife in my heart. There is a fountain of blood. Why?”] and she acted it out. It was hilarious and we didn’t speak English again. At that point, I did not know how to say knife or blood, but after that, I will never forget.  (quoted by Donato and Davin, in press, p. 12).

Note the emotional vocabulary (e.g., freaked out, hilarious) that shades this memory, as well as Sue’s claim that through this experience (i.e., perezhivanie) she learned the words cuchillo “knife” and corazón “heart”. Sue’s Spanish I and III teacher, however, used English as a mode of instruction, focusing on reading, writing, and listening rather than spoken communicative interaction. Sue reported this as a generally negative experience. As Donato and Davin argue, this contrast between Sue’s two teachers, and her experiences in their classes, formed the basis of her history-in-person process vis-à-vis her emerging philosophy of teaching. As noted, however, Sue faced challenges in enacting her history-in-­ person in the context of her student teaching. In one Spanish III class, which included about 50% heritage speakers, Sue struggled to maintain 100% target language use, despite her attempts to emulate the practices of her favourite teacher. In fact, and somewhat ironically, she was forced to accept English responses from highly proficient heritage speakers who, according to researcher field notes, frequently chatted in Spanish to each other about topics unrelated to the lesson. Sue therefore found herself having to (re)negotiate her beliefs about teaching in light of the “conflict between two institutionalized educational settings: what she had learned in her methods course and knew to be empirically-based practice (use of the L2) and what her cooperating teacher was asking her to do (translate to English)” (Donato and Davin, in press, p. 16). The authors also reveal that, at the end of the term, Sue failed to achieve the requisite level of

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proficiency, as measured by ACTFL’s Oral Proficiency Interview, for teaching certification. In hindsight, Sue’s cooperating teacher opined that her “inadequate level of Spanish proficiency lowered her credibility with the heritage language learners and explained their use of English with Sue” (Donato and Davin, in press, p. 16). Sue’s development as a teacher of Spanish was therefore intertwined with her history as a language learner, including both her fond memories of her favourite high school teacher but also her failure to attain an adequate proficiency level, as well as external, institutional pressures. Donato and Davin’s (in press) study reveals the deep interconnections between cognition, learning, socio-emotional experience, and development—that is, perezhivanie—in the context of teacher education. Like the van Compernolle and Williams (2012) study discussed above, the individuals’ pasts were brought to bear on their engagement with the world in the present, including what they were learning to do and in relation to their imagined futures; but the present and future also shaped the qualities of how Brian and Sue remembered and re-experienced their pasts. In order to understand the outcomes of their development, Donato and Davin had to engage in the analysis of what was “individually specific” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 5) to Brian and Sue, a type of qualitative inquiry that aimed to identify points of congruence and incongruence between thoughts and beliefs with discursive practice in the classroom and situated within the social-material circumstances of their past and ongoing development as people.

3.4 Conclusion This chapter has made the case for a qualitative science of L2 development, drawing on Vygotskian sociocultural psychology, particularly the concept of perezhivanie “lived experience”, and Packer’s (2011) emphasis on studying the constitution of forms of life. I have argued that such an approach adopts a different logic from hypothetico-deductive research, one that takes as axiomatic the idea that phenomena cannot be understood by reducing them into separable elements but only by studying them as unitary wholes. In the exemplar studies presented above, this was borne out in the focus on participant histories as they became relevant to their ongoing development. The past informed the present, but the present, as well as future goals, desires, emotions, and so on shaped how aspects of individuals’ pasts became relevant from moment to moment. In addition, broader social, political, and institutional affordances and constraints shaped the way individuals were able to enact, modify, or even abandon their goals. What we gain from such research is an understanding

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of that messy, fuzzy space between more stable states of development— the ZPD—where the real action takes place during development. To be sure, researching the constitution of any form of life does not lead to the presumption of generalizability. Instead, the veracity of qualitative science is in its ability to particularize the dynamic relations of the components of situated phenomena. Since dynamic relations are constituted in lived experience, research must aim to account for the individually specific relevance of components and their qualitative differences from one person to another. In other words, there is no presumuption that any single component will play the same developmental role for different learners. As Packer (2011) writes, “A ‘true account’ is one that provides a way of seeing what is relevant to our current situation, our problem” (p. 392). It should be noted that methods create objects of study. This is because epistemology constructs ontology as much as ontological assumptions drive methodological choices. This is just as true for qualitative science as it is for hypothetico-deductive research. In other words, we make different assumptions about the nature of reality (ontology), which leads to different methods for investigating that reality and constructing the entities we study (epistemology) that are in turn analysed to confirm, modify, or reject our ontological assumptions. But we also need to recognize that ontology is our assumption about and understanding of reality, not objective reality itself, something Vygotsky (1987) forcefully argued. As Backhurst (2007) notes, “Although Vygotsky appreciated that our research methods, language, and other conceptual tools influence our conception of the objects of our inquiries, he never lost confidence in the idea that those objects are independent of our forms of understanding them” (p. 67). In other words, we certainly construct knowledge (i.e., how we understand reality) that is shaped by our methods, but we do not construct reality itself. A qualitative science of L2 development makes the ontological assumption that psycholinguistic phenomena involved in L2 learning, use, development, etc. are embedded in the lived experiences of individually specific people, and this is not simply an assertion of an “alternative perspective” on L2. It is in fact an argument about which way of knowing, which ontology, “most accurately reflects [the] nature” of material, objective reality (Ratner, 2006, p. 232). Thus, the knowledge we construct through research may be wrong, but it can be challenged, revised, or rejected if it is found to inaccurately reflect reality. Qualitative science challenges the findings of other forms of researching L2 development that engage in elemental analysis because they tend to reveal only the most general characteristics of phenomena, to borrow Vygotsky’s (1986) turn of phrase, which do not provide insight into the reality of individually specific instances of a given phenomenon. Qualitative science is capable of providing a true account of and a way of

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seeing what is relevant to individuals’ L2 development experiences that goes unnoticed in hypothetico-deductive research relying on quantitative experimentalist methods. Here, it is useful to reiterate the point made earlier in this chapter that qualitative science is not just about different approaches to data collection and analysis; rather, it opens up different kinds of questions we can ask, lines of inquiry that seek to investigate holistic units of forms of life like the state of “living through” learning an additional language (perezhivanie). I would like to echo Mok’s (2015) suggestion that an exciting avenue for future research lies in reconceptualizing standard L2 acquisition concepts such as attention, memory, and noticing, implicit and explicit knowledge, and so on, within a qualitative scientific paradigm that focuses on perezhivanie as the unit of analysis. This would involve flipping the relationship between quantitative and qualitative research with regard to hypothesis generating and testing: namely, quantification in a descriptive phase of research, especially relevant for identifying important elements of a phenomenon, can generate hypotheses about the parts that form a unit to be tested, confirmed, modified, or falsified through qualitative investigations of their dynamic relations. Indeed, we might see this as a paradigm shift in L2 research, one that implies a rejection of hypothetico-­ deductive logic in favour of research designs that, instead of abstracting and objectifying our participants, their behaviours, and their characteristics in the belief that such an approach makes our field more scientific, are actually capable of accounting for individual variability and change across time and space by situating developmental phenomena in the lives—the perezhivanie—of real people.

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van Compernolle, R. A., Gomez-Laich, M. P., & Weber, A. (2016). Teaching L2 Spanish sociopragmatics through concepts: A classroom-based study. The Modern Language Journal, 100(1), 341–361. van Compernolle, R. A., & Henery, A. (2014). Instructed concept appropriation and L2 pragmatic development in the classroom. Language Learning, 64, 549–578. van Compernolle, R. A., & Williams, L. (2012). Reconceptualizing sociolinguistic competence as mediated action: Identity, meaning-making, agency. The Modern Language Journal, 96, 234–250. Vygotsky, L. S. (1971). The psychology of art. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). The historical meaning of the crisis in psychology: A methodological investigation. New York: Plenum Press. Retrieved from https:// www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/index.htm. Vygotsky, L. S. (1994). The problem of the environment. In R. van der Veer and J. Valsiner (eds.), The Vygotsky reader (pp. 338–354). Oxford: Blackwell. Zinchenko, V. P. (2002). From classical to organic psychology. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 39, 32–77. Zinchenko, V. P. (2009). Consciousness as the subject matter and task of psychology. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 47, 44–75.

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4 Theoretical Frameworks in L2 Acquisition John Truscott and Michael Sharwood Smith

4.1 Introduction It is important to distinguish between a theory and the hypotheses that are derived from it, on the one hand, and a theoretical framework on the other. The crucial criterion for judging a theory, in addition to its explanatory value, is its ability to make useful predictions. A framework functions at a higher level of abstraction. The level can vary between a narrow, “local” framework restricted to a well-specified research domain and one that has a wider coverage, ending up with frameworks that also facilitate interdisciplinary research projects. What all frameworks have in common is that they contain some commitments that cannot be significantly altered: this is the framework’s metatheory. Then there are the areas where variation is perfectly possible, allowing researchers to carry out many alternative applications of the metatheory that defines that particular framework. In general, researchers in second language acquisition research, and indeed in other related research domains, are both used to and comfortable with working at a less abstract level, i.e., with theories and hypotheses, precisely because experimental predictions can be easily derived from them and form the basis of a continuous series of research projects. These practical benefits are accentuated by the demands that institutional academic life often imposes on individual investigators for financial reasons and because of the pressure to publish regularly. These factors do not make background assumptions and an overall model of the mind that broad frameworks provide any less important, but they do encourage an overreliance on unquestioned background assumptions. The general theory versus framework distinction needs some qualification, because many researchers do work with and benefit from

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frameworks. This means that relative breadth is also important in this discussion. As just mentioned, frameworks can cover more or less territory. SLA investigators working within a generative linguistic framework, for example, can point to the considerable number of studies that this particular approach to language cognition has produced. It has been the most successful of frameworks in this respect, but there have been others that do not share its basic assumption of a special and unique human language ability distinct from a more general type of cognition. These alternative approaches include the basic behaviouristic principles that defined many people’s thinking in the years that immediately preceded the development of SLA as an independent field of investigation in the 1960s (Lado, 1957). They also include basic principles of cognitive psychology which assumed an anti-behaviourist stance by claiming that the mind was a complex information processing system. It should be noted that behaviourism was a real theory of learning, in other words eminently applicable to the development of L2 ability (Fries, 1945; Lado, 1957; Skinner, 1957). Generative linguistics, on the other hand, which has had a long track record in SLA, does not incorporate a theory of learning as such, or indeed a theory of linguistic processing: it just establishes the bases on which such theories can be developed. It has therefore allowed an analysis of learner systems at particular moments in time from which hypotheses can be formed about what processes led to their creation. As a framework guiding research, this still leaves the door open for theories of L2 learning (acquisition) and theories of online L2 processing to be developed separately: this would be in tune with generative principles, or principles of general cognitive psychology that exclude any notion of a special language faculty, or indeed other sets of principles such as those espoused by behaviourist psychologists. In what follows, we will first consider four examples of relatively narrow frameworks which have served to guide research in SLA in the past. We then consider in more detail two broad frameworks: MOGUL (Sharwood Smith & Truscott, 2014) and the Five Graces Group (2009). As the most relevant aspects of the latter are described in some detail elsewhere in this volume, our description will be less extensive than would otherwise be necessary. After these introductions, we explore the similarities and differences between the two broad frameworks and then draw some implications.

4.2  Big Frameworks, Little Frameworks Various approaches guiding SLA research have marked some interim point in the gradient between the two poles of a broad framework at one end and a single hypothesis at the other. Without any attempt at a proper

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history of the field, we will pick out four examples of relatively narrow frameworks whose origins date back to the 1970s and 1980s.

4.2.1  Interlanguage Theory Selinker (1972) was the first to provide, for SLA, what for the time was something that could be called a theoretical framework, something that could and did guide early research in this particular field. It was based on his notion of interlanguage, a concept that had as its immediate forebears Corder’s (1967) transitional competence and Nemser’s (1971) approximative system (see Sharwood Smith, 1994, pp. 22–42). It was Selinker’s particular contribution to assemble within one theoretical perspective the different ideas that emanated from the basic idea of a learner’s mental representation of the target language at any given point in their learning career being treatable as a grammar in its own right rather than simply as a source of error. His 1972 paper proposed different kinds of learner strategies that could explain the systematic properties of an interlanguage system and especially the notion of fossilization, i.e., the cessation of interlanguage development despite repeated exposure and practice in the language. Fossilization was a particular characteristic that distinguished, for Selinker, the learner of a mother tongue and the learner of a second language after a certain age, basing his view on Lenneberg’s (1967) notion of a critical period for first language acquisition after which native-like acquisition would no longer be possible. Lenneberg’s brief speculation that the existence of a critical period might also explain the difficulty older learners have in fully acquiring a second language was in this way adopted as a basic principle by Selinker. It also justified, for him, the creation of a separate theory, more or less along lines familiar from cognitive psychology, to explain the processes and hypotheses (or “strategies”) that guide second language acquisition after puberty (Selinker, 1972; Selinker & Lamendella, 1978).

4.2.2  The Creative Construction Approach Selinker’s assertion of the need for an entirely separate theoretical approach to adult and adolescent language acquisition as opposed to child language acquisition soon provoked a counter-reaction. Some researchers denied the validity of appropriating Lenneberg’s critical period to definitely exclude complete1 second language (L2) acquisition as well. Rather they, notably Dulay and Burt (1973), claimed that once an L1 had been acquired, the acquisition of further languages by adults and adolescents was in principle perfectly possible: the same grammar building instinct of young children, which they referred to as triggering creative construction 1

 We will bypass any discussion of what “full”, “complete”, or “native-like” might imply or what they actually mean.

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of the target grammar, remained intact for later re-use, and hence the older learner did not and should not have to fall back on general cognitive learning strategies. It was, in fact, Krashen (1982, 1985) who elaborated on these creative construction claims, together with some of his own, to create an alternative theoretical framework for researchers to follow, investigating the presumed innately determined sequence of stages that learners go through on their way, in principle at least, to full, native-like mastery of their target language. As things worked out it was investigations using this research framework, rather than Selinker’s interlanguage model, that for a time dominated the SLA literature and provided the basis for controlled experimentation built on the techniques and ideas used by researchers into L1 acquisition. Krashen’s theoretical approach was centred on five hypotheses and provided researchers both with a mental model of how L2 acquisition proceeds and guidelines for how a typical investigation should be set up using specific types of experimental techniques and specific targets. For example, the basic acquisition versus learning distinction meant that any investigation into “acquisition”, in his terms a purely subconscious process, should be conducted without appealing to or eliciting conscious reflections about the L2 grammar. A typical target would be to reveal or provide further confirmation of some hypothesized sequence in which particular grammatical constructions were acquired provided there had been sufficient exposure to the language being acquired. The Krashen approach provided plenty to occupy researchers at the time, and this resulted in a small tradition of experimental investigations that contributed to the field at this early stage in its history. Some of the ideas still resonate today, notably Krashen’s insistence that subconscious and consciously driven grammatical development should be treated as qualitatively different both in terms of the underlying processes and the typical outcomes. This idea is not completely uncontroversial even today, but it already suggested at the time that theoretical models that are designed to explain second language acquisition phenomena have to be grounded in the theoretical debates that take place about cognition and cognitive development in general, as well as those concerning the nature of language cognition.

4.2.3  The Generative Approach It was not long before the latter type of debate began to impact SLA research, leading to the tradition that was based on generative linguistic theory, one which has continued up to the present day. If the theoretical framework provided by the generative approach has not led to much refinement in the more strictly psychological aspects of development, it has substantially refined the quality of the linguistic questions being

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posed about the processes and systems underlying learner grammars. It is still a relatively narrow framework; neither its metatheory nor its theoretical linguistic applications cover all aspects of development and performance. Nevertheless, it has provided a platform for a great deal of theoretically interesting studies of learner grammars at different stages of development from the early 1980s onwards (Hawkins, 2005). In one way, it was a development of the interlanguage approach as it focused on learners’ grammars, whereas the creative construction approach was target-oriented and concentrated on the points at which native-like mastery of given constructions was achieved. In another way, it was a continuation of the creative construction approach in that it focused on the extent to which learner grammars conformed to innate principles specific to language that determined or rather constrained the shape these grammars would take even if the approach did not deal directly with the mechanisms of transition that moved learners on from one stage to another.

4.2.4  Processability Theory A different line of enquiry was inspired in the 1980s by the ZISA project, which looked at migrant workers from various language backgrounds acquiring German in Germany (Meisel, 2013). Pienemann (1998), one of the researchers who worked on ZISA, developed his own research framework in which he provided an L2 processing-oriented theory, which came to be called the Processability Theory, to predict and explain grammatical stages of development as manifested in learner production. Whereas the Burt–Dulay–Krashen approach had no real explanation for the developmental sequences they claimed to show, Pienemann did have an explanation, one which was based on the inherent processing ease or difficulty with which a given grammatical construction could be produced. This particular explanation was a development of an idea that Clahsen (1980) had proposed to explain the sequences manifested in migrant worker data. For Krashen and associates, the very existence of predictable developmental sequences given sufficient naturalistic exposure to the language was already an important finding in itself since it seemed to confirm the continued existence of the same developmental mechanisms that drive child language acquisition and disconfirm Selinker’s views that the types of acquisition were fundamentally different. Exactly why the developmental sequences that they found were as they were remained a mystery that still had to be unravelled. In one sense Pienemann’s theoretical framework, equipped as it was with an underlying explanation based on current notions of processing complexity, was less ambitious. His approach makes no claims about covert grammatical development, that is to say the series of new hypotheses and insights learners might be entertaining

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about the nature of the target grammar, whether they actually show up in performance or not. Pienemann’s explanation, using lexical-functional grammar to define linguistic structures, is restricted to how given types of construction appear in production, in other words in the form of overt, easily measurable phenomena. In a similar way to the Krashen framework, Pienemann’s model provided guidance for how research should be carried out, namely on natural spontaneous performance. It also provided a criterion for when a given structure was deemed to be acquired. Whereas the creative construction approach required that a form should appear in spontaneous production at least eighty per cent of the time, for Pienemann a few appearances, around five, were sufficient to say that a new stage had “emerged” (Pienemann, 1998, p. 146). In this way, both approaches provided a set of hypotheses and criteria for researchers to be able to design experiments and contribute to the advance of our understanding of how L2 acquisition proceeds.

4.2.5 Summary Since we wish to focus on two more recent, broader frameworks, we will not elaborate further on these examples of what we call narrow frameworks. Space precludes a full description of either of our two main examples, but it should be enough to show how they differ and in what sense they are similar.

4.3  The MOGUL Framework (MCF) We will now provide the main features of the Modular Online Growth and Use of Language (MOGUL) framework. This was first introduced in Truscott and Sharwood Smith (2004) and has been the subject of various publications since that time including three books (Sharwood Smith, 2017; Sharwood Smith & Truscott, 2014; Truscott, 2015; also, Truscott & Sharwood Smith, in preparation). It now has a website which describes it more accurately as a particular instantiation of the Modular Cognition Framework (MCF). This is because this framework, in order to explain language within the mind, essentially provides a basic model of the mind as a whole. For present purposes, we shall naturally continue to talk of MOGUL, which focuses on the place of language in the mind. However, by doing so, we will also by implication be talking about MCF.

4.3.1  The Availability of a Big Picture MOGUL, being broad-based, does not replace narrower research models currently in use. Rather those approaches that are compatible with its principles can be incorporated within and benefit from the overarching

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explanatory framework. This also goes for the Five Graces approach to be discussed later. Narrow frameworks that are not related to wider explanations will force busy researchers to rely on their background assumptions about the mind. For something like a Big Picture, this often means a combination of personal notions of how the mind works and a small selection of theoretical and experimental work outside their field of interest which appears relevant and which they have found the time to become at least a little acquainted with. These include major issues such as the nature of knowledge (cognition), how memory works, and where conscious processes fit in. One important characteristic of MOGUL (MCF) is that it is based in relevant strands of contemporary research drawn from different areas of cognitive science. In this sense, the service it aims to provide may be described as, to a greater or lesser extent, derivative. Its distinctiveness and its value must be judged by assessing exactly how it integrates these various strands into a coherent and systematic representation of the mind’s organization and how it functions in real time. The sections below will give some account of this.

4.3.2  Modular Cognition As the names suggest, MCF and, hence, MOGUL assume a modular mind. The idea that the mind is composed of different systems that each have their own organizational principles is scarcely controversial in modern cognitive science. Controversy still abounds, though, on what type of modularity describes the mind. This means differences in how many modular systems there are in the mind, how they are internally organized and in what manner they interact and collaborate when dealing with the many tasks the mind has to perform every millisecond, including those specifically to do with language. Figure 4.1 illustrates the architecture of the mind assumed by MOGUL, showing just six of the systems. The figure shows a network of modules, each of which has a basic design, i.e., each composed of a processor and a store, and each of which has a unique function. Visual processing and storage is carried out by the visual system; the visual processor has its unique way of building and managing representations which makes such representations (stored only in the visual store) different from auditory representations or indeed any other type of representation, i.e., visual representations are encoded differently. This should not be surprising for a neuroscientist because brain imaging and other types of technique show that visual processing patterns are distinct from auditory ones even where their pathways route them through the same modular brain systems, such as the amygdala or the thalamus (Sharwood Smith, 2017, p. 23). Since MOGUL espouses the view that some aspects of linguistic processing involve modular systems

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108333603.005

at

Audition processor

Figure 4.1  Simplified MOGUL architecture.

Hearing

Speech structure

AUDITORY SYSTEM

PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM

Phonology processor

SYNTACTIC SYSTEM

Affect processor

CONCEPTUAL SYSTEM

Values & Emotion

AFFECTIVE SYSTEM

Syntactic structure

Syntax processor

Meaning

VISUAL SYSTEM

Seeing

DOUBLE ARROWS = INTERFACES BETWEEN STORES

BOXES = SPECIALIZED STORES

OVAL SHAPES = SPECIALIZED PROCESSORS

Conceptual processor

Vision processor

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specifically and uniquely used for language functions, these have to be included in the overall model of the mind. In the case of MOGUL, and following lines proposed by Jackendoff (1987, 2002), the linguistic modules are two in number, namely the phonological system and the syntactic system. Anything to do with meaning (semantics, pragmatics, etc.) is handled by the conceptual system which deals with any kind of meaning, even meanings not easily expressible by the individual in language. In MOGUL, the phonological module takes as its input generic auditory input which it processes to see, putting it figuratively, what active generic sound representations can be further processed as speech structures, i.e., phonological representations2 written in phonological code. More specifically, speech events in the environment trigger activity in the auditory system which processes all sound and encodes it in auditory code, and this provides the input to the phonological system. At this point the mind has made sense of incoming speech both as generic sound and as speech, even though it may not yet be able to associate a syntactic structure with it or indeed a conceptual (meaning) representation. The conceptual system, as just indicated, is responsible for encoding meaning representations, and these can be associated with language-related structures but also most other kinds of structures (sounds, visual images, touch sensations, and so forth). Auditory, phonological, and syntactic structures acquire meanings by association with conceptual representations.

4.3.3  Processing Versus Representation Language learning seen from a MOGUL perspective means both acquiring new knowledge representations and the ability to process utterances in comprehension and production based on the new representations. In other words, a MOGUL interpretation of given language learner data will have something to say about both. A standard way of studying these two basic aspects of cognition, representation, and processing, is to treat them as separate and to think of them as the objects of two distinct subfields of research. To take an example of the first type of research, investigations based on the generative linguistic approach have typically focused on the abstract representational properties of different learner grammars (for an overview, see Rothman & Slabakova, 2018). Generative research has sought to reveal the degree to which learners’ mental grammars have stayed within the limits of possible grammars given the constraint of Universal Grammar. Other questions that have been investigated include the degree to which linguistic properties of a previously acquired language have influenced the new developing L2 grammar. On that basis, hypotheses have been proposed to explain why certain L2 grammatical 2

 The words “structure” and “representation” will be used here interchangeably.

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properties cause difficulties for some or all L2 acquirers, sometimes even at very advanced levels of proficiency, and others do not (see White, 2003). By way of contrast, researchers in psycholinguistics have focused on the way learners process L2 utterances in real time. In doing this, they make assumptions about what representations are being processed based on research in the first type of investigation (see Hopp, 2010). As an overarching explanatory framework, MOGUL integrates processing and representational questions so that asking questions about representational properties immediately invokes questions about processing and vice versa. This it does without collapsing the distinction between representation and processing. Compare this with a behaviouristic view where abstract concepts like “symbolic representations” and “knowledge” simply do not make any sense, except perhaps as convenient ways of describing what are actually a set of stimulus-response connections or, in the case of modern connectionism, networks of nodes, none of which individually have any symbolic value (see, for example, Elman, 1993).

4.3.4  Memory, Acquisition, and Activation Briefly, the way the system works is as follows. To solve various tasks it is faced with, the mind (like the brain) recruits, figuratively speaking, a selection of its specialized systems, each of which activates representations from its store or seeks to form new ones to fit any input they are receiving. The outcome is a network of representations activated in parallel. Because some regularly occurring types of task are identical or very similar, the mind will have ready-made representations to deal with them, which can be called schemas, but due to a constantly changing environment even these will need frequent tweaking. Language is a case in point. Some stretches of language are highly frequent in conversation; others have never been encountered but require little more than a ready-made schema to understand or produce. Importantly, representations from different modular systems that have been activated in parallel cannot be merged because they are encoded differently: like a jpg (visual) file and an mp3 (sound) file they are mutually incompatible but can still be activated simultaneously. Representations are associated via an interface (shown as double lines in Figure 4.1). The function of an interface is twofold. Firstly, it forms new associations,3 as when a noun representation is activated at the same time as a phonological representation creating for the first time an association between, say /pen/ and N(oun), an event that may also see an association formed with a conceptual representation, namely one for the meaning of a writing instrument that we know as “pen”. The second function is co-activation so 3

 This association takes the form of a shared index.

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that on a later encounter with the sound of the word “pen”, these three representations are activated together from their respective stores. MOGUL has adopted a principle called acquisition by processing (APT), already illustrated in the previous paragraph where learning is taking place across modules. What we know as the word “pen” is learned as a result of a set of structures from different modules being activated together. In this way, an association is formed. Note in passing that we are talking of different types of representation and not contentless nodes in an associative network familiar from other theoretical frameworks. Association also takes place within one module in essentially the same way. Different properties, i.e., small-scale representations, have to be associated together in different ways according to, for example, the design of particular languages. In building a noun representation for many languages, you need to associate with other nominal properties the property of grammatical gender, itself composed of smaller features like masculine, feminine, etc. Gender features are not required for nouns in languages like English or Chinese because in these cases nouns have no inherent gender. This means that English noun structure will not work properly where the target language is Spanish, for instance, because necessary gender features are missing. Thus far it seems that we are talking of instant learning, and, in a sense, we are, but there is a big difference between a learned word or larger construction being made available in principle as a result of an association and being readily available in comprehension and production. To explain this, MOGUL adopts a view of memory as a store in which representations are retained at a particular resting level of activation. New associations are formed and later co-activated in working memory (WM). WM is not a separate system as in Baddeley’s (2007, 2012) modularized view of memory: it simply means that structures in a given store are in an activated state (see Cowan, 1999, Cowan et al., 2012). This is conceptualized in MOGUL as a process of leaving a structure’s current resting level and rising upwards to an imaginary top level of the store, i.e., WM. This rising or falling idea is a convenient metaphor for activation. The main point is that newly acquired representations typically start at a low resting level, which means they are relatively hard to access being “far” from the top level. The more frequently they are activated the higher their resting level becomes, making them more accessible. Given that language learners have a great many readily available representations, i.e., ones with a relatively high resting level, in the stores that are needed for language use, attempts to understand or produce utterances in a target language will activate many structures that are stronger than ones that have been recently learned, and, for a time, these more established and stronger representations will frequently outcompete the weaker ones because of their relative inaccessibility.

Theoretical Frameworks in L2 Acquisition

4.3.5  Learning Versus Losing Another illustration of where MOGUL as a broad framework integrates two separate concepts and areas of investigation into one without eliminating the original distinction is the separate treatment of, on the one hand, acquisition, that is learning new languages, and attrition, often, somewhat misleadingly, thought of as losing or forgetting. Both phenomena are treated as a form of development and subject to precisely the same principles of representation and processing that form the core of the MOGUL approach. When processing L2 utterances, one or another of the mind’s processors forms a new association between two representations, either within a module or across modules, that is acquisition. However, following acquisition by processing theory (APT), a new representation or association will typically have a very low resting level, making it relatively unlikely at first to survive in the inevitable competition with more established rivals. If there is no further stimulation resulting from subsequent processing occasions, it will effectively never see the light of day. Whether this means attrition in the sense of “complete extinction” or just continuing to exist but with permanently very low resting levels is immaterial. It will not figure in overt linguistic performance, so it is indeed as good as “lost” or “forgotten”. The main point here is that some degree of attrition is going on all the time as a learner acquires a new language, making it (attrition) both a very short-term and long-term phenomenon.

4.3.6  Categories of Knowledge “Knowledge” in the sense of all representations in the mind (as opposed to beliefs that are true, not false) can thus be applied in principle to anything in the memory stores. However, it is useful to think of knowledge as having the conceptual system as its hub. Hence knowledge of the visual world is composed of meanings associated with visual representations. Clearly there will be multiple connections, not just this one. For example, much of an individual’s knowledge will be expressible in the form of language. The meaning of an orange will be more than a connection between a visual image and a meaning in the conceptual system. It will be associated with a particular set of interconnected representations involving syntactic structures and phonological structures and, if the subject is literate, other visual representations, namely those representing the way “orange” is written in a given language. A relevant question is how, in MOGUL, we should conceive of implicit knowledge, things we know but of which we are not conscious, and explicit knowledge, things we know consciously and about which we can reflect and talk. In MOGUL, conscious processing is largely a perceptual experience (see Truscott, 2015, for an extended discussion of consciousness in

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L2 acquisition). In the case of explicit knowledge, we are talking about conceptual (i.e., meaning) representations whose content is projected into the perceptual system. For this to happen, the conceptual representations must have relatively high resting levels of activation. Many conceptual structures do not have this, and these form part of implicit knowledge. The same is true of syntactic and phonological representations, due to the relatively isolated state of their modules. This is, then, another example of how in this broad framework, talking about representation also means talking about processing.

4.4  The Five Graces Framework The Five Graces Group (2009; henceforth “Graces”) offer a very broad-­ ranging proposal for understanding and studying language and language-related phenomena, notably including second language learning. Taking as their leading idea the view that language is a complex adaptive system (CAS), they incorporate in their proposal psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, language evolution, computer modelling, first language learning, and, of course, second language learning. This breadth, plus the usefulness of the proposal for interpreting research and suggesting new research, qualify it as a broad framework. In presenting this framework, our emphasis will be on its view of second language acquisition.

4.4.1  Complex Adaptive Systems On Holland’s (2006, p. 1) definition, complex adaptive systems are “systems that involve many components that adapt or learn as they interact”. Their dynamic, constantly changing character is a standard feature of CAS descriptions, as is the adaptive character of the change, the latter meaning, in Graces’ description, that past interaction is the basis for current behaviour and that past and current interactions shape future behaviour. Because CAS is a broad and rather loose concept, those who use it have many choices about the specific form of the CAS they are proposing. These include its scope and various features of its nature. The universe is an interconnected system which can potentially be analysed into countless complex adaptive systems, all interacting with one another. The same can be said for the human, social/psychological world. Lines have to be drawn between what is in the target system (or is the system) and what is outside but interacting with it. For the case of language, and more specifically SLA, important issues also exist regarding the nature of language and the nature of language learning. The Graces framework is thus much more than a proposal that “language is a complex adaptive system.” It is a relatively specific instantiation of that proposal.

Theoretical Frameworks in L2 Acquisition

4.4.2  Usage-Based Grammar Graces present usage-based as one feature of their CAS framework, but it takes on a dominant role in the discussion of language acquisition and might well be seen as a broad framework in itself, particularly in regard to acquisition. Elsewhere it clearly has this character (e.g., Bybee, 2010). The leading idea is that language learning occurs through experience of the learner with language. This view does not follow from or imply that language is a complex adaptive system, but it does fit comfortably with the idea, especially given the added assumption that development of the grammar is not mediated by any specifically linguistic principles (see section 4.6.3 below). Because usagebased approaches are presented in detail elsewhere in this volume, we will not go into great detail in describing them, focusing instead on how they resemble and differ from the MOGUL framework.

4.4.3  The Nature of Language Graces define their CAS (i.e., language) at two levels, the individual speaker and the speech community, treating individuals as interacting agents in the large CAS. Other communities are presumably outside the system but interacting with it. While a strong social emphasis exists, the framework is also very much cognitive, especially in its treatment of (second) language acquisition. This merging of the social and the cognitive is potentially a great strength of the approach, as an adequate understanding of language and SLA requires recognition of both and an adequate reconciliation of them. At the level of the individual, a crucial scope issue for a CAS proposal involves the question of modularity: is language a distinct component of the mind? In the Graces perspective the answer is a clear no: language is so intertwined with general cognitive mechanisms that drawing lines around it would be counterproductive, if not simply impossible. In terms of scope, the interactions of elements of the system with outside factors could be greater than internal interaction, undermining the idea of a system. The approach is often defined by its contrasts with generative approaches, including the absence of a distinct language faculty. It emphasizes, for example, the dynamic nature of language, rejecting any notion of a static grammar or of a distinction between competence and performance. The characteristics of language emerge from the interactions among the agents and are constantly changing as a result of continuing interaction. In terms of the nature of language, perhaps the most important concept for this approach is construction, which Bybee (2010, p. 9) defines as “a direct form–meaning pairing that has sequential structure and may include positions that are fixed as well as positions that are open”. The contrast with rules and principles of traditional generative grammar is again stressed.

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4.4.4  The Nature of Language Learning In regard to language learning—both first and second—the key idea of the framework is, again, usage-based (e.g., Bybee, 2010; Ellis, 2002, 2008). Language learning occurs through interaction among the agents of the system, i.e., the individual speakers, consistent with the social focus of the framework as a whole. But usage-based approaches are very much cognitive as well, so this is a cognitive approach to learning placed within a framework that as a whole emphasizes the social. From the cognitive perspective, the social setting provides the input for individual perception—the material for the general cognitive mechanisms that produce the grammar of the target language. The first requirement for acquisition is the storage of a large number of categorized instances (exemplars) of language use. This is a largely explicit process, relying on noticing (Schmidt, 1990). The explicit nature of the process suggests a role for instruction of language form: encouraging the noticing of relevant forms, particularly those that might not be noticed otherwise. Stored instances are subject to a variety of processes, the commonly proposed mechanisms including categorization, chunking, generalization, analysis into constituents, and analogy with existing constructions. The process of chunking stored instances has received considerable attention. It involves the development and strengthening of associations between stored items, based on repeated co-occurrence in the input. This process is implicit and statistical, frequency playing a crucial role. Regarding the relation between L1 and L2 learning, usage-based research is interested in both similarities and differences. The mechanisms behind L1 acquisition, being the general mechanisms underlying cognition, are not lost at puberty (or any other point), and so the ability to learn language in a natural manner is in principle still present in L2 acquisition. In this respect, the approach is largely consistent with creative construction and contrasts with Selinker’s narrow framework. But various features of learners and the context of learning result in significant differences in the details of how second language acquisition occurs and in how much success it ultimately achieves. These factors represent an important focus of research within the framework.

4.5  Similarities Between the Frameworks The two broad frameworks we have considered appear quite different, and important differences do exist, as we will show in the following section. But they also have much in common. First, and most fundamentally, neither is a theory, making clear empirical predictions, but rather a framework within which specific

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testable theories and hypotheses can be formulated. Both take ideas and findings from a range of disciplines related to SLA and seek to bring them together in a coherent manner, placing SLA in the context of much more general ideas about the social and psychological world. They are thus broad frameworks. Breadth is in fact a major goal for both. Another common feature of the frameworks is their shared interest in cognitive explanations of language phenomena, particularly in SLA. In the primary sense of the word cognitive, both frameworks are clearly cognitive. They fall under the general heading of cognitive science; they are interested in understanding the human mind as such; they exploit the computer metaphor. Both frameworks view language as firmly embedded in the mind as a whole, with the important implication that it is impossible, difficult, or at least ultimately very unenlightening to explain language systems, and how they develop in the individual and operate during online processing, without seriously considering the role of factors that are not specific to language. But the word cognitive has an additional, more restricted meaning, seen in the phrase “cognitive psychology”, which usually refers not simply to cognitively-oriented psychology but rather to a particular type of cognitive approach, a type that includes the Graces framework but probably excludes MOGUL, due to its emphasis on modularity and innate constraints. The word is often used in another restrictive sense as well, as a contrast with neural. We can speak of explanations being at the neural level or at the cognitive level, and this distinction is important because drawing connections across the levels has to be an ultimate goal for research and theory. Both frameworks operate mainly at the cognitive level, but both are also concerned with neural plausibility—their proposals should at least be compatible with what is known about the brain. In terms of learning, important similarities also emerge. Both take cognitive approaches, in the broad sense of the term. Both treat unconscious (implicit) learning as primary while also granting a significant place to more conscious (explicit) learning. Both stress the importance of perception for learning: the way that sensory input is processed is, to a considerable extent, what is learned. Both treat association of items during processing as a crucial part of learning. Both hold that frequency plays an important role. Both treat constructions as important components of linguistic knowledge. Both stress the importance of experience for development. While the full connotations of usage-based apply specifically to the Graces framework, the core idea behind it is shared: the system grows through use. In all these respects, the two frameworks show clear similarities. Crucially, though, significant differences exist in the specifics, differences we will consider in the following section.

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A difference that is more apparent than real is the relative concern with social factors in learning. A genuine difference does exist in the emphasis each framework places on the social, but this does not reflect any difference of principle. For MOGUL, context is a crucial part of processing and the representations that result from it (see especially Truscott & Sharwood Smith, in preparation). The concern is with internal context—the individual’s cognitive representations of contextual factors—as it is these rather than the objective nature of the context that shape learning and subsequent use. MOGUL, like Graces, recognizes the importance of the social and can readily accommodate it.

4.6  Genuine Differences Between the Frameworks The two broad frameworks thus resemble one another in various respects. But important differences exist, especially in background assumptions drawn from source fields. The central differences relate to innateness and modularity, particularly as they apply to language. An important note on this discussion, though, is that the differences may not be as dramatic as they appear.

4.6.1  What is Innate? Both frameworks logically must assume innate elements, implicitly or explicitly. What members of a species can do is indisputably an interaction of their genes and the environment in which they develop. This is particularly true of language. A human growing up in isolation does not develop language, regardless of his or her genetic endowment. Chimpanzees (and, a fortiori, all other non-human species) do not acquire language, regardless of the environment in which they grow up. The issue is exactly how this interaction of human genes with human environment results in the development of language. The two frameworks illustrate the two different ways to approach this issue. MOGUL falls within a rationalist tradition hypothesizing that in human evolution the process of natural selection produced a genetic basis for a language faculty distinct from other components (modules) of the mind. This genetically based faculty serves as the basis for development of language in the individual. Processing of input, in particular, is guided by its principles, which provide the basic categories to be used in the analysis and constrain the possible relations among elements of the input. Without such guidance the learner would be faced with an essentially infinite number of possible analyses for any given input and its relation to already stored information. The assumption of innateness thus provides an answer for what is perhaps the most fundamental issue in language

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learning: how do the mechanisms that underlie learning know what to look for? This approach ultimately raises the question of exactly how the evolutionary process took place, which has not been addressed within the framework. In the Graces framework, language evolved not as a distinct entity but rather as an integral part of general cognitive mechanisms. The innate basis for learning thus has to be found in these mechanisms rather than in any specifically linguistic principles. The answer to how they know what to look for and what sorts of associations to make lies in the inherent—i.e., innate—nature of the mechanisms. This of course raises the questions of exactly what their innate components are, how they evolved, and how they yield the kinds of constraints on perception and categorization that usage-based learning requires. Such questions have not, to our knowledge, been a significant area of theoretical development. We will conclude this discussion with some doubts about how different the frameworks really are at the genetic level. If language is inseparable from general cognitive mechanisms, as assumed by Graces, then evolutionary changes in the genes occurred because they facilitated development of a complex of abilities of which language is an integral part. While language on this view is not a physically distinct part of the genes, it is nonetheless part of our genetic endowment. This intermingling of language with other things in the genes might appear to separate this view from the “innatist” view of language, but, in fact, it does not. The hypothesis of a genetically based language faculty does not require a distinct set of language genes. It simply requires that whatever genes exist should be such that the faculty will result from their interactions with one another, with the chemical environment in which they are expressed, and with the social environment in which development occurs. This allows for the possibility (likelihood) that genes responsible for the language faculty are involved in other functions as well. These points have been developed in some detail by Barrett and Kurzban (2006), Carruthers (2006), and especially Marcus (2004). Thus, the seemingly dramatic contrasts between “innatist” and “non-­ innatist” views of language may turn out to be not so much substantive differences as preferred ways of looking at things. The practical significance of different ways of looking at things should not be dismissed, though, as such contrasts can lead to important differences in the way research is carried out and interpreted.

4.6.2  The Modularity of Language The hypothesis of distinct modules, two of which are specifically linguistic, distinguishes the MOGUL framework from Graces. It is to some extent a consequence of assumptions about language and innateness. On the

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standard view of modules, incorporated in the MOGUL framework, they are a product of our genetic endowment. To say that language is innate is then to say that linguistic modules are genetically based. Knowledge of language is centred in these modules and their development constitutes the heart of language learning. In the Graces framework, no such modules exist. Modularity also has consequences for the treatment of different knowledge types. While both frameworks hypothesize two distinct types of linguistic knowledge, fundamental differences exist. Graces distinguish implicit and explicit knowledge, while hypothesizing that linguistic ability is a systematic intertwining of the two. For MOGUL, the contrast is between representations in the linguistic modules and conceptual representations of language-related information, in conceptual structures. The explicit–implicit contrast is closely related to but cannot be equated with this distinction, as conceptual representations can be either explicit or implicit, as described above (section 4.3.6). The frameworks also differ regarding the interaction between the knowledge types, a complex issue that we will not go into here. As with the issue of innateness, we can ask to what extent the modular versus non-modular distinction blurs when closely examined. In terms of neural systems, an ideal linguistic module would be one that occupies one particular spot in the brain and serves no function other than language. But a module defined at the cognitive level does not require such ideal neural underpinnings. Physically separate brain regions that are richly interconnected could well act as a cognitive module (for review of evidence on neural localization of language, see Friederici, 2011, 2012). Nor is complete separation of function essential. Some low-level neural or cognitive processes might well be shared by different modules. Thus, the modularity issue is also more subtle than it might seem.

4.6.3 Learning Above, in section 4.5, we noted important similarities between the frameworks regarding the character of learning. Here we will consider the “but” side of that discussion. The central differences are consequences of assumptions about what is innate, including modularity. While both frameworks stress that learning is a consequence of experience with the language, in one of them development is based on innate linguistic knowledge, including an established architecture; in the other the innate base is expressed in general cognitive mechanisms. Both frameworks emphasize unconscious learning, but for Graces, it is a generic implicit learning applied to language phenomena, while for MOGUL, its core is a specifically linguistic process following in-built linguistic principles. Both also give conscious learning a significant place,

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but again major differences occur in how it works and how it is related to implicit learning. One significant contrast is the extensive application in usage-based work of the concept of noticing, rejected by MOGUL authors as too confused to be of value (see especially Truscott & Sharwood Smith, 2011). Both frameworks emphasize perception as the foundation of learning, but the specific treatments differ considerably, the use of noticing being one example. Both frameworks treat association of items during processing experience as crucial, but for MOGUL the associations are constrained by specifically linguistic principles within a particular architecture, while in the Graces approach it is a matter of general principles of association. Both treat frequency as an important factor driving learning, but for MOGUL, it is how frequently a given representation is activated (internal frequency), not a count of external events.

4.6.4  Dynamic Versus Stable Systems One difference that is real but easily exaggerated lies in the contrast between dynamic and stable. Consistent with familiar ideas of CAS, Graces emphasize the dynamic. The framework has nothing analogous to the stable cognitive architecture of MOGUL, which provides a basis for everything done in the framework. The presence or absence of an explicit architecture is an important contrast, inevitably influencing the use of a framework. But this should not obscure the fact that language in both approaches is both dynamic and stable. An individual’s linguistic behaviour is subject to change and is characterized by considerable stability and continuity. In the usage-based view, constructions and associations among them are far from ephemeral. It is doubtful, in fact, that the details of linguistic representation change more quickly or frequently in the usage-based approach than in the MOGUL approach. Thus, while differences in this regard are meaningful, the issue is not whether the system is dynamic or stable; it is whether the constant, extensive change that occurs takes place within a relatively stable architecture.

4.7  Further Research The most obvious suggestion for further research is that it be conducted within one of the broad frameworks currently available. Working within a narrow framework with all the convenient guidance that option provides is no substitute; nor is it something that should be given up in favour of a broad framework. The whole idea is that a broad crossdisciplinary

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framework extends, supplements, and enriches research, not that it necessarily replaces a narrow domain-defined one. This might perhaps make it sound like an optional extra. If it does so, then that idea should be firmly set aside. Broad frameworks are a real necessity if substantial progress is to be made in an efficient manner, taking advantage of research elsewhere to inform theory-building and the analysis of results, and avoiding reinventing the wheel in each subdiscipline. Apart from that, it should simply make research more interesting if not necessarily easier. In regard to what kinds of research can be done within the frameworks, the answer is largely trivial: essentially everything that is now being done in SLA. This is the nature of a broad framework. We will not attempt a general survey of potential research topics here but instead note just two illustrative examples of significant general issues. One is to what extent and exactly how consciousness is involved in learning. The rigorous scientific study of consciousness has progressed considerably in recent years, providing rich material for SLA work. Broad frameworks these days must necessarily take account of this research and provide a clear perspective on the challenges that have been with us since the early SLA work in this area, notably those involving the dual-knowledge ideas of Krashen (1982, 1985) described in section 4.2.2. As detailed above, both broad frameworks discussed in this chapter do this, and each can therefore provide a basis for further research in the area. Another significant issue is the role of emotion in learning. Research in this area can benefit from a general framework that provides an account of how emotion fits into the cognitive system and how it interacts with other components of the system, based on the extensive relevant literatures in other fields. The clear importance of emotion in language learning and language use makes it an especially significant research topic.

4.8 Conclusion We have devoted considerable space to the two broad frameworks, MOGUL and Graces, because we believe this provides insights into the kinds of choices with which researchers are faced in studying language learning. The two have important similarities, a natural consequence of their shared concern with understanding language learning in its cognitive and social context. Differences revolve around issues of innateness and modular structure. At the most fundamental levels these contrasts may have less substance than commonly believed, but in practice, they make a great deal of difference. In studying language learning, should we take linguistic principles, perhaps those specified in generative grammar, as the foundation for our explanations, or should this role be filled by

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the characteristics of domain-general mechanisms? Should we work with a stable cognitive architecture, based on distinct, functionally specified units, or focus on the dynamic processes involved in language and its development? Whatever the answers to such questions, the value of a broad framework should be emphasized. Assumptions about the nature of language, learning, and the mind are an inevitable part of SLA research. Intelligent development of the field requires that those assumptions be made explicit and critically examined. Perhaps even more importantly, the ultimate goal for a field of research has to be a filled-in version of the kind of broad framework we are discussing. Without it, there can be no genuine understanding.

References Baddeley, A. (2007). Working memory, thought, and action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baddeley, A. (2012). Working memory: Theories, models, and controversies. Annual Review of Psychology, 63, 1–29. Barrett, H. C., & Kurzban, R. (2006). Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate. Psychological Review, 113, 628–647. Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carruthers, P. (2006). The architecture of the mind: Massive modularity and the flexibility of thought. Oxford: Clarendon. Clahsen, H. (1980). Psycholinguistic aspects of L2 acquisition: Word-order phenomena in foreign workers’ interlanguage. In S. Felix (ed.), Second language development: Trends and issues (pp. 7–79). Tübingen: Narr. Corder, S. P. (1967). The significance of learners’ errors. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 5, 160–170. Cowan N. (1999). An embedded-processes model of working memory. In A. Miyake & P. Shah (eds.), Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control (pp. 62–101). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cowan, N., Rouder, J. N., Blume, C. L., & Saults, J. S. (2012). Models of verbal working memory capacity: What does it take to make them work? Psychological Review, 119, 480–499. Dulay, H., & Burt, M. (1973). Should we teach children syntax? Language Learning, 23, 245–258. Ellis, N. C. (2002). Frequency effects in language processing: A review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24, 143–188.

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Ellis, N. C. (2008). The dynamics of second language emergence: Cycles of language use, language change, and language acquisition. The Modern Language Journal, 92, 232–249. Elman, J. (1993). Learning and development in neural networks: The importance of starting small. Cognition, 48, 71–99. Five Graces Group (2009). Language is a complex adaptive system: Position paper. Language Learning, 59(S1), 1–26. Friederici, A. D. (2011). The brain basis of language processing: From structure to function. Physiological Reviews, 91, 1357–1392. Friederici, A. D. (2012). The cortical language circuit: From auditory perception to sentence comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16, 262–268. Fries, C. (1945). Teaching and learning English as a foreign language. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Hawkins, R. (2005). Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar (review). Language, 81, 754–757. Holland, J. H. (2006). Studying complex adaptive systems. Journal of Systems Science and Complexity, 19, 1–8. Hopp, H. C. (2010). Ultimate attainment in L2 inflection: Performance similarities between non-native and native speakers. Lingua, 120, 901–931. Jackendoff, R. (1987). Consciousness and the computational mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackendoff, R. (2002). Foundations of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Krashen, S D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon. Krashen, S. D. (1985). The Input Hypothesis: Issues and implications. New York: Longman. Lado, R. (1957). Linguistics across cultures: Applied linguistics for language teachers. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Lenneberg, E. (1967). Biological foundations of language. New York: Wiley. Marcus, G. (2004). The birth of the mind: How a tiny number of genes creates the complexities of human thought. New York: Basic Books. Meisel, J. M. (2013). The ZISA Project. In P. Robinson (ed.), The encyclopedia of second language acquisition (pp. 708–709). New York: Taylor & Francis/ Routledge. Nemser, W. (1971). Approximative systems of foreign language learners. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL), 9, 115–124. Pienemann, M. (1998). Language processing and second language development: Processability theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rothman, J., & Slabakova, R. (2018). The generative approach to SLA and its place in modern second language studies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40, 417–442.

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Schmidt, R. W. (1990). The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 11, 129–158. Selinker, L. (1972). Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL), 10, 209–231. Selinker, L., & Lamendella, J. (1978). Two perspectives on fossilization in interlanguage learning. Interlanguage Studies Bulletin, 3, 143–191. Sharwood Smith, M. (1994). Second language acquisition: Theoretical foundations. London: Longman. Sharwood Smith, M. (2017). Introducing language and cognition: A map of the mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sharwood Smith, M., & Truscott, J. (2014). The multilingual mind: A modular processing perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Truscott, J. (2015). Consciousness and second language learning. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Truscott, J., & Sharwood Smith, M. (2004). Acquisition by processing: A modular approach to language development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7, 1–20. Truscott, J., & Sharwood Smith, M. (2011). Input, intake, and consciousness: The quest for a theoretical foundation. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33, 497–528. Truscott, J., & Sharwood Smith, M. (in preparation). The internal context of bilingual processing. Amsterdam: Benjamins. White, L. (2003). Fossilization in steady state L2 grammars: Persistent problems with inflectional morphology. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 129–143.

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5 Qualitative Classroom Methods Peter I. De Costa, Wendy Li, and Hima Rawal

5.1 Introduction While earlier research on second language learning may have distinguished language acquisition from language use (Krashen, 1982), more recent conceptualizations of second language learning have come to refer to the field of second language acquisition (SLA) as second language studies (e.g., Gass, Lee, & Roots, 2007) and second language development (e.g., Larsen-Freeman, 2018). In light of this conceptual shift, the focus has also expanded beyond the individual language learner, with the research lens turning towards the language teacher and the wider social ecology in which the learner is embedded. In tandem with the broadening of the field, there has been a marked increase in the volume of qualitative research published since Lazaraton’s (1995) earlier lament over the paucity of qualitative studies published in applied linguistics journals. While the distribution of qualitative research across international journals remains uneven (Benson et al., 2009), with some journals such as Applied Linguistics, The Modern Language Journal, System, and TESOL Quarterly being more open to the publication of qualitative research than others, the field of SLA has also witnessed a proliferation of handbook chapters on qualitative research (e.g., Benson, 2012; De Costa, Valmori, & Choi, 2017; Harklau, 2011; Lew, Yang, & Harklau, 2018) and books (e.g., Holliday, 2007; Mirhosseini, 2017b; Richards, 2003) that focus exclusively on qualitative research. Importantly, and in line with the qualitative turn in research on second language learning, the classroom has become the centre of attention, as evidenced in books such as Allwright and Bailey’s (1999) Focus on the Language Classroom, Wallace’s (1998) Action Research for Language Teachers, and McKay’s (2006) Researching Second Language Classrooms. In short, as complex and messy as classroom research may be, a qualitative interest in

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what goes on in a second or foreign language classroom shows no signs of abating.1 However, as new research methods and methodologies emerge (e.g., Choi & Richards, 2016; De Costa, Rawal, & Zaykovskaya, 2017), it is vitally important that we take stock of what constitutes a contemporary language classroom, unpack what constitutes qualitative research, and explore the underpinnings for this upward trajectory in classroom-based research before examining some well-established methodologies, with accompanying exemplar studies, that have been adopted to investigate language-related classroom dynamics qualitatively. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of how to advance the classroom-based qualitative research (CBQR hereafter) agenda.

5.1.1  (Re)defining Language and the Language Classroom In a recent reconceptualization of the foreign language classroom, Collins and Muñoz (2016) questioned the future of the “bricks and mortar” language classroom in the twenty-first century, given the emergence of technological tools that afford new learning platforms such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the upward trend of self-directed and self-regulated learning. Indeed, the educational landscape has changed because even physical learning sites have expanded to include complementary weekend schools, community centres, religious institutions, and study abroad satellite campuses—sites where learning takes place formally and informally. Such an expanded understanding of what constitutes the language classroom is timely for two reasons. First, it is in line with the Douglas Fir Group’s (2016) reconceptualization of language learning and teaching along ecological lines, that is, one that reminds us of the needs to take into consideration how learning and teaching are shaped by forces that exist at the micro-level (e.g., individual, classroom), meso-level (e.g., school, family), and macro-level (e.g., community, nation) of society.2 Second, and as rightly observed by Harklau (2011), we need to look across a diverse set of populations and not just focus on US-based university English as a second language (ESL) classrooms. Thus, in line with Collins and Muñoz (2016), the Douglas Fir Group (2016), and Harklau (2011), we extend the notion of the language classroom to include the physical classroom and its digital corollary. We also conceive of the classroom as being nested within a school, community, and nation. In addition, we also take on an embodied and semiotic-inflected understanding of language (Atkinson, 2014), that is, one which includes non-linguistic  A second language refers to a language that is learned in the context where it is spoken; whereas a foreign

1

language is learned in the context where it is not generally spoken by the community (VanPatten & Benati, 2015).  To view the multifaceted nature of language learning and teaching see Douglas Fir Group (2016, Figure 1, p. 25) at

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elements such as prosodic, interactional, and non-verbal resources that are mobilized by learners and teachers in order to enhance the language learning experience.

5.2 Characteristics of Classroom-Based Qualitative Research Building on insights from Benson (2012) and Friedman (2012), we posit that CBQR is: • inductive, descriptive, and interpretive, with aims to provide detailed explanations of a phenomenon such as classroom behaviours. And in the spirit of open inquiry, pre-set coding schemes are eschewed in favour of coding categories that emerge from the data at hand. In addition, there is generally no attempt to control or manipulate variables because the goal is often to describe classroom routines. • examined from multiple perspectives, with several methods adopted to ensure data trustworthiness. For example, when exploring classroom processes, both emic (insider) perspectives, such as those of the teacher and students, and etic (outsider) perspectives, such as those of school authorities and parents, are sought to corroborate findings. • context dependent, in that the micro-level features of a classroom, such as individual student–teacher relationships, are examined in relation to meso-level features such as school-wide language curricula and macro-level national language policy.

5.2.1  Why is CBQR Becoming Increasingly Popular? Several reasons can be attributed to the increasing adoption of qualitative methods and methodologies in contemporary language classroom research. These reasons need to be considered in relation to an increasingly research-friendly social infrastructure available to teachers. Such a supportive system includes positive developments such as (a) greater involvement of teachers in collaborative research projects as teachers are engaged as coinvestigators, from planning stages to the interpretation of results; (b) the increasing availability of resources (e.g., methodology books and special issues of journals as described earlier) and courses that provide methodological guidance; and (c) wider acceptance and recognition that detailed longitudinal small-scale studies can be just as insightful as larger-scale experimental studies (Duff, 2007).

5.2.1.1  Clearer Guidelines As noted, there has been a proliferation of literature on how to conduct qualitative research in classrooms (e.g., Friedman, 2012; Holliday, 2007; Richards, 2003). The book- and chapter-length overviews have been

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accompanied by journal articles that provide succinct methodology-­ specific descriptions. The guidelines put out by TESOL Quarterly (Chapelle & Duff, 2003; Mahboob et al. 2016), in particular, have been instrumental in making both emerging and established classroom researchers think about best practices associated with carrying out qualitative research in an ethical manner.

5.2.2  Emergence of Social SLA Theories Given the strong emphasis on the social context of learning, CBQR has also received a boost from a stream of social theories that have been coopted to investigate the complex social dynamics of classrooms (for a greater discussion of alternative approaches to SLA, see Atkinson, 2011) as part of the broader social turn in SLA (Block, 2003; Firth & Wagner, 1997, 1998, 2006). This turn has witnessed the emergence of adjacent constructs such as (a) translanguaging (e.g., García, Ibarra Johnson, & Seltzer, 2016; Li, 2018), as researchers focus on the flexible instructional arrangements and communicative repertoires of multilingual students and teachers; (b) scales (De Costa & Canagarajah, 2016; Maloney & De Costa, 2017); and (c) emotions (De Costa, 2016a; De Costa, Rawal, & Li, 2018), as we attempt to account for the multiple spatio-temporal dimensions of language learning and teaching. In addition, a large body of classroom-based qualitative research is generally set against a backdrop that is characterized by contemporary concerns such as transnationalism (Duff, 2015) and neoliberalism (Li & De Costa, 2017) that intrude upon and shape the language learning and teaching processes. In the interest of space, and in spite of a growing adoption of social theories in SLA, we have identified three widely used social SLA theories—identity, language socialization and sociocultural theory—to which we now turn.

5.2.2.1 Identity Identity has emerged as a key concept in SLA research, and a whole body of classroom-based investigative work over the last two decades (De Costa & Norton, 2017; Li & De Costa, 2018; Norton & De Costa, 2018) has been undertaken through qualitative means. Underpinning much of the post-structurally-oriented identity research has been the central understanding that identity is a site of struggle and that the identities of both learners and teachers are fluid and multiple. As a consequence, a key concern has been to examine how teachers can create opportunities for learners to speak from a position of power in ways that improve their language learning outcomes (Luk, 2017). In line with digital developments, there has also been an expanding interest in the construction and performance of digitally mediated identities (Thorne, Sauro, & Smith, 2015), a line of research whose analytic rigour has been made possible through corresponding developments in multi-modal analysis (see section 5.7 below).

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5.2.2.2  Language Socialization According to Garrett (2017), language socialization researchers seek to understand how interactions shape the developmental trajectories of individuals as they negotiate larger systems of cultural meaning and practice. Generally longitudinal in nature, some CBQR is ethnographic in nature and takes into consideration the sociocultural and historical contexts within which learners are embedded as researchers examine how learner and teacher identities and linguistic practices are reproduced and transformed over the course of time (Mangual Figueroa & Baquedano-López, 2017). Particular attention is paid to social and institutional structures that intertwine with the everyday experiences of learners in the classroom (e.g., Duff, 2014; Zappa-Holman & Duff, 2015). Zappa-Holman and Duff (2015), for example, examine how the study abroad experience of three international Mexican students is inextricably linked to the complex social networks they developed both within and outside a Canadian university classroom.

5.2.2.3  Sociocultural Theory Originating primarily from the work of the cultural psychologist Lev Vygotsky, CBQR inspired by sociocultural theory also views learners as engaging in embodied interactions that are influenced by their broader cultural and interactional histories (Ohta, 2017). While earlier micro-level work looked at how teachers, peers, and learning materials create affordances to scaffold learning (e.g., Gibbons, 2003; Walqui & van Lier, 2010) and attendants’ zones of proximal development, more recent work has examined dynamic assessment (Lantolf & Poehner, 2014), concept-based instruction (van Compernolle, 2014), and the affective dimensions of teaching (Johnson & Golombek, 2016). Van Compernolle (2014), for example, explored the sociopragmatic development of French within a foreign language classroom.

5.2.3  Discourse Analysis in Classrooms The development of CBQR has moved in congruence with the emergence of increasingly sophisticated discourse analytic tools that allow for in-depth analyses of spoken and written texts (Benson et al., 2009) and “the construction of social realities through discourse” (Harklau, 2011, p. 178). In their review of discourse analysis in educational research, Warriner and Anderson (2017) underscore that micro-ethnographic analysis allows researchers to conduct fine-grained analysis of how interaction unfolds at the micro-­ interactional level of classroom events in ways that relate to macro-social educational issues. One study that adopts micro-ethnographic analysis is De Costa (2015a), who examined how the social imaginary of high performing scholarship students ultimately affected their foreign language anxiety. Equally influential in shaping the classroom interaction agenda has been the role of ethnomethodologically-inflected interaction analysis

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such as Conversation Analysis (Waring, 2017) that investigates how language, meaning, and learning are co-constructed in and as interaction in classrooms. Conversation Analysis provides effective tools to help us investigate how learners and teachers manage interactive processes in an orderly manner while negotiating social reality and social relationships that contribute to language development (for an overview of interactional approaches to classroom discourse and student learning, see Hellermann & Jakonen, 2017 and Miller, 2018). Crucially, discourse analytic methods in general are often used in conjunction with the social SLA theories in CBQR. Smotrova and Lantolf (2013), for example, paired Conversation Analysis with sociocultural theory in order to investigate speech–gesture synchronization in an EFL class in Ukraine.

5.3  Paradigm Matters As observed by De Costa, Valmori, and Choi (2017; see also King & Mackey, 2016; Lew, Yang, & Harklau, 2018; Mirhosseini, 2017a; Paltridge & Phakiti, 2015), we need to recognize that there are fundamentally different types of knowledge and different ways of knowing. Relatedly, and given the commitment of CBQR researchers to conduct contextually-situated, in-depth, and practically-relevant research, it is vitally important that we consider the distinction between ontology (a researcher’s views on the nature of reality) and epistemology (a researcher’s views on the nature of knowledge and how it can be acquired). To date, much of the SLA classroom-based research can be grouped broadly within two primary paradigms—­postpositivism and postmodernism—which are summarized in Table 5.1. In light of the significance of a researcher’s paradigm (i.e., her epistemology and ontology), there needs to be an alignment between how the classroom-based research is conducted (i.e., methodology) and the theory that guides a research study. Thus, an SLA researcher who conducts an investigation of language learner identity development would probably subscribe to a postmodernist paradigm that views identities as multiple.

Table 5.1.  CBQR paradigms (adapted from De Costa, Valmori, & Choi, 2017, p. 526). SLA Paradigms

Epistemology

Ontology

Postpositivist

Test hypotheses or look for cause– effect relationships in language learning

Seek an objective reality and a single truth

Postmodernist

Try to understand the experiences, abilities, perceptions, and performances of language learners

Seek subjective realities and multiple truths

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Methodologically, such an identity researcher would have a range of options to select from (see sections 5.4.1–5.4.6), resulting in paradigmatic (e.g., postmodernist) or theoretical (e.g., identity) or methodological (e.g., case study, ethnography, conversation analysis, grounded theory, narrative inquiry, action research) alignment. According to Benson et al. (2009), while some applied linguists expli­ citly identify their research as “qualitative”, many more simply use qualitative methods without using this term. This observation is noteworthy because it underlines the need to distinguish qualitative methodologies from qualitative methods. Qualitative methodologies, which are linked to a researcher’s theoretical framework and paradigm, generally comprise several qualitative methods, such as interviews and focus groups (Prior, 2018; Winke, 2017), as well as observations and fieldnotes (Copland, 2018; for an overview of individual qualitative methods and methodologies, see Friedman, 2012; Mirhosseini, 2017b). These methods are often used in conjunction with data sources such as classroom interactions (audio- and/ or video-recorded) and classroom artefacts (e.g., samples of written work). Given the methodology–method distinction, it is highly possible to conduct a postpositivist experimental study (a quantitative methodology) based in a classroom by adding a qualitative method, such as interviews, to investigate a phenomenon (for a comprehensive discussion of mixed methods research in language learning and teaching see Riazi, 2017).

5.4 Six Classroom-Based Qualitative Research Methodologies In this section, we review six qualitative methodologies—conversation analysis; narrative inquiry; case study; action research; ethnography; and grounded theory—that have been used to better understand language learning and teaching processes in second- and foreign-language classrooms. To illustrate each methodology, we also provide an exemplar study.

5.4.1  Conversation Analysis Conversational analysis, or CA as it is commonly referred, originates from the work of ethnomethodologists and examines the social organization of talk-in-interaction (Tsui, 2017). Because the analysis is done from an insider perspective of how participants understand and manage talk with their interlocutors, CA takes on an emic dimension. Through finegrained analyses of verbal and nonverbal interactions in conversations, classroom-based CA work forces us to reconsider some of the fundamental questions related to learning and teaching. These questions address concerns about what needs to be taught, how teaching is conducted, and how learning takes place (Waring, 2017). The ways that learners manage

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repairs,3 navigate tasks, and negotiate identities are but some of the many topics that have been studied in CA-oriented CBQR (see Kasper & Wagner, 2011, for a description of a conversation-analytic approach to SLA). It is important to note, as Kasper and Wagner (2011) observe, that CA is both a methodology and a theoretical approach to SLA, hence the term CA-for-SLA. More recent classroom-based CA research has focused on content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classrooms by investigating how teachers and students use language when they negotiate content knowledge (Hellermann & Jakonen, 2017). In line with this growing interest in CLIL classrooms, our exemplar study (Jakonen & Morton, 2015) examines problem-solving sequences during the interactions with peers in a history class. Exemplar Study 1 Jakonen, T., & Morton, T. (2015). Epistemic search sequences in peer interaction in a content-based language classroom. Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 73–94. Research Concerns The study sought to investigate three main aspects of interaction in terms of how students: • display their own and orient to others’ epistemic stance and status in relation to particular knowledge objects (whether “content” or “language” or other matters); • manage rights, responsibilities, and obligations towards what is known or unknown about the knowledge objects on which they focus; and • resolve knowledge gaps by using ordinary conversational resources of sequence organization. Theoretical Framework • A CA-based study of epistemics in content-based instruction. Methods • Video-recordings of history lessons taught through English to students. Participants • Students aged between fourteen and fifteen years at a school in Finland. Results • Students discovered their own knowledge gaps and deployed resources in resolving the gaps. • Their engagement in collaborative tasks enabled them to mobilize their linguistic, embodied, and artefactual resources in order to negotiate what they knew and did not know about the task.  Repair in CA occurs as part of the turn-taking system for talk-in-interaction. It is seen as one of the mechanisms

3

employed by language users to “maintain the course of action in their talk when some source of interactional trouble arises” (Hellermann, 2011, p. 147).

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5.4.2  Narrative Inquiry According to Barkhuizen (2014), SLA studies that use narrative inquiry may be referred in the published literature as life histories, language learning histories, language learning experience, diary studies, memoirs, language biographies, autobiographies, and autoethnography. This methodology, which is generally used to collect data outside the classroom, can illuminate our understanding of the complex learning and teaching dynamics of the classroom. Specifically, Lew, Yang, and Harklau (2018) maintain that narrative inquiry is most commonly used to document language learners’ and teachers’ development, practices, identity, agency, beliefs, emotion, positionality, and motivation. Benson (2018) posits two reasons for the strong uptake of narrative inquiry among qualitative SLA researchers. First, he credits a growing interest in examining language learning in its social contexts and environments. Second, he contends that the ways in which research findings are presented through narrative inquiry make it both accessible and convincing to consumers of research. Given that narrative inquiry draws from a rich intellectual history that sees stories as a fundamental way for people to make sense of the world, there are three broad ways that narrative data can be analysed. They include: (a) content (i.e., thematic) analysis of narratives (e.g., Xu, 2014); (b) discourse analysis of narratives that focuses on how narratives are discursively constructed by the story teller and the listener (e.g., Kasper & Prior, 2015); and (c) narrative analysis, which involves identifying narratives within collected data (e.g., from interviews) and representing findings as narratives in published work. It is on this third approach (i.e., narrative analysis) that our second exemplar study (Barkhuizen, 2017) is based. Barkhuizen thematically analysed tutors’ stories using a short story framework that focused on both content and context. The content aspect of the stories was analysed according to who (the characters), where (the place), and when (the time). Context was analysed in accordance with three scales: story (e.g., emotions and ideas); Story (e.g., assumptions of members of the communities); and STORY (e.g., language ideologies). Exemplar Study 2 Barkhuizen, G. (2017). Investigating language tutor social inclusion identities. The Modern Language Journal, 101(S1), 61–75. Research Concern • This narrative study sought to investigate how the identities of the tutors in the study were co-constructed during their narratives of their experiences of tutoring immigrant and refugee English language learners. Theoretical Framework • An identity framework guided this study. Tutor social inclusion was examined through how they narrativized their tutor identities.

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Methods • Interviews to elicit short stories (narratives) of their tutoring experiences. Participants • Forty-two English tutors in New Zealand participated in the larger study. The published study, however, focused on the stories of five tutors. Results • The tutors engaged in cognitive, sociocultural, and emotional work when helping their immigrant and refugee background learners achieve English learning and social inclusion goals. • Tutors’ identities were also constructed and reflected in the stories they told about their tutoring social inclusion experiences.

5.4.3  Case Study Case studies, as noted by Casanave (2015) and Duff (2012), are generally constituted by multiple data sources (e.g., interviews, documents, observations) and seek to describe and analyse particular bounded phenomena such as individual learners and teachers or a given classroom or school. The aim is, therefore, to provide in-depth portrayals of the chosen phenomena that are situated in particular contexts. Such a methodological approach provides “an understanding of individuals’ experiences, issues, insights, developmental pathways, or performance within a particular linguistic, social, or educational context” (Duff, 2014, p. 233). Applying this methodological principle to instructed second and foreign language contexts, case studies have been conducted on study abroad (e.g., Zaykovskaya, Rawal, & De Costa, 2017), linguistic minority (e.g., Kanno & Harklau, 2012), heritage language (Manosuthikit & De Costa, 2016), and international (De Costa, Tigchelaar, & Cui, 2016) students as well as novice teachers (e.g., Wolff & De Costa, 2017) in order to explicate how their identities and emotions are transformed over time and mediated by factors within their social contexts. Identity and accent development is the focus of our third exemplar study (Diao, 2017), which traces the language learning experiences of three US case participants studying abroad in China. Exemplar Study 3 Diao, W. (2017). Between the standard and non-standard: Accent and identity among transnational Mandarin speakers studying abroad in China. System, 71, 87–101. Research Questions • How do speakers of transnational Mandarin become aware of the culturally embedded concept of standard Mandarin?

Qualitative Classroom Methods • How do they negotiate their existing non-standard accent and (re)interpret the meanings associated with the accent while in China? Theoretical Framework • Language Socialization Methods • Diao’s participants were instructed on how to audio record their conversations with their Chinese hosts. • Interviews were conducted and language awareness questionnaires administered during the pre- and post-study abroad period. • Field data were collected via participant observations. • A detailed discourse-orientated approach was used to delve into the participants’ language use during their interactions with their hosts. Participants • The three focal participants went to Shanghai, China for their study abroad programme. Results • Participants’ use or rejection of the nonstandard Mandarin feature, the retroflex or dental merger, was affected by how they constructed their identities when studying abroad in China.

5.4.4  Action Research Given the growing interest in teacher agency (Li & De Costa, 2017) and teacher identity (De Costa & Norton, 2017), it is not surprising that an increasing number of teachers has chosen to undertake action research by investigating issues closely aligned with their own questions or concerns about their daily pedagogical practices (Allwright & Bailey, 1991). As noted by Burns and McPherson (2017), action research is often characterized by a cycle of planning, action, observation, reflection, and further action in order to enact pedagogical change and enhance a practitioner’s understanding of her classroom practices. Recent published work examined teachers’ experience with their documented implementation of new teaching methods and curricula (e.g., Calvert & Sheen, 2015; Lee & Wallace, 2018) and explored the importance of support factors at the macro-, meso- and microlevel (e.g., Burns & Edwards, 2016). Another key mounting concern is how action researchers manage the asymmetrical power relationship between teacher-researcher and their students. In line with these recent developments in action research, our fourth exemplar study (Galloway, 2017) addresses the challenges associated with taking on the dual role of teacher and researcher as she attempts to balance her workload and negotiate ethical issues related to the blurred line between teacher and researcher.

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Exemplar Study 4 Galloway, N. (2017). Researching your own students: Negotiating the dual practitioner-researcher role. In J. McKinley & H. Rose (eds.), Doing research in applied linguistics: Realities, dilemmas, and solutions (pp. 146–156). New York: Routledge. Research Questions • How do my students use English outside the classroom? • To what extent is the native English-speaking model, being taught by a native English speaker, meeting their needs? • What are their attitudes of the role of English as a global language? Theoretical Framework • Global Englishes (Galloway & Rose, 2015). Methods • A mixed methods approach was adopted: a questionnaire was administered and personal and focus group interviews were conducted. Participants • Third- and fourth-year university students in Japan who were enrolled in two content-based courses that Galloway taught for thirteen weeks. Because of her tenuous role as a teacher-researcher who was conducting research on her own students, Galloway’s extensive discussion of her researcher positionality points to her own key role as a participant in this study. Results • Managing the asymmetrical power relationship between teacher-researcher and the students proved problematic. • “Teacher research is research” that can help us better understand and improve teaching. It can also lead to better learning, and it has the potential to influence theory.

5.4.5 Ethnography A classroom ethnography, according to Bloome (2012), seeks to understand how social boundaries are defined and how meanings are constructed in relation to learning, achievement, and social identities. A core characteristic of a classroom ethnography is the sustained and prolonged engagement of the classroom by the researcher as she attempts to obtain an emic (insider) perspective of classroom interactions and subsequently triangulates a range of data sources that include participant observation, field notes, open-ended interviews, audio- or video-taped classroom interactions, and artefacts (Davis, 2012; Starfield, 2015). A classroom ethnography is not bound to just spoken interactions, however. Ethnographies related to L2 writing (e.g., Paltridge, Starfield, & Tardy, 2016) have also been conducted. What is more central to the ethnographic enterprise is the examination of

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classroom processes that reflect and refract wider social and historical practices and values (Lau, 2017). Adopting an ethnography of communication approach in her classroom-based study, Duff (2002), for example, investigated how broader social issues such as immigration influenced the ways in which student–teacher interactions developed in a Canadian high school. In a similar vein, our next exemplary study (Sayer, 2013), which is situated against a larger backdrop of globalization and immigration, examines how the use of a hybridized Spanish-English variety called TexMex served as a valuable mediating tool to help bilingual elementary school students in San Antonio, Texas. Sayer describes in detail the ethnographic, linguistic, and demographic contexts of the school, as the focal teacher and students used TexMex to navigate an academic context and standard languages. Exemplar Study 5 Sayer, P. (2013). Translanguaging, TexMex, and bilingual pedagogy: Emergent bilinguals learning through the vernacular. TESOL Quarterly, 47(1), 63–88. Research Questions • What role does language mixing have in the bilingual classroom? • Does it help emergent bilingual students learn standard English or Spanish? • Does it mediate other sorts of learning? If so, how? Theoretical Framework • Translanguaging Methods • Participant observation of the classroom over two years. The field notes and interviews were also recursively analysed. Participants • The focus of this ethnographic study was a second-grade classroom with a teacher and fifteen children. Results • The teacher’s use of translanguaging helped both the teacher and students to create discursive spaces by allowing the latter to exercise their bilingual Latinos status. • Translanguaging as a pedagogy also helped them to make sense of content and language learning as well as perform their desired identities.

5.4.6  Grounded Theory Grounded theory, according to Dillon (2012), seeks to generate theory inductively from data collected by creating categories that describe patterns in the data. This theory helps explain a process associated with particular phenomena. As the analytical process progresses, researchers

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become more familiar with the data and generate insights that can subsequently be used to facilitate further data collection and analysis, resulting in the emergence of a theory (see Hadley, 2017, for a comprehensive review of grounded theory in applied linguistics). Thus, more often than not, the whole process involves stepping back from the data after each cycle of coding, and writing about how a theory emerges from the analysed data (Baralt, 2012). Making a clear distinction between grounded theory (GT) as a general method and GT as methodology (GTM), Dillon (2012) points out that the latter warrants attention to the researcher’s philosophical and theoretical perspectives that undergird the study. With the notable exception of Hadley (2015), who adopts a grounded theory methodology to examine the strategies used by English for academic purposes professionals to survive in neoliberal higher education institutions, most SLA classroom researchers are, however, more likely to adopt a grounded theory as a general method (versus grounded theory as a methodology) approach. Hence, rather than developing a new theory, their objective is generally to explain the processes underlying a classroom phenomenon guided by an established theory such as possible selves theory (see Exemplar Study 6). For example, in her study of an EFL teacher in Slovakia, Kubanyiova (2015) adopted a language teacher cognition theoretical framework to study how her focal teacher used a mental image of her teacher self to shape her teacher-led discussions. Using a similar framework as Kubanyiova, our exemplar study (Valmori & De Costa, 2016) adopted a grounded theory method—in this case interview data that were subjected to a multi-stage coding process developed from Strauss and Corbin (1998)—to explore how foreign language teachers maintained their proficiency. Exemplar Study 6 Valmori, L., & De Costa, P. I. (2016). How do foreign language teachers maintain their proficiency? A grounded theory approach. System, 57, 98–108. Research Questions • How do foreign language teachers think their foreign language proficiency changes during the course of their teaching career? • How can foreign language teachers’ perceived proficiency shape their teaching? Theoretical Framework • Markus and Nurius’ (1986) possible selves theory and Kubanyiova’s (2009) possible language selves construct. Methods • In-person and Skype interviews with nine Italian foreign language (FL) high school teachers.

Qualitative Classroom Methods Participants • Nine Italian FL high school teachers who taught in either a college preparation or vocational school. Results • The foreign language teachers saw their foreign language proficiency as being a foundation for their teaching and central to their students’ learning. • The teachers thought that their foreign language proficiency can take different developmental trajectories, and they perceived proficiency changes as contributing to their self-efficacy.

5.4.7  Ethical Considerations Given the wider ethical turn in applied linguistics (e.g., De Costa, 2014, 2016b) and the growing calls for social justice in language education (e.g., Hawkins, 2011), SLA researchers have come to embrace the core ethical principles of maintaining respect for persons and yielding optimal benefits while minimizing harm and justice. However, in view of the emphasis on the social learning context and, correspondingly, the close social contact that classroom-based qualitative researchers have with their research participants, the former needs to make an added effort to ensure that the integrity and privacy of their participants is preserved at all costs. Beyond getting formal participant consent from an institutional ethical review board, qualitative researchers are increasingly expected to engage in researcher reflexivity and researcher positioning (Anderson, 2017; De Costa, 2015b). In other words, researchers need to see themselves as being a crucial part of the investigative process—a part that recognizes that they are individuals who have to be “explicitly and systematically accounted for and placed in [their] historical, political, and symbolic context” (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2007, p. 918), and thus be subjected to as much scrutiny as their participants.

5.5  Looking Ahead Undeniably, CBQR has made deep inroads in SLA over the past two decades since (a) Firth and Wagner’s (1997) exhortation to broaden the SLA base, which traditionally had been primarily cognitively- and quantitatively-oriented, and (b) more recent calls to bridge the gap between cognitive and social approaches to research in second language learning and teaching (Hulstijn et al., 2014). In a follow up to Richards’ (2009) review of three major journals—Applied Linguistics (AL), The Modern Language Journal (MLJ), and International Review of Applied Linguistics (IRAL)—which noted that qualitative research constituted less than twenty per cent of work in applied

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linguistics, Lew, Yang, & Harklau, 2018 observed that significant differences and patterns within journals still exists across journals, with some (e.g., IRAL) still publishing very little, while the percentage had gradually increased in others (e.g., MLJ, AL, and TESOL Quarterly).

5.6  Methodological Rigour Throughout this chapter we have reiterated that the methodologies chosen by classroom-based researchers are influenced by their respective research paradigms and the theoretical frameworks they adopt to guide their research. And while these primary concerns need to be and are taken into consideration in the research design process, one way to generate further interest in CBQR is to ensure that steps are taken to provide a transparent explanation of (a) how the research participants and sites were chosen and how the data collection tools were created, and (b) how the design plan was executed and how the data were analysed. As noted, qualitative researchers are also expected to discuss their researcher positionality and describe how they negotiated ethical issues that may have emerged as they go about making appropriate claims based on their findings. Together, a sound description of these measures would contribute to the credibility and dependability (Abbuhl & Mackey, 2017) of CBQR.

5.7  Methodological Innovation As the field of SLA evolves, CBQR needs to move in sync with a changing educational landscape. For example, in view of a greater digital presence in and across language classrooms, new data collection and analytic tools need to be created. Working within an SLA study abroad context, the special issue of System edited by De Costa, Rawal, and Zaykovskaya (2017), for example, describes how the study abroad research agenda can be advanced through methodological innovation (see Choi & Richards, 2016, for a discussion on innovation in applied linguistics research). This innovation could include exploring new forms of ethnography, such as connection ethnography (Wargo & De Costa, 2017), which allows researchers to trace the relationship between in-class literacy development and out-of-class digital literacy development, and new ways of analysing multimodal data as a result of shuttling by learners between different learning domains. Thus, a greater focus on the digital aspects of language learning would require more sophisticated analytic tools, such as those recommended by Norris (2014), who used Multimodal

Qualitative Classroom Methods

(Inter)action Analysis to investigate literacy development in a school setting (see Pirini, Matelau-Doherty, & Norris, 2018, for an overview of multimodal analysis). At the same time, and in order to manage “big” qualitative data that might emerge from classroom research (e.g., through a comparative analysis of several classrooms), computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) packages such as ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, and NVivo, would need to be used to effectively manage the data (AndersonGough, Edgeley, & Sharma, 2017; Paulus, Jackson, & Davidson, 2017). Methodological innovation can also include the use of methodologies such as autoethnography (e.g., Canagarajah, 2012) and poetic inquiry (e.g., Hanauer, 2012) to trace language learner and teacher identity development. In light of the growing transdisciplinary nature of SLA, some SLA researchers have started to move beyond a quantitative/qualitative binary and opted for an eclectic mixed methods approach (Riazi, 2017). Thus, rather than engaging in protracted conceptual debates, such researchers prefer a layered approach (King & Mackey, 2016; Subtirelu, Mackey, & Plonsky, 2017) in order to investigate a phenomenon from varied epistemological stances. However, such a methodological sea change will take time and will require SLA researchers to continually update their methodological knowledge and skills, as astutely observed by Gonulal, Loewen, and Plonsky (2017). In relation to carrying out qualitative research, academic upgrades could take the form of learning how to ensure that ethical research practices are in place (e.g., Sterling & Gass, 2017) and learning about how to respond to reviewer criticism when attempting to publish qualitative research (Gao, 2017). Fortunately, qualitative SLA researchers now have the option to participate in webinars, summer and winter school workshops, and pre-conference workshops. In 2018, for example, the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) organized two workshops for individuals interested in CBQR: Exploring Digital Tools for Qualitative Research and Integrative Mixed Methods Research Design and Analysis.

5.8 Conclusion In a recent forum article published in Applied Linguistics, Rose and McKinley (2017) warned of a possible two-tier system emerging in the field, one where language pedagogy-related research, once the cornerstone of applied linguistics, is in jeopardy of being consigned to education-focused journals that place practice at their core. Specifically, they cite Kramsch (2015), who claimed that applied linguistics has become highly intellectualized,

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resulting in a widened gap between researchers and practitioners. As a consequence, journals such as Applied Linguistics have become relatively inaccessible or irrelevant to the daily professional lives of language teaching professionals. Building on this lament, we like to close this chapter with a call to SLA researchers to heed this warning. While it would be safe to claim that SLA researchers are generally committed to studying the processes underlying language learning and teaching, we also need to remind ourselves about the need to consider the social utility (Ortega, 2005) of our research. One way, as we have argued throughout this chapter, is to engage in CBQR because it puts the language classroom front and centre. The onus then is on us to make our findings accessible and relevant to consumers of our work, be it fellow researchers, teachers, or policymakers. We must not forget that language learning and teaching is an endeavour that cuts across multiple scales.

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Duff, P. A. (2014). Case study research on language learning and use. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 34, 233–255. Duff, P. A. (2015). Transnationalism, multilingualism, and identity. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 57–80. Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1997). On discourse, communication, and (some) fundamental concepts in SLA research. The Modern Language Journal, 81(3), 285–300. Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1998). SLA property: No trespassing! The Modern Language Journal, 82(1), 91–94. Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (2006). Second/foreign language learning as a social accomplishment: Elaborations on a reconceptualized SLA. The Modern Language Journal, 91(S1), 800–819. Friedman, D. (2012). How to collect and analyze qualitative data. In A. Mackey & S. M. Gass (eds.), Research methods in second language acquisition (pp. 180–200). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Galloway, N. (2017). Researching your own students: Negotiating the dual practitioner-researcher role. In J. McKinley & H. Rose (eds.), Doing research in applied linguistics: Realities, dilemmas, and solutions (pp. 146–156). New York: Routledge. Galloway, N., & Rose, H. (2015). Introducing global Englishes. New York: Routledge. Gao, X. (2017). Dealing with criticism when publishing qualitative research. In J. McKinley & H. Rose (eds.), Doing research in applied linguistics: Realities, dilemmas, and solutions (pp. 225–234). New York: Routledge. García, O., Ibarra Johnson, S., & Seltzer, K. (2016). The translanguaging classroom: Leveraging student bilingualism for learning. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon. Garrett, P. B. (2017). Researching language socialization. In K. A. King, Y.-J. Lai, & S. May (eds.), Research methods in language and education (pp. 283– 295). New York: Springer International Publishing. Gass, S. M., Lee, J., & Roots, R. (2007). Firth and Wagner: New ideas or a new articulation? The Modern Language Journal, 91, 788–799. Gibbons, P. (2003). Mediating language learning: Teacher interactions with ESL students in a content-based classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 37, 247–271. Gonulal, T., Loewen, S., & Plonsky, L. (2017). The development of statistical literacy in applied linguistics graduate students. ITL: International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 168(1), 4–32. Hadley, G. (2015). English for academic purposes in neoliberal universities: A critical grounded theory. New York: Springer. Hadley, G. (2017). Grounded theory in applied linguistics research. New York: Routledge. Hanauer, D. I. (2012). Meaningful literacy: Writing poetry in the language classroom. Language Teaching, 45(1), 105–115. Harklau, L. (2011). Approaches and methods in recent qualitative research. In E. Hinkel (ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (Vol. 2, pp. 175–189). New York: Routledge.

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6 Experimental Studies in L2 Classrooms Charlene Polio and Jongbong Lee

6.1 Introduction 6.1.1  Defining Experimental Research The nature of experimental research is not controversial, but we begin here with Gass’ (2015, p. 101) definition in relation to applied linguistics: Experimental research is a way of determining the effect of something on something else. In other words, a researcher begins with an idea of why something happens and manipulates at least one variable, and controls others, to determine the effect on some other variable.

A simple example of a research question related to classroom instruction that might be answered by experimental research is: does the use of authentic listening materials instead of simplified listening materials result in improved listening comprehension for second language (L2) learners? In order to answer this question through a true experimental study, the researcher would have to manipulate the hypothesized cause (listening materials) on some effect (listening comprehension). Of course, many will immediately realize that designing a study to answer such a question is not without problems, but the hypothesized nature of the relationship between manipulated or independent variable (listening materials) and the outcome or dependent variable (listening comprehension) in an experimental study is one of cause and effect. Interestingly, Phakiti’s definition of experimental research in the TESOL Quarterly research guidelines (Mahboob et al., 2016, p. 46) of experimental research is as follows: Experimental research aims to determine causal-like relationships between one or more independent variables (e.g., types of instruction, feedback) and one or more dependent variables (e.g., language acquisition, learning behaviors). [emphasis added]

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Given the challenges of designing true experimental studies, which will be discussed here, Phakiti’s use of the term causal-like may be significant in that he may see true causal relationships as elusive, but he does not directly address the matter. In the past, experimental research was somewhat at odds with qualitative research, both in terms of ontology (one’s view of reality) and epistemology (what knowledge is). Experimental research falls within a postpositivist paradigm, which suggests that an objective and discoverable truth exists (its ontology) and that we can find out that truth by generating and testing hypotheses (its epistemology). Using the example of authentic listening materials, this means that under ideal circumstances, researchers should be able to determine the effect of authentic listening materials on listening comprehension. Qualitative research, on the other hand, falls within a postmodernist paradigm that rests on the ideas that there are multiple truths (its ontology) and that research should try to uncover the diversity of experiences and perspectives on a topic of inquiry (its epistemology). Despite seemingly irreconcilable differences between experimental and qualitative research, the field of applied linguistics has begun to accept mixed methods research, which in its true form integrates quantitative and qualitative data. Although not all studies that claim to be mixed methods truly integrate both types of data (Polio & Friedman, 2017), many researchers have recently promoted mixed methods research as a viable option for applied linguistics (e.g., Brown, 2014; Dörnyei, 2007; Hashemi, 2012; Hashemi & Babaii, 2013; Jang, Wagner, & Park, 2014; Riazi & Candlin, 2014). Indeed, we will later argue that mixed methods research that uses qualitative data in conjunction with an experimental, or quasiexperimental, study is ideal for examining language classrooms, and a few such studies are mentioned in this chapter. Not all quantitative research is experimental; much of it is causal-­ comparative. This means the study may have the same research question or hypothesis as an experimental study, but that the researcher does not manipulate the independent variable and instead measures or categorizes the independent variable as it exists in the research context. For example, to examine the effect of authentic listening materials, instead of manipulating the materials, a researcher might try to measure the amount of authentic materials used in various classes and try to find the relationship to students’ listening comprehension. In other words, if researchers want to study the relationship between an instructional variable and a learning outcome, they can design an experimental study where different groups receive different treatments, or they can look at the relationship between variables as they exist a priori. Causal-comparative studies often examine variables that can never be manipulated by the researcher, such as learner

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variables including gender or first language, but they can also include classroom variables that are impractical for the researcher to manipulate, such as student level of language anxiety. These types of studies will not be discussed further, but it is important to remember that they are less effective at showing cause–effect relationships because the researcher does not control the variables. We note, however, that some experimental studies often include a causal-comparative aspect such as Rassaei (2015), who studied the effect of recasts but at the same time included students’ cognitive style as a variable. In this chapter, we will review research that attempts to isolate the effect of some treatment or intervention in the classroom. This includes true experimental studies in which students are randomly assigned to different conditions. Random assignment is a hallmark of experimental research, but because random assignment is often impossible in classroom research, we have chosen to include quasi-experimental research in this review. Specifically, we have included studies that use intact classes as opposed to random assignment and studies that have no control group.

6.1.2  Defining Classroom Research Defining the scope of classroom research is not as easy as one might expect. For example, many studies of students who are learning in classrooms are designed so that the intervention actually occurs outside of the classroom. In the example of the hypothetical authentic listening materials study, students could complete all their listening activities online outside of the classroom. Written corrective feedback studies are often, but not always, designed so that the feedback is independent of what happens in the classrooms: teachers give feedback on papers and students revise the papers at home. In this chapter, we address only studies in which some or all of the intervention is done in the classroom or in which the intervention appears to be an integral part of the curriculum as opposed to an intervention that was added for research purposes. Other recent reviews (Collins & Muñoz, 2016; Mackey, 2017) define the scope of classroom research in similar, but not identical ways. In addition, there are many laboratory studies of classroom activities, and by laboratory, we mean studies done outside of the classroom independent of the curriculum. These laboratory studies sometimes examine activities or tasks that could easily be done in the classroom, but were not (e.g, the vocabulary study of Sonbul & Schmitt, 2013). Researchers often choose to conduct such studies in the laboratory, often a small room, for logistic reasons such as noise level or to control for issues such as time on task. These studies do not fall under what we consider to be classroom research even though they would fall under the scope of research on

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instructed second language acquisition (ISLA), which is defined by Loewen (2015) as “the systematic manipulation of the mechanisms of learning and/or the conditions under which they occur” (p. 2). In other words, most classroom experimental research is a subset of instructed second language acquisition, but it is possible that a study might have something other than student language learning as the dependent variable (e.g., anxiety level in Dolean, 2016). Finally, we want to point out that qualitative research, in contrast, is less likely to narrowly define the classroom. For example, in De Costa, Valmori, and Choi’s (2017) review of qualitative research methods for ISLA, they refer to the multifaceted nature of language learning and teaching as detailed in the Douglas Fir Group (2016) piece, which views the classroom as only a small part of the learning and teaching process situated within a larger community. Indeed, De Costa, Li, and Rawal (this volume, Chapter 5) problematize the notion of an intact class. Qualitative research often tries to examine the bigger, and more holistic, picture of a phenomenon, so limiting the scope of inquiry may not be desirable.

6.2 Historical Perspectives on Experimental Research in Language Classes In an early review of classroom research, Chaudron (1988) characterized classroom research as falling into four categories: psychometric, interaction analysis, discourse analysis, and ethnographic approaches. The latter three refer to various ways to describe classroom interaction and will not be discussed further, but what Chaudron referred to as the psychometric approach seems to refer to experimental research. He described studies that compare methods of teaching such as grammar-translation and audio­ lingual approaches (as in Scherer & Wertheimer’s, 1964, study of German foreign language instruction). Chaudron echoed Long’s (1980) earlier concern that many studies did not document what was actually happening in the classroom in these comparative method studies and instead discussed only the outcomes. The result was that there was no check on what intervention was really being implemented or how the teachers may have adapted the treatment. Beretta (1986) also addressed a problem with studies of classrooms that compared teaching methods, namely, that the tests of the outcome variables can be biased towards one of the methods or treatments. Beretta refered to a study comparing a Total Physical Response (TPR) class with a control class (Asher, 1972). One of the outcome measures used in the study was the same as one of the treatments used in the TPR class.

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In the area of interaction, because much experimental research has been conducted in the laboratory, Gass, Mackey, and Ross-Feldman (2005) stated that researchers needed to consider the applicability of interaction research to classroom settings. They thus conducted a study in which students of Spanish completed tasks either in a classroom with a teacher giving directions, or in a laboratory with the researcher meeting individually with pairs of students. They found differences in interaction across task types, regardless of whether the tasks took place in the laboratory or in the classroom, but little difference across the two contexts. Gass, Mackey, and Ross-Feldman are quick to point out that their results cannot be extended to all classrooms, but their study was an important step in considering how experimental findings might be replicated in a classroom setting.

6.3  Issues Involved in Experimental Classroom Research In order to explain key concepts related to experimental classroom research, we use an example of a quasi-experimental study on the use of authentic materials (Gilmore, 2011). Although it is challenging to design good quasi- or true experimental studies, Gilmore was able to deal with many of the problems that are not addressed in other studies. We first summarize the study and then point to the central issues in designing an experimental classroom study using details from Gilmore’s study as an example. Any limitations of his design are in no way a criticism of the study given that we see this study as one of the more rigorous experimental classroom studies available. Gilmore (2011) wanted to study the effect of input from textbooks versus input from authentic materials on learners’ communicative competence. He conducted a quasi-experimental study with sixty-two second-year English majors from four intact English classes in Japan. Two intact classes were randomly assigned to an experimental group, which received input mostly from authentic sources such as films, television shows, novels, and newspaper articles. The control group used their textbooks, which appeared to contain no authentic materials, and what Gilmore called contrived texts. The classes, both taught by the same teacher, followed these two different syllabi for ten months. The students were tested before and after instruction with eight tests that were purported to test their communicative competence. Gilmore found that the experimental group outperformed the control group on five of the eight tests. In any kind of experimental research, the issues that need to be addressed can be grouped into matters related to internal validity, appropriate measurement of the outcome variables, and external validity, each addressed in the next three sections. Regarding classroom research specifically,

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ensuring internal validity can be more challenging than in other types of language learning and teaching experimental studies. External validity, on the other hand, is often less of a concern. We address these three broad issues using Gilmore’s (2011) study as an example.

6.3.1 Operationalizing the Independent Variable and Ensuring Internal Validity In experimental research, the goal is to isolate the effect of the independent variable. The researcher has to first operationalize the variable. In Gilmore (2011), the author had to define what authentic materials are, explain how they are used in the experimental group, and detail how the intervention in the experimental group differs from that in the control group. After a discussion of how he defines authentic materials, Gilmore provides a two-page table of the themes of the sixteen units, including exactly which authentic materials were used for each unit. The control group used only materials from the textbook, which, the author explains, used contrived texts. Thus, he clearly articulates what is meant by authentic materials. What is less detailed is how the materials in the two classes were used. In other words, when one refers to the use of authentic materials, it would be helpful to operationalize what is meant by use. It is not clear that use could be explained in detail in a journal article, but in the dissertation version of the study (Gilmore, 2008) sample lessons that show how the materials were used are included. If a study is internally valid, it means that the outcome is due strictly to the manipulation of the independent variable. In laboratory studies, the researcher can control more of the variables than in a classroom study. Gilmore’s independent variable was the materials. To ensure that any outcomes were due to the materials, Gilmore randomly assigned the classes (not the students) to the experimental or control group. Although random assignment of individuals is preferable, it is often not possible in classroom research. When intact classes are used, there could be factors such as time of day that affect the outcome or, more likely, student placement into classes may be related to some factor that might affect achievement, such as the other courses they are taking. To deal with initial differences in students’ proficiency, Gilmore pre-tested the students and then used their pre-test scores in his statistical analysis (an analysis of covariance that takes into account initial group differences). Another common source of variability not related to the independent variable in classroom research is the teacher. Failing to consider the effect a teacher has on learning shows a misconception of the complexities of classroom learning. In Gilmore’s study, he taught both the control and experimental groups. Of course, this introduces a new source of

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variability: the teacher’s attitude towards the treatment. This variability is unavoidable in any study in which the teacher knows what is being studied. Gilmore (2011) acknowledges this problem and states that he attempted to teach all classes “with equal commitment and enthusiasm” (p. 813). What’s more, in a longitudinal classroom study, factors such as teacher commitment can change over time or create other sources of variability. For example, a teacher’s attitude might affect the students’ attitudes, and then that too becomes a source of variability. One way to address internal validity in experimental classroom research is to include observations that detail how the intervention was administered. (Recall Chaudron’s, 1988, and Long’s, 1980, early calls for documenting what happens in the classroom during experimental research.) This should be done in classroom research where a teacher other than the researcher administers the instruction. Gilmore did not include observation data because he was the instructor, but it might have been helpful to have another person periodically observe the classes and note any differences in instruction not related to the materials. Classroom observation data should also be used as a qualitative data source to triangulate the results of the experimental study or to explain them. For example, Gilmore found that the experimental group outperformed the control group on receptive vocabulary. He gives several reasons why this may have happened, but classroom observations could have provided more details on what the instructor did or did not do to focus the learners’ attention on the new vocabulary.

6.3.2 Measuring the Dependent Variables: Practicality, Validity, and Reliability Determining precisely what is an appropriate dependent variable in a classroom study is not always easy. In laboratory studies, the focus is often very narrow and thus easier to measure. In a classroom study, the researcher may want to study an outcome such as overall language learning. The researcher must then decide whether to focus on general proficiency or specific areas. Gilmore chose to examine the general construct of communicative competence as his dependent variable. Communicative competence is multifaceted and challenging to measure. Gilmore discusses the construct at length and ultimately chose to examine a large number—thirteen—of dependent variables that came from eight different tests as a way to assess communicative competence. For example, a version of the IELTS oral interview was used to collect some of the data, and the samples were rated on five different factors related to communicative competence. When choosing any measures of the outcome variable, the researcher has to consider practicality, reliability, and validity of the measures.

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Gilmore (2011) chose a range of tests that could be practically administered to the sixty-two participants. Of course, the tests and measures need to be valid. In other words, the tests need to measure what they say they are measuring. How to best measure communicative competence is beyond the scope of this chapter, but Gilmore makes an excellent case for why he chose the tests and measures that he did. Many studies do not clearly justify their measures, but Gilmore is very thorough in his discussion of how the tests assess the components of communicative competence including linguistic competence, pragmalinguistic competence, sociopragmatic competence, strategic competence, and discourse competence. The measures also need to be reliable. This means that the tests must be consistent and provide the same results each time. To assess vocabulary, for example, Schmitt’s Vocabulary Levels Test (Schmitt, 2000) was used. This is an established test used in other studies that, Gilmore reports, has a Cronbach alpha coefficient of over .9, which means the test is internally consistent. Other measures that involve rating responses need to be rated by more than one rater, and inter-rater reliability needs to be calculated. For example, the student role plays used to assess strategic and pragmatic competence had to be rated by more than one rater to ensure the reliability of the scores. Gilmore used the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient to check the inter-rater reliability. The coefficient values (conversational behaviour: r = .70; conversational management: r = .85) indicate that the scale was reliable.

6.3.3  External Validity, Ecological Validity, and Reductionism External validity refers to the extent to which the results of a study can be extended to other contexts. In Gilmore’s (2011) study, the issue is whether or not similar results would have been found in contexts outside of Japan. Gilmore explicitly addresses this issue saying: The same experimental treatment would probably lead to very different results with a group of learners from another culture; for example, it is unlikely that statistically significant differences in sociopragmatic measures would have been observed in European students, for which behavioural norms are closer to those of NSs [native speakers] of English. Similarly, the lack of statistically significant results for the grammar test may have been due to the already well-developed grammatical competence exhibited by the Japanese subjects.  (pp. 810–811)

Ecological validity is similar but refers to the extent that a study can be extended to real-life contexts. Slightly different definitions of this term exist, but one from social psychology is as follows:

Experimental Studies in L2 Classrooms Ecological validity is one aspect of external validity in which researchers ask whether research results represent what happens in everyday life. More specifically, ecological validity addresses whether an effect has been shown to operate in conditions that occur often for people in the population of interest. (Wegener & Blankenship, 2007, p. 275)

In other words, if the results of a laboratory study cannot be extended to the classroom, the study would not have ecological validity. We can also consider the extent to which the experimental conditions are similar to classroom, or real-life, conditions. If the conditions match, the study can be said to have an ecologically valid design (as discussed in Spinner, Gass, & Behney, 2013, in relation to eye-tracking studies). Ecological validity is generally an issue for laboratory studies because sometimes the intervention cannot be implemented in a classroom. Experimental classroom studies usually have ecological validity because they are conducted in real classrooms. Nevertheless, the intervention may not be practical for a wide range of classes. For example, a study such as Gilmore’s (2011) may have not been possible in a context with very large classes. Gilmore addresses ecological validity as well by explaining the difficulties related to implementing his syllabus. He states that using authentic materials can be very time consuming and that non-native speaker teachers may have difficulty assessing the pragmalinguistic or sociolinguistic appropriateness of the materials. One final concern of experimental research is reductionism. Reductionism is a concept that has been addressed throughout the social sciences, particularly by qualitative researchers, who often problematize the examination of specific phenomena in isolation. In applied linguistics, researchers working in a complex systems framework have argued against trying to understand a concept as complex as language learning by examining individual parts (e.g., Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). For example, had Gilmore (2011) measured only listening comprehension, we might not have seen what else was affected by the use of authentic materials. He chose, however, to use a broad construct as his outcome measure, but not all studies choose to do so.

6.3.4  Reporting and Replicability Experimental studies need not only to be well-designed, but they also need to be well-detailed so that they can be replicated and evaluated. Replication has been written about extensively over the last ten years in the field of applied linguistics (e.g., Porte, 2012). While most agree that true replication is not possible in the social sciences, there is consensus that researchers need to report their design, measures, instruments, and coding procedures so that they can be replicated and evaluated. Thus, a

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clear description of the intervention and the instruments used to assess outcomes is essential. Gilmore (2011) describes the experimental class in detail. Readers do not have access to the materials, but this is not surprising given copyright issues. We note that the dissertation on which the journal article is based includes some sample materials (Gilmore, 2008). Whether the intervention is described in enough detail to use in a replication study is not clear, but given probable space limitations, Gilmore’s description is quite thorough. Of concern also are the control group activities. Some studies do not describe the control group well, but Gilmore provides a relatively clear discussion of its activities. Because of a concern for clear reporting in experimental studies, a repository for materials was created. The digital repository of Instruments and Materials for Research into Second Language (https://www.iris-database .org/iris/app/home/index), usually referred to as IRIS, was created so that researchers could share materials. Gilmore (2011) uploaded his assessment materials to IRIS so they can be easily found by other researchers. In addition, given the importance of replication, many journals now have space on their websites for researchers to include materials used in their studies. Gilmore also included his assessment materials on the Language Learning website.

6.3.5  Ethical Concerns In order to address ethical issues in research, some journals, such as TESOL Quarterly, include ethical guidelines (Mahboob et al., 2016). However, we know of no particular guidelines for classroom-based L2 research, though there are numerous ethical concerns, and Gass and Sterling’s (2017) discussion of ethics in instructed SLA are quite relevant here. For example, the control treatments need to be ethical. The experimental group should not have more class time and more experienced teachers than the control group. Furthermore, the experimental group might have what is considered a better treatment. Gilmore (2011) proposes that authentic materials are better, so it may, at first, seem unethical to withhold the materials from the control group. However, we cannot be sure of the authentic materials’ benefits unless a study is done. In the same vein, it is possible that the experimental group was exposed to a risky or unattested teaching practice. Another way to think about this situation is to consider with what one is challenging the status quo. If we can justify the hypothesis that authentic materials are better, we can argue that without the study, the control group would use the current materials and thus would not be disadvantaged. Other related concerns for classroom research are confidentiality and whether the experimental test outcomes affect students’ grades. Students

Experimental Studies in L2 Classrooms

need to consent to share the results of any part of the study with their instructor. Conversely, they have the right to decide whether or not to share any class grades with the researcher. Gass and Sterling (2017) also mention the possibility of researcher bias. In some studies, such as (Gilmore, 2011), the researcher may be the teacher and treat students differently, even if unconsciously. Gilmore specifically addresses this concern, as mentioned earlier. Finally, researchers should work with teachers before proposing any study. It is unethical to force an instructor to take on a treatment that he or she thinks will not be effective or that will take away time from the current curriculum that focuses on goals related to how the students are assessed.

6.4  Review of Recent Studies 6.4.1  Search Process and Resulting Table In order to present an overview of experimental classroom research conducted over the last five years, we conducted a manual search of three journals: Language Teaching Research, the Modern Language Journal, and TESOL Quarterly. Searches of Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts using key words did not result in capturing the range of published experimental studies. The three journals were chosen because they publish empirical research related to language learning and teaching. Some journals that might include classroom research, such as Language Learning, where Gilmore’s (2011) study was published, focus more on laboratory research, while others, such as ELT Journal, which do publish some research studies, focus more on pedagogy. We felt that the three chosen journals would have the greatest numbers of experimental classroom studies. In addition, TESOL Quarterly publishes exclusively on the learning and teaching of English, while The Modern Language Journal strives to include a range of languages, and Language Teaching Research says that they welcome articles on languages other than English. The goal of this section is to provide novice researchers with an understanding of which variables have been studied in the classroom, and to provide all researchers with a list of studies that they can consult when doing similar research. Although we do try to generalize about the nature of experimental classroom research, the list of studies is not at all intended to be exhaustive and is most certainly biased by the journals that we chose to examine. As stated earlier, defining experimental classroom research is not straightforward, but we chose certain criteria when creating the list, and these criteria were related to the nature of the independent variable or intervention. The intervention had to be done in a real classroom, but could

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include a school computer lab. Furthermore, the focus had to include the teacher (or guest instructor) administering the intervention. For example, in Gilmore (2011), the focus was on the materials but involved the teacher teaching from those materials. We excluded studies such as Boers, Dang, and Strong (2017) in which teachers were given vocabulary materials to distribute but did not have to do anything with the materials. We also excluded studies such as Kim and Taguchi’s (2015) pragmatics study in which the independent variable was related to different task features as opposed to the implementation of the tasks. The end result of our search was a list of thirty studies shown in Table 6.1. We organized the studies by the independent variable and not the dependent variable. For example, the focus of a study might fall under general instruction technique, such as content and language integrated learning (CLIL) versus non-CLIL, but only one narrow dependent variable, such as formulaic sequences (Serrano, Stengers, & Housen, 2015), was measured. (Of course, this raises the issue of reductionism that we addressed earlier, namely whether or not examining only one dependent variable is sufficient to understand a complex phenomenon.) In addition to the independent and dependent variables, we included information about the context of the study and the design, as well as a column with additional comments.

6.4.2  Contexts for Classroom Research Not surprisingly, most of the research was conducted in English classes with nineteen studies done in EFL classes and six in ESL. The remaining five studies were conducted in Chinese, Japanese, French, and Spanish language classes. Not surprisingly, twenty of the thirty studies were conducted in a university setting, while seven were done in a secondary school setting and three in some other adult-learning context. We thus need to be careful about claims related to classroom teaching when so few studies were completed in K-12 settings or non-traditional adult language teaching contexts. The reason for most studies addressing English can be explained by the fact that we examined only English language journals, and researchers from non-English contexts who publish in English are likely to teach English. Similarly, most researchers teach at universities, and this probably accounts for the fact that so many of the studies were done in a university setting. In addition, university instructors tend to have more control over their own curriculum and can generally accommodate researchers or conduct research themselves. Furthermore, getting institutional review board (IRB) approval for research with minors can be challenging and might discourage some researchers. But we also note that we did not

Context

Private language school in Brazil

Hung (2017) TESOL Quarterly

CLIL

Drama-based English instruction

Taiwanese university Flipped versus EFL class conventional classroom

Heras & Lasagabaster Spanish-Basque (2015) speaking Language Teaching secondary school Research English as a foreign language (EFL) students in Spain

Galante & Thomson (2017) TESOL Quarterly

Overall instructional approach

Authors and journals

Independent variable (Treatment)

Table 6.1.  Recent experimental classroom studies.

Achievement and attitude

Affective factors and vocabulary learning

Fluency, comprehensibility, and accentedness

Dependent variable (Construct) Design

End-of-term exam that included vocabulary, listening, and speaking Survey on attitudes towards class and learning

Questionnaire and receptive and productive vocabulary tests

Each class had a different teacher to minimize teacher effect

Comments

Quasi-experimental: Researcher taught both intact classes classes. Longitudinal: eighteen Data was triangulated weeks of instruction with research reflections and observations

Quasi-experimental: Delayed post-test was intact CLIL and nonused. CLIL classes Researchers noted the Longitudinal: twelve problem of selfone-hour sessions selection into CLIL of physical classes education taught in English

Untrained raters Quasi-experimental: assessed speech intact classes samples on a Longitudinal: variety of tasks four months of using a Likert scale instruction

Measure of dependent variable

Taiwanese university Data-driven EFL students in learning grammar classes approach versus a traditional classroom

University-level Flipped versus students studying traditional Spanish in the US classroom

Beginning Japanese Online versus language students face-to-face at a US university instruction

University Spanish/ Catalan-speaking EFL students in Spain

Lin (2016) TESOL Quarterly

Moranski & Kim (2016) The Modern Language Journal

Sato, Chen, & Jourdain (2017) The Modern Language Journal

Serrano, Stengers, & Housen (2015) Language Teaching Research

Oral proficiency and learners’ perceptions of oral proficiency

Learning of Spanish se and student attitude

Student learning motivation and selfefficacy regarding grammar

Dependent variable (Construct)

Time allocation Acquisition of formulaic Proficiency level sequences

Context

Independent variable (Treatment)

Authors and journals

Table 6.1.  (cont.)

Quasi-experimental: intact classes Longitudinal: three sessions over ten weeks

Design

Quasi-experimental: self-selection into sections Longitudinal: fifteen weeks

The same teacher taught both sections The treatment conditions are well described

Follow-up interview with instructor to discuss Hawthorne effect possibilities Time on task was checked for the two conditions

The teachers were rotated throughout the treatment to avoid a teacher affect

Comments

Coding of formulaic Quasi-experimental: Both classes had similar structures in an oral intact classes curricula, but the narrative Longitudinal: the two intensive class have sections both had more audio-visual a total of 110 hours activities to make distributed over 4.5 them more engaging weeks or 7 months during the extended classes

Oral interviews and questionnaires

Test of metalinguistic Quasi-experimental: knowledge, a intact classes grammaticality Treatment was judgment test, and administered over production test three days

Questionnaire

Measure of dependent variable

University English as a second language (ESL) students at a US university

Secondary school The use of Romanian songs students studying French

Bardovi-Harlig, Mossman, & Vellenga (2015) Language Teaching Research

Dolean (2016) Language Teaching Research

Instruction of pragmatic routines

University EFL students in Japan

Aubrey (2017b) Language Teaching Research

Intercultural contact

US middle and high Sheltered school content instruction classes observation protocol (SIOP).

Specific instructional technique: oral skills

Short, Fidelman, & Louguit (2012) TESOL Quarterly

Anxiety

Use of pragmatic routines

Flow and engagement

Reading, writing, and oral proficiency

Quasi-experimental: two school districts participated in the experimental condition and one in the control Longitudinal: two years

The authors described in detail how the three districts compared on various features Classroom observations were included

Quasi-experimental: intact classes Short term: four fiftyminute lessons

An adapted version of Quasi-experimental: Foreign Language intact classes Classroom Anxiety Short term: five Scale lessons over five weeks

Use of targeted expressions in a simulated conversation

The same teacher taught the four classes The experimental and control groups were from different schools

Flow: a questionnaire Quasi-experimental: The author compared Engagement: number intact classes the two groups on a of words and turns Short term: treatment number of variables administered over to show that they five weeks were similar Author addresses ecological validity

State-mandated English test

Japanese university EFL students

Secondary Chinese EFL students

Japanese university EFL students

Hamada (2016) Language Teaching Research

Li (2012) TESOL Quarterly

Saito & Saito (2017) Language Teaching Research

Tavakoli, Campbell, & UK university ESL McCormack (2016) students TESOL Quarterly

Context

Authors and journals

Table 6.1.  (cont.)

Dependent variable (Construct)

Acquisition of request supportive moves

Awarenessraising and fluency strategy training

Fluency, accuracy, and complexity of oral speech

Design

A discoursecompletion test

A large number of measures

The researcher taught the lessons

The same test was used for the pre- and post-test

Comments

Quasi-experimental: intact classes with nationalities balanced Longitudinal: treatment administered over four weeks

Quasi-experimental: Both classes had the intact classes same teacher Short term: three hours of instruction over six weeks

Quasi-experimental: intact classes Short term: three forty-five-minute lessons over three weeks

Dictation-cloze test Quasi-experimental: Multiple choice no control group listening Short-term: comprehension test shadowing lessons were twice a week for a month

Measure of dependent variable

Suprasegmental Comprehensibility, word A reading aloud instruction stress, rhythm, and task evaluated on intonation comprehensibility and an acoustic analysis of the speech samples.

Pragmatic instruction

Shadowing Phoneme perception Proficiency level Listening comprehension

Independent variable (Treatment)

University EFL students in Taiwan

Sun (2017) Language Teaching Research

Listening skills and strategy use

Amount of verbal communication Learner investment

Variations of a picture book reading task

Vocabulary learning

Learning of twenty target words

Using visual Learning of vocabulary imagery to teach abstract vocabulary

Tian & Macaro (2012) University EFL Lexical focus Language Teaching students in China on form, Research language of focus on form, proficiency level

US university students in Spanish classes

Farley, Ramonda, & Liu (2012) Language Teaching Research

Specific instructional technique: vocabulary

Taiwanese university Interactive EFL students versus strategies approach to teaching listening

Yeldham (2016) TESOL Quarterly

Form-focused versus meaningfocused instruction

Japanese high school EFL students

Tomita & Spada (2013) The Modern Language Journal

A receptive vocabulary test

Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (Paribakht & Wesche, 1997)

Receptive vocabulary test

A general listening proficiency test. Test of bottom-up listening skills. Questionnaire about strategies.

Number of turns

Experimental: randomization by proficiency level Short term: 1.5 hours a week for six weeks

Quasi-experimental: intact classes Short term: three 100-minute sessions over three weeks

Quasi-experimental: intact classes One brief treatment session

Quasi-experimental: intact classes Longitudinal: twentytwo hours of instruction

A delayed post-test was used The same teacher taught in all conditions

A delayed post-test was included

Delayed post-test was included

Experimental: random The study also included assignment a qualitative analysis Four fifty-minute of the students’ treatment sessions interaction and of interviews

Context

Canadian university ESL classes

Korean middle Pre-task school EFL classes modelling

Kartchava & Ammar (2014b) Language Teaching Research

Kim (2013) TESOL Quarterly

Grammar learning and noticing

Dependent variable (Construct)

Attention to question forms and development of question forms

Type of oral Grammar learning and corrective noticing feedback and grammatical structure

Canadian university ESL classes

Type of oral corrective feedback and learner beliefs

Independent variable (Treatment)

Kartchava & Ammar (2014a) TESOL Quarterly

Specific instructional technique: grammar

Authors and journals

Table 6.1.  (cont.)

Design

Focus on questions during a thinkaloud planning session Question use on an oral production task

Quasi-experimental: intact classes Longitudinal: treatment administered over five weeks

Learners’ use of past Quasi-experimental: tense and question intact classes formation on a Short-term: two variety of oral tasks 120-minute Reflection sheets treatment sessions

Learners’ use of past Quasi-experimental: tense and question intact classes formation on a Short-term: two variety of oral tasks 120-minute Reflection sheets treatment sessions

Measure of dependent variable

Included a delayed post-test

There is no detailed analysis of what actually happened in the classroom No delayed post-test

There is no detailed analysis of what actually happened in the classroom No delayed post-test

Comments

US university Grouping of students studying Chinese Chinese characters based on radicals

Xu, Chang, & Perfetti (2014) The Modern Language Journal

Reading strategy instruction

EFL Iranian adult learners at a private language school

Karimi (2015) The Modern Language Journal

Specific instructional technique: reading

Community-based ESL classes for adults in Canada

Spada et al. (2014) Language Teaching Research

Learning of Chinese characters

Comprehension of multiple documents Self-reported use of strategies

Integrated Learning of passive versus construction isolated form-focused instruction

Adult Iranian Corrective The use of articles students studying feedback in EFL as part the form of of their job recasts and requirements cognitive style

Rassaei (2015) Language Teaching Research

Lexical decision, sound matching, and meaning matching tasks and a written production task

A true–false test that involved inference across texts A questionnaire

Experimental: appears Included a delayed to be random post-test assignment Each treatment consisted of four learning sessions

Experimental: random Data triangulated using assignment think-aloud sessions Longitudinal: ten with some of the ninety-minute participants sessions

Independent coders evaluated materials for features of the independent variable, but no videoing was allowed. Teachers kept logs on how and if they deviated from the lesson. A delayed post-test was included

Quasi-experimental: Classes were observed intact classes for the presence of One treatment session recasts

Error-correction task Quasi-experimental: and oral production intact classes task Short term: twelve hours of class over three days

Article use on an oral and written production task

Context

University EFL students in Sri Lanka

Vietnamese university EFL students

Iranian university EFL students

De Silva (2015) Language Teaching Research

Nguyen & Gu (2013) Language Teaching Research

Rahimi (2013) Language Teaching Research

Specific instructional technique: writing

Authors and journals

Table 6.1.  (cont.)

Dependent variable (Construct)

Feedback training

Strategy instruction

Types of feedback, writing quality, and incorporation of feedback

Writing quality and selfregulation strategies

Writing strategy Strategy use. instruction Writing performance.

Independent variable (Treatment)

Coding of student comments and performance on an essay

A written production test and a questionnaire

Questionnaire Two written tasks

Measure of dependent variable Comments

One of the researchers co-taught the experimental group and did three observations of the two control groups A delayed writing test was included Experimental: random The treatment was assignment added, and there was Two training sessions no activity for the control group

Quasi-experimental: intact classes Longitudinal: nine sessions over eight weeks

Experimental: random It is not clear assignment that classroom Longitudinal: observations were instruction was over done twenty-four weeks

Design

Experimental Studies in L2 Classrooms

search education or bilingual education journals that tend to focus on young or adolescent learners. It was interesting to see that the majority of studies were conducted in EFL classes. In general, many EFL classes are larger than ESL classes, so researchers can have a greater number of participants. Interestingly, one could argue that research in an EFL setting may have fewer threats to internal validity because students are less likely to use English outside of class on a regular basis. While it may or may not be true, Hamada (2016) explicitly stated that she assumed that the students in her study had no exposure to English outside the classroom.

6.4.3 Focus of Classroom Research: Independent and Dependent Variables The second column in Table 6.1 lists the independent variable for the study. The first eight studies test some kind of broad instructional approach, including drama-based instruction, CLIL, flipped or online instruction, data-driven learning, and sheltered instruction. In each case, the teaching approach under investigation in the experimental group was compared to a control group that received instruction that was the status quo in the particular institution. This group also includes a study (Serrano, Stengers, & Housen, 2015) that compares two groups based on the distribution of instruction. In other words, both groups received the same type and amount of instruction, but in one case, the instruction was distributed over 4.5 weeks and in the other over seven months. The next ten studies focus on the teaching of listening and speaking by testing a variety of specific interventions such as intercultural contact (i.e., contact with native speakers of the L2), suprasegmental instruction, the teaching of pragmatic routines, and even shadowing (i.e., repeating language while listening). In all cases except the shadowing study (Hamada, 2016), a control group who received regular instruction was used for comparison. Tomita and Spada’s (2013) was a repeated measures study, discussed further below, where all students participated in both conditions. They compared students in focus on meaning and focus on form conditions. Despite a large number of studies in the field that examine vocabulary learning and instruction, we found only three studies that we considered to be classroom research. Many studies of vocabulary learning study materials or activities that can be completed by students without their teachers (e.g., Laufer & Rozovski-Roitblat, 2015). We found four that focused on grammar. There were so few studies most likely because studies of learning specific grammar points are often done in a lab setting. Finally, we found two studies about reading instruction and three about writing. Of these five studies, three examined some type of strategy instruction.

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We also included a column showing what the dependent variable and outcome measure were for each study. Twenty-six of the thirty studies measured some type of learning as evidenced by a general proficiency test or the learning of specific vocabulary or grammatical items. The focus of the learning measures varies considerably and includes constructs such as general oral or written proficiency, fluency, comprehensibility, the acquisition of formulaic sequences or specific grammatical items, phoneme perception, the complexity of oral speech, and so on. Four studies measured only some other type of outcome, including flow and engagement (Aubrey, 2017a), anxiety (Dolean, 2016), self-efficacy (Lin, 2016), and amount of verbal communication (Tomita & Spada, 2013). Five of the twenty-six studies that examined learning also included some other type of dependent variable such as learner attitude (Hung, 2017) or strategy use (Nguyen & Gu, 2013). For these non-learning related outcomes, usually questionnaires were used, but Aubrey and Tomita and Spada also used the number of turns in oral interaction as a measure. Of the twenty-six studies that measured a learning outcome, eight used a delayed post-test. Delayed post-tests are used to see if any effects of the independent variable last for any length of time after the treatment is complete. They are often used in vocabulary research as the goal of vocabulary teaching is the retention of new words, and, indeed, all three vocabulary studies in Table 6.1 included delayed post-tests. Heras and Lasagabaster (2015) studied the effects of CLIL and also included a delayed post-test. The other studies that used delayed post-tests measured grammar learning outcomes (Spada et al., 2014), Chinese character learning (Xu, Chang, & Perfetti, 2014), and writing performance (Nguyen & Gu, 2013). In general, including a delayed post-test when studying any learning outcome is good practice.

6.4.4 Design Only six of the thirty studies randomly assigned participants to groups and can thus be considered true experimental studies. The lack of random assignment in classroom research is quite common because of the logistic problems in randomly assigning students to different classes. Only one of the studies (Tomita & Spada, 2013) was a repeated measures study. In a repeated measures study, students first participate in one intervention and then another, and the effects of the intervention are compared for each student. For this type of design to be possible, the first intervention should have no lasting effect, otherwise the research would not be able to determine the source of the cause. Tomita and Spada were able to use a repeated measures design because their study was one of the few that did not examine learning. Instead, they were interested in how formversus meaning-focused activities affected learner engagement, and they

Experimental Studies in L2 Classrooms

examined the number of student turns in an interaction as a measure of engagement. The presumption is that learners will start with a clean slate during the second activity. The order of activities needs to be counterbalanced in any repeated measures study because there is always a possibility of the first activity affecting performance on the second, even though that effect should not be strong or long-lasting. The twenty-four remaining studies can be considered quasi-experimental because intact classes were used. Only one of these studies, Hamada’s (2016), used no control group. Both types of quasi-experimental studies can be rigorously designed. As discussed earlier, when there is no random assignment, threats to internal validity increase because outside variables related to how students are placed in a class, for example, can influence the outcome. The use of pre-test in these cases can help show that groups from intact classes are similar, and, in fact, most of the studies used a pretest to analyse gains. Other ways that the studies addressed the problem of intact classes included using the same teacher for each group (Sato, Chen, & Jourdain, 2017) or rotating the teachers (Lin, 2016). Aubrey (2017a) compared his groups on a number of variables to show how they were similar. Quasi-experimental studies without a control group should include qualitative data to help triangulate the results of the pre-test–post-test design. The Hamada (2016) study was particularly problematic because not only was there no control, but no qualitative data were reported and the same test was used for the pre- and post-tests, so there could have been a practice effect from students having taken the same test a month earlier. The median sample size for the studies was sixty-seven across all groups. One study, that of Short, Fidelman, and Louguit (2012) was an outlier with their cross-school-district study of 1,444 students. Only one of the thirty studies used no inferential statistics. Most of the studies used parametric tests, such as ANOVA or t-tests, to test for group differences, but a few used non-parametric tests. What was surprising was that only two studies used ANCOVA, which can account for initial group differences. Moranski and Kim (2016) added a multiple regression to better understand what might predict student attitudes and Spada et al. (2014, pp. 460–461) used multi-level modelling (MLM). They give a clear explanation as to why they used this technique: MLM has several advantages over other statistical procedures traditionally used in instructed SLA research. First, it allows for the analysis of individual learner development by examining nested data (e.g., pre, post and delayed tests within one participant), rather than analysing aggregated mean points. Second, MLM takes into consideration pretest differences as a covariate. Finally, MLM tolerates missing data because treating multiple measurements as nested data makes it possible to analyse all the data regardless of the number of measurement points (Barkaoui, 2010;

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Luke, 2004; Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007). This is particularly advantageous in classroom research where attrition rates can be high as experienced in this study.

MLM is certainly something that future longitudinal studies should consider. In terms of length, the treatment periods ran from one single session up to two years with most being what we might call short-term studies with periods of treatment running from two to eight weeks, but seven of the studies ran for four months or more. It is not necessarily the case that longer is better in experimental research, but it was good to see that most studies went beyond one class session.

6.5 Conclusion We have presented a summary of the methodological issues related to conducting experimental classroom research. In contrast to De Costa, Li, and Rawal (this volume, Chapter 5), we did not discuss the range of theoretical frameworks. This was because the range of topics covered in the studies did not suggest any type of unified framework. Generally speaking, the frameworks tended to be more cognitively oriented than socially, but see Tomita and Spada (2013) for an exception. Therefore, we will not discuss where the field should go in terms of topics or research questions, but rather end with a list of suggestions about how to move forward methodologically. First, replication is challenging, if not impossible, when it comes to classroom research. Nevertheless, researchers need detailed reporting of their interventions and assessments. By uploading materials to IRIS, researchers can encourage replication. Given the dearth of research on languages other than English, replication in non-English classrooms should be done. Replication would also expand the generalizability of the studies to ensure greater external validity. Replication of laboratory studies in the classroom context, such as those done by Gass, Mackey, and Ross-Feldman (2005), would increase the ecological validity of those lab-based studies to show that the interventions are practical and usable. Second, researchers might want to consider more sophisticated statistical techniques that can be used with longitudinal data. Most studies reviewed here included both a pre- and post-test, yet only one used MLM. Barkaoui (2014) reviews analyses that can be used with longitudinal data, including MLM, and this review is a useful starting point. We also encourage random assignment of participants where possible, but given that it may not be possible, more sophisticated statistics can help account for initial group differences.

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Finally, in future research, more qualitative data should be used in conjunction with quantitative data. At the very least, observations of the interventions should be included as was done in Rassaei (2015) to ensure that the students were receiving recasts. Most studies did not include observations, but some included other qualitative data. Hung (2017), for example, taught both the experimental and control groups in her study and collected reflection data on her teaching. Although this was a good start, she did not systematically report the data. These studies used qualitative data as a check, but other studies, not included in the scope of our search, can serve as examples of mixed methods studies that collect and integrate a range of quantitative and qualitative data. Yasuda (2011), for example, studied genre-based instruction and included both text analyses and interview data in her study. Although well-designed mixed methods studies can be challenging (Bryman, 2007), future studies might better integrate quantitative and qualitative data. Classroom research is without a doubt an area that would benefit from the increased attention in applied linguistics to mixed methods research (e.g., Brown, 2014; Dörnyei, 2007; Polio & Friedman, 2017).

References Asher, J. J. (1972). Children’s first language as a model for second language learning. The Modern Language Journal, 56, 133–139. Aubrey, S. (2017a). Measuring flow in the EFL classroom: Learners’ perceptions of inter- and intra-cultural task-based interactions. TESOL Quarterly, 51(3), 661–692. Aubrey, S. (2017b). Inter-cultural contact and flow in a task-based Japanese EFL classroom. Language Teaching Research, 21(6), 717–734. Bardovi-Harlig, K., Mossman, S., & Vellenga, H. E. (2015). The effect of instruction on pragmatic routines in academic discussion. Language Teaching Research, 19(3), 324–350. Barkaoui, K. (2010). Explaining ESL essay holistic scores: A multilevel modeling approach. Language Testing, 27, 515–535. Barkaoui, K. (2014). Quantitative approaches for analyzing longitudinal data in second language research. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 34, 65–101. Beretta, A. (1986). Program-fair language teaching evaluation. TESOL Quarterly, 20(3), 431–444. Boers, F., Dang, T. C. T., & Strong, B. (2017). Comparing the effectiveness of phrase-focused exercises: A partial replication of Boers, Demecheleer, Coxhead, and Webb (2014). Language Teaching Research, 21(3), 362–380. Brown, J. (2014). Mixed methods research for TESOL. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Hashemi, M. R. (2012). Reflections on mixing methods in applied linguistics research. Applied Linguistics, 33, 206–212. Hashemi, M. R., & Babaii, E. (2013). Mixed methods research: Toward new research designs in applied linguistics. The Modern Language Journal, 97, 828–852. Heras, A., & Lasagabaster, D. (2015). The impact of CLIL on affective factors and vocabulary learning. Language Teaching Research, 19(1), 70–88. Hung, H. T. (2017). Design-based research: Redesign of an English language course using a flipped classroom approach. TESOL Quarterly, 51(1), 180–192. Jang, E. E., Wagner, M., & Park, G. (2014). Mixed methods research in language testing and assessment. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 34, 123–153. Karimi, M. N. (2015). EFL learners’ multiple documents literacy: Effects of a strategy-directed intervention program. The Modern Language Journal, 99(1), 40–56. Kartchava, E., & Ammar, A. (2014a). Learners’ beliefs as mediators of what is noticed and learned in the language classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 48(1), 86–109. Kartchava, E., & Ammar, A. (2014b). The noticeability and effectiveness of corrective feedback in relation to target type. Language Teaching Research, 18(4), 428–452. Kim, Y. (2013). Effects of pretask modeling on attention to form and question development. TESOL Quarterly, 47(1), 8–35. Kim, Y., & Taguchi, N. (2015). Promoting task-based pragmatics instruction in EFL classroom contexts: The role of task complexity. The Modern Language Journal, 99(4), 656–677. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Research methodology on language development from a complex systems perspective. The Modern Language Journal, 92(2), 200–213. Laufer, B., & Rozovski-Roitblat, B. (2015). Retention of new words: Quantity of encounters, quality of task, and degree of knowledge. Language Teaching Research, 19(6), 687–711. Li, Q. (2012). Effects of instruction on adolescent beginners’ acquisition of request modification. TESOL Quarterly, 46(1), 30–55. Lin, M. H. (2016). Effects of corpus-aided language learning in the EFL grammar classroom: A case study of students’ learning attitudes and teachers’ perceptions in Taiwan. TESOL Quarterly, 50(4), 871–893. Loewen, S. (2015). Introduction to instructed second language acquisition. New York: Routledge. Long, M. H. (1980). Inside the “black box”: Methodological issues in classroom research on language learning. Language Learning, 30(1), 1–42. Luke, D. (2004). Multilevel modeling. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Mackey, A. (2017). Classroom-based research. In S. Loewen & M. Sato (eds.), The Routledge handbook of instructed second language acquisition (pp. 541– 561). New York: Routledge. Mahboob, A., Paltridge, B., Phakiti, A., Wagner, E., Starfield, S., Burns, A., …, De Costa, P. I. (2016). TESOL Quarterly research guidelines. TESOL Quarterly, 50(1), 42–65. Moranski, K., & Kim, F. (2016). “Flipping” lessons in a multi-section Spanish course: Implications for assigning explicit grammar instruction outside of the classroom. The Modern Language Journal, 100(4), 830–852. Nguyen, L. T. C., & Gu, Y. (2013). Strategy-based instruction: A learnerfocused approach to developing learner autonomy. Language Teaching Research, 17(1), 9–30. Paribakht, T. S., & Wesche, M. (1997). Vocabulary enhancement activities and reading for meaning in second language vocabulary development. In J. Coady & T. Huckin (eds.), Second language vocabulary acquisition: A rationale for pedagogy (pp. 174–200). New York: Cambridge University Press. Polio, C., & Friedman, D. A. (2017). Understanding, evaluating, and conducting second language writing research. New York, NY: Routledge. Porte, G. (2012). Replication research in applied linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rahimi, M. (2013). Is training student reviewers worth its while? A study of how training influences the quality of students’ feedback and writing. Language Teaching Research, 17(1), 67–89. Rassaei, E. (2015). Recasts, field dependence/independence cognitive style, and L2 development. Language Teaching Research, 19(4), 499–518. Riazi, A. M., & Candlin, C. N. (2014). Mixed-methods research in language teaching and learning: Opportunities, issues and challenges. Language Teaching, 47, 135–173. Saito, Y., & Saito, K. (2017). Differential effects of instruction on the development of second language comprehensibility, word stress, rhythm, and intonation: The case of inexperienced Japanese EFL learners. Language Teaching Research, 21(5), 589–608. Sato, E., Chen, J. C. C., & Jourdain, S. (2017). Integrating digital technology in an intensive, fully online college course for Japanese beginning learners: A standards-based, performance-driven approach. The Modern Language Journal, 101(4), 756–775. Scherer, G. A. C., & Wertheimer, M. (1964). A psycholinguistic experiment in foreign language teaching. New York: McGraw-Hill. Schmitt, N. (2000). Vocabulary in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Serrano, R., Stengers, H., & Housen, A. (2015). Acquisition of formulaic sequences in intensive and regular EFL programmes. Language Teaching Research, 19(1), 89–106.

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Short, D. J., Fidelman, C. G., & Louguit, M. (2012). Developing academic language in English language learners through sheltered instruction. TESOL Quarterly, 46(2), 334–361. Sonbul, S., & Schmitt, N. (2013). Explicit and implicit lexical knowledge: Acquisition of collocations under different input conditions. Language Learning, 63(1), 121–159. Spada, N., Jessop, L., Tomita, Y., Suzuki, W., & Valeo, A. (2014). Isolated and integrated form-focused instruction: Effects on different types of L2 knowledge. Language Teaching Research, 18(4), 453–473. Spinner, P., Gass, S. M., & Behney, J. (2013). Ecological validity in eye-tracking: An empirical study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35(2), 389–415. Sun, C. H. (2017). The value of picture-book reading-based collaborative output activities for vocabulary retention. Language Teaching Research, 21(1), 96–117. Tabachnick, B. G., & Fidell, L. S. (2007). Using multivariate statistics. Boston, MA: Pearson Education. Tavakoli, P., Campbell, C., & McCormack, J. (2016). Development of speech fluency over a short period of time: Effects of pedagogic intervention. TESOL Quarterly, 50(2), 447–471. Tian, L., & Macaro, E. (2012). Comparing the effect of teacher codeswitching with English-only explanations on the vocabulary acquisition of Chinese university students: A lexical focus-on-form study. Language Teaching Research, 16(3), 367–391. Tomita, Y., & Spada, N. (2013). Form-focused instruction and learner investment in L2 communication. The Modern Language Journal, 97(3), 591–610. Wegener, D., & Blankenship, K. (2007). Ecological validity. In R. F. Baumeister & K. D. Vohs (eds.), Encyclopedia of social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 275–276). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Xu, Y., Chang, L. Y., & Perfetti, C. A. (2014). The effect of radical-based grouping in character learning in Chinese as a foreign language. The Modern Language Journal, 98(3), 773–793. Yasuda, S. (2011). Genre-based tasks in foreign language writing: Developing writers’ genre awareness, linguistic knowledge, and writing competence. Journal of Second Language Writing, 20(2), 111–133. Yeldham, M. (2016). Second language listening instruction: Comparing a strategies-based approach with an interactive, strategies/bottom-up skills approach. TESOL Quarterly, 50(2), 394–420.

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7 Action Research: Developments, Characteristics, and Future Directions Anne Burns 7.1 Introduction Action research has become increasingly prevalent in the field of English language teaching over the last two decades. It can be considered as a form of professional learning for language teachers which takes a socio-constructivist approach in which teachers are seen as agentive actors and investigators within their own social contexts. This chapter begins by providing a brief overview of the origins of action research and its development in the field of English language teaching, considering also some of the more recent initiatives that have contributed to the spread of this form of research in the field. It then discusses what various recent studies have shown about the impact on teachers of conducting action research. The discussion ends with a brief consideration of future directions for this research. In this chapter, I give preference to the term action research to refer to research carried out by practitioners in language educational contexts, and I focus primarily on research in this area. Overall, I eschew the term teacher research, which is sometimes used to describe such work in educational sites (e.g., Borg, 2013), since in my view it excludes the range of others (principals/administrators/school leaders, pre-service candidates and teacher educators, teaching colleagues/assistants/aides, technical staff, community-based supporters and parents) who might also be involved in the research and unnecessarily narrows the perspective on the potential for the scope of educational action research to lead to transformation and innovation. It also tends to suggest an individualistic, cognitively-based, and self-referential orientation towards the teacher that underplays the embeddedness of teaching within wider social, relational, and interpersonal networks.

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7.2  The Development of Educational Action Research The roots of action research go back to Aristotelian traditions of practical philosophy, in particular the concept of praxis, but it found prominence in more recent times in the work of the educator John Dewey, social psychologist, Kurt Lewin, and sociologist and philosopher, Jürgen Habermas. I have described the origins of action research in some detail elsewhere (Burns, 2011); therefore, in this section and the next, I provide just a brief account of some of the key figures in action research, particularly educational action research, and more recent developments in action research in the field of language teaching. Kurt Lewin is widely credited with the introduction of the term action research. Lewin, a refugee to the US from Nazi Germany, founded the Research Centre for Group Dynamics at the Michigan Institute of Technology (MIT), where his work on the social organization and operation of groups gave rise to new directions in social psychological research through “involving participants in a cyclical process of fact finding, planning, exploratory action and evaluation (Lewin, 1948, 202–6)” (Somekh & Zeichner, 2009, p. 7). By including those most directly concerned in the social action, Lewin contested “the separation of the investigation from the action needed to solve the problem” (McFarland & Stansell, 1993, p. 14). An early champion of educational action research in the US was Stephen Corey at Colombia University. Corey advocated “cooperative action research”, believing that: One of the psychological values in action research is that the people who must, by the very nature of their professional responsibilities, learn to improve their practices are the ones who engage in the research to learn what represents improvement. (Corey, 1954, p. 375)

By the mid-1950s, action research was under attack in the US, seen as unscientific and lacking in scholarly rigour. Its re-emergence in educational contexts came primarily through Lawrence Stenhouse, a historian whose work in the Humanities Curriculum Project in the UK was concerned with the “enacted curriculum” (i.e., both what was planned and what students learned). Stenhouse believed that curriculum development should emanate from researchers and teachers working together in joint exploration. He wanted teachers’ accounts of their classroom investigations to contribute to building educational curriculum theory: Each classroom should not be an island … teachers working to such a tradition should communicate with one another … they should report their work … a common vocabulary of concepts and a syntax of theory need to be developed … If teachers report their own work in such a tradition,

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case studies will accumulate, just as they do in medicine … Professional research workers will have to master this material and scrutinize it for general trends. It is out of this synthetic task that general propositional theory can be developed. (Stenhouse, 1975, p. 157)

New influences on concepts of action research, that took it beyond its predominantly rationalistic and practical epistemologies, came from Carr and Kemmis (1986) in Australia, who repositioned action research within Habermasian critical theory, and incorporated ideological dimensions of emancipation, democracy, social justice, and resistance to oppresssion. These concepts echoed the liberationist and participatory educational goals of Paolo Freire in Brazil and Orlando Fals Borda in Colombia, and placed emphasis on social and dialectic ways of thinking and knowledge production. Carr and Kemmis’ exegesis of participatory and critical educational action research led to their often-cited definition: Action research is simply a form of self-reflective inquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices, their understanding of these practices, and the situations in which the practices are carried out.  (Carr and Kemmis, 1986, p. 162)

They argued that action research has two essential aims: to improve and to involve. Improvement relates to improvements in practice, understanding of the practice, and of the situation in which the action takes place. Involvement means that the actors in the situation should be involved in all the cyclical phases of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting.

7.3 The Development of Action Research in Language Teaching The concepts of action research in English language teaching (ELT) began to appear from around the mid-1980s. Here I trace its development over two time periods.

7.3.1  Early Developments: Late 1980s–2000 Although by the late 1980s, action research had still “not so far received much serious attention as a distinct style of research in language teaching” (van Lier, 1988, p. 67), the idea of teacher education based on teacher inquiry and problem solving was beginning to enter the literature (e.g., Breen et al. 1989; Brumfit & Mitchell, 1989; Fanselow, 1987; Nunan, 1987; Ramani, 1987; Roberts, 1986). Nunan (1989) was the first to provide language teachers with explicit guidance about researching their teaching contexts. Drawing mainly on traditional methods for conducting

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classroom research, Nunan spoke directly to an audience of teachers and teacher educators, and introduced them to the key idea that “in order for language teachers to understand the classroom in which they work, they need to systematically observe and investigate these classrooms” (p. 15). Other publications foregrounding teacher reflective practice and inquiry as a part of teacher education quickly followed throughout the 1990s, including those oriented to teacher classroom research and “exploratory teaching” (Allwright & Bailey, 1991), “reflective” teaching (Richards & Lockhart, 1994; Roberts, 1998; Wallace, 1991), teacher research (Edge & Richards, 1994; Freeman, 1998; McDonough & McDonough, 1997), teacher learning (Freeman & Richards, 1996), action research (Wallace, 1998), and collaborative action research (Burns, 1999). However, despite the upsurge in volumes for teachers and graduate students conducting research in the field of ELT and applied linguistics since 2000 (e.g., Holliday, 2001; McKay, 2006; Richards, 2003; Richards, Ross, & Seedhouse, 2012; Paltridge & Phatiki, 2015), surprisingly there are still very few volumes that focus on guiding language teachers through the processes of conducting action research specifically. Exceptions are Wallace (1998), Burns (1999, 2010), and more recently Dikilitaş & Griffiths (2017). Various players and waves of activity by agencies in different geographical locations have served to propel the action research movement in language teaching. Burns (1999), for example, drew on extensive professional development initiatives employing action research in Australia’s Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) from the early 1990s. This work emanated from earlier research by Nunan (e.g., 1987) and an agenda for research (Brindley, 1990) developed within the Australian Government’s National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, based at Macquarie University in Sydney, which envisaged “practitioner research” as an important component of the centre’s work with the AMEP. Burns and her colleagues (respectively Hammond, Hood, and de Silva Joyce) conducted ten national action research projects with AMEP teachers from around the country over an almost twenty-year period from 1990 to 2008. The focus for these projects was derived from national feedback from AMEP service providers about curriculum development and teaching issues that were seen as widely relevant to teacher development and classroom practice (see Burns, 2016, for a more extended discussion of this work). In the UK, Edge and Richards at Aston University took a leading role in promoting research by teachers, a concept which had gained increasing currency within the Teacher Development Special Interest Group (TD SIG) of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL). Based on their growing perceptions of the “overlap between teacher development and teacher research” (Edge & Richards, 1994, p. 6), they initiated a collaborative venture between the TD SIG

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and the more recently established Research SIG to organize a conference at Aston that “would attract some attention” (p. 6) to these linkages. Adopting the title “Teachers Develop Teachers’ Research” (TDTR) that aptly united the two concepts, this event initiated a series of other TDTR conferences held at first in the UK (e.g., Cambridge in 1995), but then also overseas through IATEFL affiliates (e.g., in Israel in 1997 and Chile in 1999). The conferences provided a singular opportunity for those conducting action research and other related types of teacher inquiry in the field of ELT to present and publish their work (e.g. Edge & Richards, 1994; Field et al., 1997). In India, Mathew, Eapen, and Tharu (2000), from the then Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL), were involved in a national Curriculum Implementation Study from 1993 to 1997, which eventually involved 250 teachers and 800 secondary schools. They saw the concept of the teacher-as-researcher as central to successful implementation of the project. They introduced the teachers to research techniques and strategies in classroom investigation and data-gathering and used the teachers’ input in developing and implementing the curriculum. They also supported action research mini-studies by fifty of these teachers. Meanwhile in Colombia, in the late 1990s, C árdenas from the PROFILE Research Group in the Departamento de Lenguas Extranjeras, at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, was promoting the concept of action research by teachers through the establishment of a journal. Launched in 2000, PROFILE Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development provided (and still does) a publication forum, initially for teachers who had been introduced through the university’s professional development programmes to concepts of action research, but later for teacher researchers and teacher educators from a wide range of international backgrounds. The journal was unique in its concern to “share results of classroom research projects, reflections and innovations undertaken by teachers of English as a second or foreign language … teacher educators and novice teacher-researchers” and to address itself mainly “to an international readership of pre- and in-service teachers” (see PROFILE homepage: https://revistas.unal.edu.co/ index.php/profile).

7.3.2  More Recent Developments: 2000 to the Present A further impetus to practitioner action research was provided by the International TESOL organization. Although the TESOL Research Interest section had been disbanded in the mid-2000s, to the consternation of several of its members, the body that replaced it, the TESOL Standing Committee for Research (now the TESOL Research Professional Council), which was seen as an umbrella committee that crossed the range of

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Interest sections in TESOL, began to offer pre-convention workshops for teacher researchers (e.g., Borg & Burns, 2008), which have continued to this time. TESOL was also promoting research by teachers through publications such as The Language Teacher Research Series, edited by Thomas Farrell (2006–2009), which highlighted projects conducted in Asia, the Americas, Europe, Australasia, the Middle East, and Africa. The series was described as “a relatively new stance toward educational research”, aimed at encouraging teachers to take “an inquiry stance toward language teaching” (TESOL, 2004, p. 14). While the number of other projects involving action research initiated both by individual teachers and educational organizations slowly increased in various parts of the world across the decade, from the late 2000s there seems to have been an upsurge in action research initiatives funded by major international bodies. In Australia, the Action Research in ELICOS (English Language Courses for Overseas Students) Program instigated by the professional body, English Australia, was funded by Cambridge English Language Assessment (now Cambridge Assessment English). Starting as a pilot programme in 2010, it is now approaching its ninth year (see Burns & Khalifa, 2017 for an account of its development and examples of participating teachers’ action research; see also Research Notes, volumes 44, 48, 53, 56, 60, 64, 67, at http://www .cambridgeenglish.org/research-notes/). From 2014, this programme was replicated in the UK by Cambridge English in collaboration with English UK as an Action Research Award Scheme (see Borg, 2015). Both these programmes provide opportunities for teachers of international students in each country to undertake a programme of action research across a year. Since around 2010, other initiatives have been funded and supported by The British Council. To give some examples, from 2012 to 2016 The British Council sponsored the English Language Teaching Research Partnerships (ELTReP) in India, which resulted in thirty-three publications published in the series Explorations: Teaching and Learning English (see https://www.britishcouncil.in/programmes/english-partnerships/ research-policy-dialogues/eltrep-papers). In conjunction with the AllIndia Network of English Teachers (AINET), The British Council continues to host the Aptis Action Research Mentor Scheme (AARMS) in India. From 2013, The British Council and Ministry of Education in Chile instigated the Champion Teachers programme which provides support for secondary school teachers to engage in exploratory action research projects (see Rebolledo, Smith, & Bullock, n.d.). The Action Research Award Scheme (ARAS), which is sponsored by The British Council Aptis, also aims to support the development of teacher-research in English language education in Latin-America more generally. In Singapore The

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British Council’s Teacher Development Centre (TDC) has recently begun developing and supporting Action Research projects with education partners there, for example a project on critical literacy with a local primary school (see https://www.britishcouncil.sg/about/press/newsletter-articles/ teacher-development/action-research-singapore). Cambridge University Press has also entered the scene of practitioner research, launching its own Teacher Research Programme in 2014 to further “the development of teachers and teaching around the world, and … to encourage teacher research projects by offering financial and professional support to a number of projects every year” (see http://languageresearch.cambridge.org/). In addition, IATEFL, through its Research SIG, has been very active over the last few years in promoting research by teachers both through its pre-conference events, its newsletter ELT Research, and its web discussions (e.g., Wyatt, Burns, & Hanks, 2016). Employing the title Teachers Research!, the 2014 pre-conference event aimed to “revive the spirit of the TDTR [Teachers Develop Teachers Research] conferences started off in 1992 at Aston University” (http://resig.weebly.com/background-to-teachersresearch.html; see also Bullock & Smith, 2015). From 2015, IATEFL also began to support a series of Teacher Research! conferences in Turkey, building on the work of Kenan Dikilitaş and his colleagues in promoting action research and other forms of research by teachers in that country (see, for example, Dikilitaş, Smith, & Trotman, 2015, Dikilitaş et al., 2016; Burns et al., 2017). A more recent initiative that is aiming to unite and promote research by teachers globally is the International Festival of Teacher-Research in ELT. Initiated in 2017 by Richard Smith from Warwick University, former Chair of the IATEFL Research SIG, it aims to “co-brand” international research initiatives involving teachers in order to promote such research and to bring together what were previously “disparate local initiatives” (see https://trfestival.wordpress.com/about/). The Festival has a number of major supporters including the IATEFL Research SIG, the IATEFL Teacher Development SIG, the All-India Network of English Teachers (AINET), the Argentine Federation of Associations of Teachers of English (FAAPI), TESOL International, the Cameroon English Language and Literature Teachers Association (CAMELTA), the Association of English Language Teachers of Buenos Aires (APIBA), the British Council English Language Agenda/Teaching English, and English Australia/Cambridge Assessment English. The website hosts video-recordings of teacher presentations in different locations with the aim of building a global community for research by teachers and producing published work by teacher researchers and research facilitators.

Action Research: Developments, Characteristics, and Future Directions

7.4  Action Research in Language Teaching In this section, I provide a brief overview of some of the main trends and themes emerging from the literature on teachers as action researchers in the field of language teaching. I consider the literature from this specific perspective rather than the field of education more broadly.

7.4.1  Language Teachers’ Engagement with Action Research A general concensus in the literature is that under favourable conditions (see section 7.5.1) many language teachers derive considerable benefits from engaging in action research. Nunan’s (1989) early work (citing Beasley & Riordan, 1981, from the education literature) set out nine benefits, ranging from its relevance to the concerns of teachers and its capacity to build on their accumulated knowledge and provide them with better information about their practices, to the rather more general observation that “it matches the subtle, organic process of classroom life” (p. 3). More recently, Borg (2013, p. 16) summarizes other benefits (presented here with reference to works other than those cited in Borg): • develops teachers’ capacity for autonomous professional judgments (e.g., Viera, 2003; Vilches, 2007; Wang & Zhang, 2014) • reduces teachers’ feelings of frustration and isolation (van Lier, 1994; Tinker Sachs, 2002) • allows teachers to move out of a submissive position and be curriculum innovators (Edwards & Burns, 2016a; Pickering & Gunashekar, 2015) • allows teachers to become more reflective, critical, and analytical about their teaching behaviours in the classroom (Hine, 2013; Dajani, 2015) • makes teachers less vulnerable to and less dependent on external answers to the challenges they face (Allison & Carey, 2007; Wyatt, 2010) • fosters connections between teachers and researchers (O’Brien, Newnham, & Tinker, 2000; Yuan & Lee, 2015) • boosts teachers’ sense of status (Edwards & Burns, 2016b; Mangion & Stokes, 2017). Various studies have highlighted yet other benefits. Burns (1999) emphasizes the sense of professional community that can emerge from collaborative approaches to action research, also reported in a number of other recent studies (e.g. Atay, 2008; Banegas et al., 2013; Burns & KurtogluHooton, 2015; Castro Garcés & Martínez Granada, 2016; McDonough, 2006; Rajuan, 2015). Teachers report gaining skills in conducting research (e.g., Dikilitaş & Griffiths, 2017; Perrett, 2003; Wyatt, 2010), which potentially provide them with the means to continue to reflect on and problematize

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their practices. There has also been substantial evidence that teachers who conduct action research find it to be a powerful and empowering form of professional development (e.g., Esposito & Smith, 2006; Hei & David, 2017; Mok, 1997). Perhaps most significantly in relation to the potential impact of action research on teaching, many teachers report a much stronger sense of engaging with and understanding the needs and interests of their students (e.g., Alexander & Onslow-Mato, 2015; Burns & McPherson, 2017; Castellano, Mynard, & Rubesch, 2011). Despite the reported benefits, challenges encountered by teachers in doing research are also well documented in the literature. Two in particular are foregrounded as the primary barriers. Time to do research is a particularly pressing issue, particularly in the light of the heavy teaching loads encountered by most teachers (e.g., Borg, 2013; Burns, 1999; Crookes & Chandler, 2001; McKay, 2009; Rainey, 2000). A further major obstacle is the extent of teachers’ skills and abilities to conduct research as well as their self-confidence to become researchers (e.g., Çelik & Dikilitaş, 2015; Mehrani, 2016; Negi, 2016). Other challenges relate to access to resources to support research, such as current literature and research mentoring, lack of understanding or encouragement of research, and institutional constraints.

7.5  Emerging Research Areas for Language Teacher Action Research So far in this chapter, I have outlined the development of action research as well as what the literature reveals about the engagement of language teachers in action research. In this section, I highlight four themes in particular that are emerging from this literature as valuable directions for future empirical research.

7.5.1  Conditions for Action Research In several parts of the world, policy demands for teachers to become active in reflective practice and research as part of their professional development have been steadily increasing (see for example NCTE, 2009, for India; NFL2020, 2014, for Vietnam; MEST, 2015, for Kenya). However, concomitant discussion at a systems level of how teachers can best be supported within a particular educational context to enable them to conduct research is rare (e.g., Borg & Lui, 2013; and see also some of the teacher narratives in Dikilitaş & Griffiths, 2017, pp. 237–262). Rainey (2000) states that the dominant form of action research is small-scale studies carried out for individual teacher self-reflection (see also Crookes, 1993). However, recent literature

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is beginning to indicate that this kind research, ostensibly self-initiated by teachers, is both hard (if not impossible) to sustain and likely to remain private and have limited impact (e.g., Kutlay, 2013; Negi, 2016). Empirical studies documenting the kind of support that is facilitative of successful outcomes from research by teachers are still emergent in the language teaching field. While, as Borg (2013) points out, action research conducted by teachers as part of a formal academic programme has increased, this kind of research “may not generate realistic understandings of teacher research engagement” (p. 185) and may be driven more by instrumental motives related to obtaining qualifications. If action research by teachers as part of continuing teacher development is to be understood more generally, the conditions that support it need to be documented outside formal academic requirements. A few publications have begun to identify the kinds of factors needed to facilitate such research (e.g. Al-Maskari, 2015; Borg, 2013; Burns, 2000; Burns & Brandon, 2017; Yucel & Gűndoğdu, 2017). Various essential conditions identified by these studies include: • teachers’ voluntary participation in research • guidance from an experienced facilitator, mentor, or academic partner • a programme of input about the theory, practices, procedures, and processes of action research • support in accessing and using appropriate literature • timely and ongoing feedback on the design and progress of the research • guidance on dissemination of the research (e.g., through presentation and publication) • peer support through communities of practice (e.g., research conducted in pairs or teams, access to a collaborative peer group) • institutional support (e.g. financial, time allocation) • institutional recognition (e.g. acknowledgement of research efforts, use of teachers’ research for further curriculum development) • positive institutional research climate (e.g., valuing or promotion of action research by teachers, professional development research opportunities). While the findings emerging from these studies serve to illuminate the key facilitative factors, there are few studies that provide empirical data illustrating the way these processes unfold gradually in practice over time at an institutional level in response to local needs and teacher reactions (although see Burns, Westmacott, & Hidalgo Ferrer, 2016, for one recent example). In relation to these factors, more empirical studies are also needed on ways that teacher–academic mentoring partnerships could operate effectively in support of action research by teachers (see Yuan & Lee, 2015; Chan, 2016, for recent examples).

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7.5.2  Genres for Teacher Action Research Freeman (1998) noted that research by teachers, including the way it was conducted and reported, constitutes a new research genre. He suggests four kinds of possible forms of presentation: interactive presentation (e.g., poster sessions, teacher-research conferences; see Bullock & Smith, 2015; Rebolledo, Smith, & Bullock, n.d.); virtual presentation (e.g., video or multimedia; see https://trfestival.wordpress.com/past-events/); performed presentation (e.g., readers’ theatre, narrative; e.g., Yoshida & Kambara, 2014); and written presentation (e.g., codified and new forms of writing, taking purpose and audience into account; see Burns & Khalifa, 2017 for examples of teacher accounts of action research). While illustrations of some of these ways of presenting action research have started to emerge in the literature, as suggested by these references, there is little research on how teachers manage the processes of planning, preparing, visualizing, or activating such presentations or what forms of support are needed to assist novice teacher researchers. Perhaps the clearest glimpses so far are the few studies conducted on mentoring teacher writing. Drawing on teacher reports, field-notes, and retrospective surveys, Cárdenas (2003) suggests five “criteria” that supported the writing process for teachers in Colombia: using a style sheet (report structure and standards); sustaining “a steady gaze” (narrative style, teacher audience); integrating own and others’ views (personal perspectives integrated with references to the literature); supporting with concrete examples (data samples and illustration); and coping with editor feedback (acceptance of feedback and redrafting). The main difficulties experienced were: language proficiency; lack of writing practice and experience in writing articles; synthesizing content; short times for writing; and lack of peer critical feedback. More recently, Dikilitaş and Mumford’s (2016) interview data with Turkish teachers reveal the importance of collaboration through expert and peer support. While expert mentors were seen to provide moral and pedagogic or technical support, peers provided assistance in language improvement, through “democratic” dialogue and sharing the writing load. These studies also suggest that, since professionally oriented writing is “not a common practice among teachers” (Cárdenas, 2003, p. 52) and given the increasing pressure on language teachers in different parts of the world to begin conducting and publishing research (see Tran, Burns, & Ollerhead, 2017), much more empirical work is desirable to understand the processes and support needs involved.

7.5.3  Teacher Identity and Action Research Identity research related to learners (e.g., Norton, 2000), and more recently teachers (e.g., Barkhuizen, 2017), has expanded considerably in the language teaching field over the last two decades. However, while research

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on the benefits for language teachers of doing action research are now quite well documented, research on how a teacher researcher identity emerges, and what new roles and agencies are taken on, is very limited. Only a handful of studies to date has tracked such identity dimensions. Trent’s (2010) study, conducted within a pre-service teacher course in Hong Kong, showed that, as researchers, participants developed a more critical stance towards previously held perceptions of teacher roles and their images of teaching, as well as their alignment with current educational discourses. Banegas (2012) traced his own development as a researcher and facilitator during a collaborative action research project conducted with four other colleagues in Argentina. He found that there were complex tensions between his various roles as a teacher, classroom researcher, and facilitator relating to his own concern to develop professionally, but also his sense of responsibility to contribute to his fellow teacher-researchers’ professional development and to the curriculum development of the institution. Xu (2014), in China, found that teacher-researcher identities became fragmented at different times as they grappled with the processes of undertaking research and with the external and internal drives surrounding their research participation. More recently, case studies by Edwards and Burns (2016b) of two teachers of international students in Australia showed that the teachers gained a strong sense of themselves as emerging researchers, increased their professionalism and workplace power, and developed greater confidence, but that their developing teacher-researcher “conceptual selves” (p. 742) were constrained by external institutional and sectoral perspectives (see section 7.4.1). Burns (2017) recommends that research on language teacher-researcher identity construction needs to broaden beyond its reliance on the individualist and cognitivist obtained through written or verbal data in order to include socioconstructivist, ethnographic, ecological, and sociohistorical perspectives that would illuminate its emergent, multiple, and shifting nature. Overall, the initial insights from this line of research suggest that developing a teacher-researcher identity is highly complex and dynamic, and characterized by numerous tensions arising from the sociocultural context, as well as from teachers’ cognitive, psychological, and emotional responses (see also Yuan and Burns, 2016). Much more research is necessary, however, to understand these factors more fully.

7.5.4  Sustainability of Action Research The final emergent theme to be discussed here is that of the sustainability of action research. Around twenty-five years ago van Lier (1994) remarked that “if action research is going to make us even more exhausted than we already are, then it will not be a popular or successful activity … It has to enrich our professional life” (p. 33). Allwright (1997) argues that it is

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unlikely that teachers “will maintain the required level of effort indefinitely, and much more likely that they will soon abandon the research entreprise altogether”; rather what is needed is a “research perspective” (p. 368). Although for many teachers worldwide, conducting action research may indeed be challenging or impossible, recent studies such as those highlighted in this chapter show that for others it is highly rewarding (see, for example, Yucel & Bos, 2015). The question therefore arises of how action research and its impact can be sustained by teachers over time. There is little research at present that documents the longer-term sustainability effects of language teachers conducting action research; however, a study by Edwards and Burns (2016a) suggests that the sustainability of the impact of action research, as perceived by the teachers they interviewed during and after their research involvement, consists of more than teachers adopting and maintaining “a research perspective”: they argue that the impacts are multifaceted, interconnected, and evidenced at the microand macro-levels. At the micro-level, for some teachers, action research reinforced but also enriched their position as classroom teachers, with the added gains of tools for reflection and practice. For others, action research acted as a catalyst to pursue further academic goals and to envisage themselves as researchers. At the macro-level, the teachers’ research impacted on the teachers’ institutions and influenced curriculum development and sustainability. Edwards and Burns propose that a combination of bottom-up individual teacher motivation and experimentation (e.g., also Xie, 2015) and top-down institutional support is crucial in ensuring the sustainability of the impact of action research over time. This line of enquiry is however, at present in its infancy.

7.6 Conclusion Just over a decade ago, Dörnyei (2007) wrote that there was too little action research and, “I am still to meet a teacher who has been voluntarily involved in it” (p. 191). Setting aside larger arguments about the dysfunction of the theory–practice divide in the field of language teaching (e.g., Clark, 1994), one might argue that, these days, there is ample opportunity for Dörnyei to encounter teacher action researchers who have voluntarily conducted research on their practice and to read their publications if he so wished. This chapter has aimed to briefly review the development of action research in the language teaching field, but more importantly to document recent initiatives as well as to suggest areas that merit further research. On the basis of this review, it seems that action research in ELT is a movement that continues to expand as part of an overall trend towards opening up the possibilities of conducting research to language teachers.

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TESOL (2004). TESOL 2004 Annual Report. Alexandria, VA: TESOL International. Retrieved from http://www.tesol.org/docs/annual-reports/ arp2004.pdf?sfvrsn=4. Tinker Sachs, G. (ed.) (2002), Action research in English language teaching. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong. Tran, A., Burns, A., & Ollerhead, S. (2017). ELT lecturers’ experiences of a new research policy: Exploring emotion and academic identity, System, 67, 65–76. Trent, J. (2010). Teacher education as identity construction: Insights from action research. Journal of Education for Teaching: International Research and Pedagogy, 36(2), 153–168. van Lier, L. (1988). The classroom and the language learner. London: Longman. van Lier, L. (1994). Action research. Sintagma, 6, 31–37. Viera, F. (2003). Addressing constraints on autonomy in school contexts: Lessons from working with teachers. In D. Palfreyman & R. C. Smith (eds.), Learner autonomy across cultures: Language education perspectives (pp. 220–239). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Vilches, J. U. (2007). Teacher autonomy: A critical review of the research and concept beyond applied linguistics. Í  kala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura, 12(18), 245–275. Wallace, M. (1991). Training foreign language teachers: A reflective approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallace, M. (1998). Action research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wang, Q., & Zhang, H. (2014). Promoting teacher autonomy through university–school collaborative research. Language Teaching Research, 18(2), 222–241. Wyatt, M. (2010). Teachers researching their own practice. ELT Journal, 65(4), 417–425. Wyatt, M., Burns, A., & Hanks, J. (2016). Teacher practitioner research: Reflections on an online discussion. TESL-EJ, 20(1), 1–22. Xie, J. (2015). Learning to do teacher research independently: Challenges and solutions. In S. Borg & H. Santiago Sanchez (eds.), International perspectives on teacher research (pp. 47–56). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Xu, Y. (2014). Becoming researchers: A narrative study of Chinese university EFL teachers’ research practice and their professional identity construction. Language Teaching Research, 18(2), 242–259. Yoshida, T., & Kambara, K. (2014). EFL teachers’ conceptual development and the transformation of teaching through narratives in the E-portfolio. In B. S. Said & L. Zhang (eds.), Language teachers and teaching: Global perspectives, local initiatives (pp. 219–236). New York: Routledge. Yuan, R. E., & Lee, I. (2015). Action research facilitated by university–school collaboration. ELT Journal, 69(1),1–10.

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Yuan, R. E., & Burns, A. (2016). Teacher identity development through action research: A Chinese experience. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 23(6), 729–749. Yucel, M., & Bos, V. (2015). Action research as a means of stepping out of the teaching comfort zone. In S. Borg & H. Santiago Sanchez (eds.), International perspectives on teacher research (pp. 29–46). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Yucel, B., & Gűndoğdu, M. A. (2017). Mentoring teachers as researchers. In A. Burns, K. Dikilitaş, R. Smith, & M. Wyatt (eds.), Developing insights into teacher research (p. 29–38). Faversham: IATEFL.

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8 Classroom Observation Research Nina Spada 8.1 Introduction This chapter is about second and foreign language (L2) classroom observation research, with a focus on observation instruments developed within the interaction analysis tradition. It begins with a brief description of classroom observation research and a comparison of interaction analysis with other approaches. This is followed by a general description of how observation instruments are organized, how they differ in terms of number and type of categories, coding procedures, units of analysis, and overall strengths and weaknesses. Four observation schemes are then described in detail with specific examples and illustrations of their categories along with information about the reasons for their development, the contexts in which they have been used, the type of research undertaken with them, and brief summaries of the findings associated with each. Throughout, there is an examination of how interaction analysis observation schemes have evolved in relation to the different phases of L2 classroom research, including the global method comparison studies, process and process-product research, and the shift from macro-level to micro-level descriptions of classroom behaviours. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the benefits of multi-method approaches to L2 classroom observation research.

8.2  Approaches to Classroom Observation Research Observation research is concerned with describing what goes on in L2 classrooms between teachers and learners. It documents pedagogical practices and procedures including the content of instruction and how it is organized and delivered. It includes descriptions of the kind of language that teachers and students use and the nature of the linguistic interactions that take place between them. Classroom observation also describes how

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teachers and learners are socially organized into different groups (e.g., whole class, pairs), the dynamics of the groupings, and the type of activities that take place within them. Another focus of observation research is affective behaviours such as the motivation practices of teachers and the levels of engagement on the part of learners. Depending on the approach taken, classroom observation research can be broad-based and open-ended or narrowly focused and closed, structured or unstructured, objective or subjective, and quantitative or qualitative. Chaudron (1988a) distinguished three main approaches to classroom observation: interaction analysis; discourse analysis; and ethnography. Interaction analysis has its roots in sociological investigations of group processes which led to the development of systems to observe and analyse classrooms in terms of the relationships between teachers and learners, and the activities in which are engaged. Early versions of observation schemes developed within the interaction analysis tradition emphasized the pedagogic functions of teacher talk (e.g., teacher gives directions, teacher corrects) and affective characteristics (e.g., teacher encourages, teacher praises). Later schemes included a larger number of categories to describe the language used by teachers (and learners) in linguistic and communicative terms. These systems typically consist of discrete categories of language use and do not describe how they combine to form classroom discourse (but see the FOCUS instrument below). Observation research that describes the nature and structure of the flow of verbal interactions between teachers and students falls within the discourse analysis tradition.1 This approach arose from a linguistics perspective and examines the language used by teachers and students as a sequence of interconnected moves and communicative acts described in terms of structure and pedagogical function. One of the earliest discourse analysis systems, developed by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975), identified the well-known Initiation–Response–Feedback (IRF) exchange structure, which has had an enormous impact on our understanding of the ways in which teachers and students communicate. The third tradition that Chaudron described is ethnographic—a holistic, qualitative approach to classroom observation that examines behaviours in social and cultural terms (Watson-Gegeo, 1988). Within this approach, detailed field notes supplemented with audio and video recordings are used to collect the observation data, which are analysed qualitatively and supplemented with other data sources (e.g., interviews). Ethnographic research is typically longitudinal in nature and can be conducted by participant or non-participant observers. A particular type of ethnography used in L2 classroom research is the ethnography of communication (Duff, 2002; Harklau, 1994). 1

 Related approaches include conversational analysis (Markee, 2000; Seedhouse, 2004) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995).

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8.3  Brief History of Interaction Analysis Schemes Classroom observation schemes developed within the interaction analysis tradition consist of a set of pre-determined categories to document classroom events and behaviours. Because observation instruments were initially used to evaluate teaching effectiveness, the focus was on teacher behaviours. One well-known example is FIAC (Flander’s Interaction Analysis Categories), a scheme that was developed in the field of education which consisted of ten categories of “effective teaching” divided into those that reflected direct influence (e.g., lecturing, giving directions) and indirect influence (e.g., asking questions, accepts feelings; Flanders, 1970). A modified version of Flanders’ scheme for use in L2 classrooms— the Foreign Language Interaction System (FLINT)—was developed by Moskowitz (1976). The underlying assumption for both observation schemes was that indirect teaching practices were more effective for learning than direct ones. This was based entirely on expert opinion and consensus rather than research evidence. The categories were used to help teachers-in-training discover the extent to which their own teaching practices matched them or not, thus reflecting more or less effective instruction. The prescriptive nature of the early observation schemes was directly tied to the audio-lingual method which was the broadly accepted and widely implemented “scientific approach” to L2 teaching of the era. The development and use of observation schemes for research purposes came later and largely in response to the global method comparison studies in the 1960s. These were large-scale studies that compared traditional grammar-based pedagogies with audio-lingual instruction. Two frequently cited method comparison studies in the United States, known as the Colorado Project (Scherer and Wertheimer, 1964) and the Pennsylvania Project (Smith, 1970), investigated college level learners of German and high school students of French and German respectively. The combined findings of the studies indicated that while students in the audio-lingual group did better at speaking and students in the grammar-translation classes did better in reading and writing, there were no significant longterm differences in learners’ language abilities that could be attributed to the teaching method. Similar findings were obtained in a large-scale method comparison study in Sweden known as the GUME project (Levin, 1972) in which an implicit (i.e., inductive) and explicit (i.e., deductive) version of the audio-lingual method were compared. The inconclusive results of these studies pointed to a number of limitations, including the lack of control over teacher and learner variables as well as the use of tests that were biased in favour of more traditional grammar-based instruction. The most serious concern was the absence of any detailed systematic information about the instructional processes. That is, there was no reliable

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evidence to demonstrate how the instructional approaches were delivered and, furthermore, whether they were implemented differently. The failure of the global method comparison studies led to a period of process research in which the focus shifted away from investigating learning outcomes (i.e., product) in relation to particular methods to investigating what actually goes on in L2 classrooms through detailed descriptions of teacher and learner behaviours (i.e., process). The shift to process-based research did not mean that method comparison studies ceased to exist. On the contrary, there continued to be studies to investigate a range of methodological differences including comparisons of communicative and more traditional approaches (e.g., Savignon, 1972), different versions of communicative and task-based approaches (e.g., Beretta & Davies, 1985; Prabhu, 1987), and comparisons between input- and output-based instructional programmes (Lightbown et al., 2002; Shintani & Ellis, 2010). These studies were much smaller in scale than the global method comparison studies in terms of number of parti­ cipants and focus. Like the earlier global method comparison studies, they did not include an observation component and the findings were inconclusive. In an analysis and review of sixteen of these studies, Ellis (2012) points to the considerable heterogeneity of the research in terms of parti­ cipants, contexts, types of instruction, methods of testing, etc. He also discusses the methodological problems associated with many of the studies, including comparisons of non-equivalent groups, no attempt to establish that the instructional treatments were implemented in ways that were consistent with their descriptions, no control groups, no account of individual learner differences, and in most cases no efforts to guard against test bias. Factors such as these make comparisons between studies difficult and necessarily lead to tentative conclusions.

8.4 Observation Schemes: Coding Procedures and Categories In a review of L2 classroom observation research, Long (1980) identified twenty-two observation schemes developed for L2 teaching. Almost ten years later in Chaudron’s (1988a) review of research in L2 classrooms, he added three observation schemes that had been developed in the interim: the Target Language Observation Scheme (TALOS) (Ullman & Geva, 1985), the Communicative Interaction (CI) system developed by Mitchell, Parkinson, and Johnstone (1981), and the Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) observation scheme (Allen, Fröhlich, & Spada, 1984; Spada & Fröhlich, 1995). To my knowledge, these are the last comprehensive observation instruments developed within the interaction

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analysis tradition that cover a wide range of pre-determined categories for the documentation and measurement of pedagogic and linguistic behaviours. As reported in Long (1980) and Chaudron (1988a), observation instruments differ in terms of coding procedures, number and type of categories, units of analysis, focus, and purpose. In this section, I discuss the first three features leaving an examination of differences in focus and purpose to section 8.5 where four individual observation schemes are described and discussed. With respect to coding procedures, some observation instruments use a category system in which each behaviour or event is coded every time it occurs. Others use a sign system in which behaviours or events are coded once during a specified time period (e.g., every three minutes). A rating scale is also used with some observation schemes. This typically takes place after the observation session and involves making decisions about the estimated frequency of behaviours or events along a scale ranging from “very frequent” to “never” or “high” to “low”. Another aspect of the coding procedures is whether the coding takes place in “real time”—as events or behaviours unfold in the classroom—or not. If the coding takes place post-hoc, it is done using audio or video recordings. Decisions about realtime or post-hoc coding depend to a large extent on the type of categories. Observation schemes also differ widely in terms of the number of categories, ranging from fewer than ten categories on simple schemes to over 150 with more complex instruments. While it can be challenging to work with observation schemes that have numerous coding categories, it depends on the type of categories. For example, low-inference categories record objective, overt, easily observable behaviours such as skill focus (e.g., speaking, listening), participant organization (teacher-fronted, pair work), and use of first languages (L1). High-inference categories involve judgment and thus are more subjective in nature (e.g., deciding whether students are motivated, whether teachers ask questions to which they know the answers). If an observation scheme has numerous categories but the majority of them are low-inference, it is easier to use than an observation scheme with fewer categories that are high-inference in nature. This raises issues about the reliability of observation categories discussed in section 8.4.1 below.

8.4.1 Observation Schemes: Reliability, Validity, and Units of Analysis Despite the importance of doing so, few L2 classroom observation researchers working within the interaction analysis tradition have confirmed the reliability of their observations and analyses. This includes inter-rater reliability to verify whether multiple users of a scheme are making the same coding decisions when using the categories to document classroom

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behaviour. It also includes intra-rater reliability to determine whether an individual observer makes the same coding decisions consistently. Procedures for establishing reliability appear to be limited to observation schemes that have been developed most recently for research purposes. For example, the developers of the CI scheme (Mitchell, Parkinson, & Johnstone, 1981) double coded both early and late observations of several classes and reported reliability estimates consistently. Fröhlich, Spada, and Allen (1985) indicate high levels of reliability using the COLT scheme but do not report reliability estimates. While it is essential that developers of an observation scheme carry out reliability testing (and report it), it is equally important for users of the instruments to do so given that variation occurs across users of research instruments in different contexts. Establishing the validity of observation categories is equally important. This concern was raised by Long (1980) almost forty years ago. At the time he wrote that “in addition to categories designed specifically for the description of classroom processes, it would seem of crucial importance that instruments contain categories which current theory would suggest are relevant to classroom language acquisition” (p. 20). Again, only a few research teams associated with the more recently developed instruments have reported on efforts to establish validity. For example, in the development of TALOS, Ullman and Geva (1985) established validity by comparing the coding results of low-inference categories with those of the high-inference categories. A match between the two was considered evidence of construct validity because both sets of categories were developed using the same theoretical constructs. Fröhlich, Spada, and Allen (1985) set out to establish the validity of the COLT scheme by establishing a relationship between programmatically defined degrees of communicative language teaching with categories on the scheme designed to measure the communicative orientation of L2 programmes. They report that the instrument had criterion-related validity because it succeeded in identifying differences in the programmes based on the relative frequency of pedagogic and linguistic behaviours captured in both parts of the scheme. They also calculated a score based on the frequencies of five selected categories to characterize the degree of communicative orientation across the programmes to establish further validation of the scheme. Criticisms have been raised about this procedure, however, including the arbitrariness of the five selected categories and the equal weighting of them (Chaudron, 1991). Another methodological issue related to classroom observation schemes is that they vary with respect to the unit of analysis. For example, researchers analyse classroom events on smaller or larger segments such as linguistic or functional units (e.g., utterances or moves) or pedagogical units (e.g., activities or episodes). While these differences reflect

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important distinctions and assumptions about relationships between language, pedagogy, and learning, they make the interpretation of L2 observational data and comparisons across studies difficult. Chaudron (1988b) illustrates this problem with reference to a specific feature of classroom behaviour—teacher language choice—measured using different units of analysis: … studies may measure teacher language choice (whether the first, or the target language) in units of time, of teacher utterances, or of functional moves. These differences in measurement all involve different assumptions about the psychological relationships between language choice and student learning. For instance, a measure of language use by fixed time units (every three minutes) may overestimate the actual amount of language spoken, if the teacher speaks more slowly in that language relative to the other, or if more silence occurs in that time period. (p.13)

He goes on to argue that temporal versus categorical measures also assume a different value in terms of learning and raises the question as to whether the knowledge a learner derives from fifteen minutes of exposure to the L2 is the same type of knowledge that is derived from fifteen question-and-answer exchanges. The methodological challenges associated with classroom observation research within the interaction tradition point to the need for more quantitative research to establish the validity of observation categories, their reliability, and the use of comparable units of analysis to permit systematic comparisons that can lead to the generalization of findings. There appears to be little interest in conducting such research, however, given that the last studies to investigate some of these issues took place in the late 1980s. This appears to be related to a shift that took place around that time from using broad-based comprehensive schemes with numerous observation categories to the use of more narrowly focused descriptions of one or two classroom behaviours that were examined in relation to learning outcomes. This is discussed in more detail in sections 8.5 and 8.6. In the next section, some of the strengths and limitations of observation schemes developed within the interaction analysis tradition are examined.

8.4.2  Observation Schemes: Advantages and Disadvantages The advantage of using observation schemes is that they allow researchers to see directly what teachers and learners are doing in the L2 classroom rather than having to rely on what they say they do or on the use of external labels (e.g., audio lingual, communicative) to describe what they do. Observation schemes also permit an objective and systematic account of classroom events and behaviours that enables cross-study comparisons in different classrooms and educational contexts. This in turn allows for an

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increase in the generalizability of research. In addition, the use of observation instruments facilitates the description and measurement of pedagogical change over time which can be effectively used in programme revision and evaluation. Importantly, structured observation makes the demanding task of describing complex and rich classroom processes do­­ able and easier to use when compared with non-systematic descriptions. Furthermore, observation schemes can and should be revised and adapted to suit the specific goals of the research. As Spada and Fröhlich (1995) point out, “observation schemes are simply tools for research and they should serve rather than direct it” (p. 10). The disadvantages that come with the use of observation schemes developed within the interaction analysis tradition are the flip side of some of the advantages. For example, while observation schemes provide a record of what is observable, we know that a good deal of what goes on in classrooms is not observable (e.g., mental processes). In addition, because these observation schemes consist of a set of pre-determined categories and the observer is coding for the categories “on the page”, other pedagogical behaviours that could serve important roles are not coded and perhaps not even noticed. This renders observation schemes less sensitive to emergent information and is one of the arguments for conducting qualitative and ethnographic observation research. Furthermore, while it is true that observation schemes have a way of simplifying complex pedagogical and linguistic behaviours, they may reduce the complexity to a point where it could result in an incomplete or distorted representation of events and behaviours. Finally, while some efforts have been made to establish the reliability and validity of observation schemes, they have been minimal. In the next section four observation schemes that are well-known within the interaction analysis tradition are examined.

8.5  Four Observation Schemes: FOCUS, TALOS, CI, & COLT Observation schemes share several common categories, such as the grouping of participants (e.g., individual, pair, group), content or topic of lesson (linguistic or other), language focus (e.g., vocabulary, grammar, etc.), and language use (L1, L2). However, they vary in terms of how these categories are defined and operationalized, the addition of other categories to document different aspects of classroom behaviours, and their overall structure and organization. These differences reflect divergence in their purpose and focus but also influences from various disciplines (e.g., linguistics, education) that have shaped their conceptualization and development. One of the earliest interaction schemes that was developed for both research and teacher education purposes is Fanselow’s (1977) Foci for

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Observing Communications Used in Settings (FOCUS). Following the early work of Bellack et al. (1966) on first language classroom discourse, FOCUS uses the move2 as the unit of analysis and includes structuring, soliciting, responding, and reacting as the major criteria for segmenting the classroom interaction. These moves, produced by the teacher or the student, are then described in terms of the mediums used to communicate (linguistic, non-linguistic, para-linguistic), how the mediums are used to communicate areas of content (attend, characterize, present, re-present), and what areas of content are communicated (language systems, life, procedure, subject matter). Within these major categories are over seventy sub-categories that more precisely describe the nature of the communication. For example, under “characterize” in the category describing how the mediums are used to communicate content, there are five ways in which this can be done (differentiate, evaluate, examine, illustrate, label). Included under “language systems” in the category describing the different areas of content communicated are eight sub-categories (e.g., contextual, grammatical, literary, meaning, mechanics of writing). This observation scheme is complex, and even though it consists of discrete categories, its goal is to show how they combine to form larger stretches of discourse. This is an important feature, and it is what distinguishes FOCUS from other schemes within the interaction analysis tradition. Because of its detailed nature and focus on individual moves by teachers and learners, it is not an instrument that can be used in real-time coding. Unlike earlier interaction analysis schemes, FOCUS is not restricted to describing (or prescribing) the behaviours or events that are associated with a specific language teaching method. The categories are linguistic rather than pedagogic in nature, and this is likely why Fanselow claimed that FOCUS could be used to describe communication both inside and outside classroom environments. Unfortunately, it appears that FOCUS has not been used to a great extent in either context. This may be due to the time-consuming nature of using the scheme. Two observation schemes that have more of a pedagogical focus are the Target Language Observation Scheme (TALOS) developed for use in a French second language programme evaluation study (Ullman & Geva, 1985) and the Communicative Interaction (CI) scheme developed to investigate features of communicative interaction in French foreign language classrooms (Mitchell, Parkinson, & Johnstone, 1981). TALOS consists of two separate but related sections. One is a low-inference real-time coding scheme that describes different types of classroom activities (e.g., drills, free communication), content (e.g., sound, phrase, discourse), focus (eg., grammar, culture), skill focus (e.g., listening, reading), teacher language 2

 A move is a functional-linguistic unit that can consist of one or two words or stretches of talk.

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(e.g., explain, correct, question), student language (e.g., word, sentence, type of question), and use of L1 and L2. The other part of TALOS is a high-inference rating scale to be completed after the observation session. This requires the observer to rate on a five-point scale (extremely low to extremely high) judgments about the overall degree of occurrence of similar events or behaviours. The unit of analysis is time for the low-inference portion of the scheme, that is, behaviours are coded every minute throughout the observation period and coded once afterwards for the high inference categories. TALOS was used to evaluate French second language classes in elementary schools, and the results indicated that, for the most part, the classes were teacher-centred and focused on the formal features of language with little evidence of functional or communicative teaching. Mitchell, Parkinson, and Johnstone (1981) and Mitchell (1985a) set out to determine the extent to which French foreign language teachers who shared a commitment to the communicative approach used the target language to provide extensive exposure to message-based input. In their CI observation scheme, there are two units of analysis: pedagogical moves and lesson segments. Within pedagogical moves, the functional (e.g., metalinguistic talk, organizing and activity instructions, discipline) and structural (e.g., lexical range, syntactic complexity, discourse markers) aspects of the teachers’ language are coded along with strategies they employ for the negotiation of meaning and the repair of breakdowns in communication. For lesson segments, categories are coded in terms of class organization (e.g., individual, whole class), language activities (e.g., drill, translation, communicative foreign language use), topic of discourse (e.g., language, organization, real life), and mode of involvement (e.g., listening, doing, writing). The results indicated considerable quantities of foreign language input and interaction; however, most of it was language-related in structure-based activities rather than messageoriented in communicative practice. Like the FOCUS observation scheme, it appears that neither the TALOS nor CI schemes have been used to a great extent outside the contexts in which they were originally developed. While TALOS and CI are easier to use and are less time-consuming in terms of coding and analyses than FOCUS, it is not clear why so little L2 classroom research using these schemes has been conducted. This is probably due to the shift over the past twenty-five years from using comprehensive schemes that capture a wide range of pedagogic and linguistic behaviours to using smaller-scale systems targeted to specific domains of linguistic and pedagogical practice in order to explore relationships between L2 instruction and learning outcomes. The Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) observation scheme is used to describe L2 classrooms at the level of activity type along with the verbal interactions that take place within them. COLT is

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described in greater detail here than the other schemes because it has been used extensively in L2 classroom research, has influenced the development of other schemes, and appears to be the last broad-based comprehensive L2 observation scheme to have been developed in the field of L2 classroom research. COLT was developed in the early 1980s to describe differences in the communicative orientation of language teaching (process research) and to determine whether and how this contributes to differences in L2 learning outcomes (process-product research). One of the ways in which COLT has been distinguished from other interaction analysis observation schemes is the effort that was made to validate the categories based on theories of communicative competence, communicative language teaching, and research in first and second language acquisition (Allen, Fröhlich, & Spada, 1984). The COLT scheme consists of two parts: Part A, which involves realtime coding of instructional behaviours at the level of activity, and Part B, which is a detailed post-hoc coding of the verbal interactions between teachers and students and students interacting with each other using audio-recordings and transcriptions (see Appendix 1 for Part A and B of the COLT scheme). Part A consists of five major features that are divided into thirty-three categories and subcategories: activity type (open-ended); participant organization (e.g., whole class, group work, individual); content (e.g., language, other topics); student modality (e.g., listening, speaking); and materials (e.g., visual, minimal, controlled). Part B consists of seven major features divided into forty categories/subcategories that are divided equally to describe teacher and student speech: use of target language (L1 or L2); information gap (giving or requesting information); sustained speech (ultraminimal, minimal, sustained); reaction to code or meaning (form or message); incorporation of student utterances (e.g., correction, repetition, clarification request); discourse initiation (selfinitiated turns by students); and restriction of linguistic form (e.g., restricted, unrestricted). COLT has been used in several process-oriented studies to determine differences in the communicative orientation of L2 instruction. In the first such study, Fröhlich, Spada, and Allen (1985) used COLT Part A and B to observe instruction in three different French language programmes (i.e., core, extended, immersion) and one ESL programme. Prior to observing the classes, the researchers predicted that some classes would be more communicatively oriented than others based on previous knowledge of and observations in the programmes. One of the main goals of that study was to determine whether the categories in the scheme were successful in differentiating between more or less communicatively oriented instruction. This was confirmed. Subsequently, other studies have used COLT to describe instructional processes along communicative dimensions for a

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variety of purposes (see Spada & Fröhlich, 1995 for summaries of earlier studies and Lyster & Mori, 2006 and Simard & Jean, 2011 for more recent research). Other observation schemes with different foci have also been modelled on COLT. For example, Guilloteaux and Dörnyei (2008) developed the Motivational Orientation of Language Teaching (MOLT), an instrument to describe the motivational practices of teachers and learners in foreign language classrooms. COLT has also been used in combination with more qualitative approaches to L2 classroom research (e.g., Fazio & Lyster, 1998). There are a few studies that have used COLT to explore whether differences in the communicative orientation of L2 instruction contribute to differences in learning outcomes. In a large-scale process-product study with school-age French language learners, Allen and Carroll (1987) investigated correlations between the COLT Part A and Part B categories in relation to learners’ performance on oral and written language tests that measured a wide range of learners’ L2 ability (e.g., grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse). While several of the COLT categories positively correlated with learner achievement (e.g., focus on form, information gap, sustained speech), few of the relationships were statistically significant. In a separate analysis of the classroom data, the researchers grouped the COLT features into binary oppositions to characterize the target classes from most experiential to most analytic and found that there were positive correlations between both types of instruction and learning outcomes. In a study with adult ESL learners, Spada (1987) used the COLT categories to distinguish between more or less communicative classes and found minimal differences between them in terms of learning outcomes. Similar findings have been reported in other studies using COLT with different groups of learners (e.g., McKay, 2006). This raises questions about whether the COLT categories are valid predictors of learning outcomes. It also raises a more general concern as to whether efforts to establish process-product relationships using comprehensive observation schemes like COLT are feasible or realistic. That is, COLT may be too blunt an instrument to investigate process-product relationships. This is likely compounded when, not only are the classroom process variables measured broadly, but also the product variables (i.e., learner outcomes) via general language proficiency measures. This may explain why the use of broad-based observation schemes has apparently ceased to exist in studies investigating relationships between L2 instruction and L2 learning.3 Instead, researchers have sought to carry out more fine-grained process-product research focused on a narrower  The publication dates of research reports using comprehensive observation schemes such as COLT have dropped

3

precipitously since the late 1980s.

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range of instructional features that are hypothesized to be predictors of L2 learning and examined their effects on specific features of language use and development.4 This represents a move from macroscopic to microscopic description (Spada & Lyster, 1997) or what McKay (2006) refers to as “generic/limited”. Mitchell (1985b) characterizes it as a shift from “global to single-issue research” and explains it in the following way: The complex and multi-layered nature of L2 classroom processes … has led many researchers to shift away from the attempt to conduct comprehensive analyses of lesson data, with the aim of encompassing all possible features and variables which may have significance for improving the effectiveness of the classroom as a language learning environment. Recognising that we do not yet have the theoretical understanding of the overall processes of teaching and learning a second language which would make this a practicable goal, these researchers have instead turned to the more detailed study of particular features and mechanisms of the classroom instructional process, which may ultimately contribute to the development of a global understanding. (p. 335)

This does not mean that broad-based observation schemes like COLT do not serve a useful purpose in L2 classroom research. On the contrary, the strength of comprehensive instruments is precisely in their capacity to provide the big picture. An example of where the use of COLT provided critical information in a single-issue study is discussed later in this chapter (Lyster & Mori, 2006). We now turn our attention to a few small-scale process and process-product studies.

8.6 Narrowly-Focused Observation Systems: Process and Process-Product Research Using COLT as an example of a macroscopic scheme, Spada and Lyster (1977) describe the development of a microscopic system (i.e., error treatment model) used to describe teachers’ reactions to learners’ errors and their immediate responses to this feedback (Lyster & Ranta, 1997). The error treatment model was inspired by two categories on COLT Part B (reaction to form or message and incorporation of student utterances) as well as other feedback-on-error models used in L2 classroom research. Given the researchers’ focus, they also created additional categories that could more fully describe the oral linguistic behaviours of teachers and learners in the error treatment sequence. Seven types of corrective feedback are 4

 Although these approaches are not addressed here, it is important to emphasize that another response to the use of comprehensive observation schemes has been to carry out more qualitative studies, including ethnographic research of classroom processes.

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included in the model (e.g., recasts, elicitation, repetition) along with several different types of learner repair (e.g., repetition, incorporation) and needs repair (e.g., same error, partial repair). Since its development, this system has been used in many descriptive studies of oral corrective feedback in a wide range of contexts, as well as in numerous experimental and quasi-experimental studies (see Lyster, 2007 and Lyster, Saito, & Sato, 2013 for summaries of this work). The results from the process-oriented research using the error treatment model have revealed that recasts are the preferred type of corrective feedback used by L2 instructors in second and foreign language classrooms, and this is particularly the case in communicative and content-based language teaching contexts. The overall results of studies investigating the efficacy of oral corrective feedback in promoting L2 learning (process-product) indicate that it plays a beneficial role (Russell & Spada, 2006). Questions remain, however, about whether certain types of corrective feedback are more effective than others (Li, 2010; Lyster & Saito, 2010; Mackey & Goo, 2007). Conflicting results suggest the effects of different types of corrective feedback are dependent on several factors, including the context in which the research was undertaken (e.g., classroom versus laboratory), the type of target feature, the age and proficiency level of learners, and the overall communicative orientation of the instructional context in which the corrective feedback is provided. Based on these findings Lyster, Sato, and Saito (2013) conclude that teachers should use a variety of different types of corrective feedback, echoing what Lyster and Ranta (1997) concluded fifteen years earlier and reinforcing the words of Ammar and Spada (2006) that “one size does not fit all” (p. 566). Other examples of observation research taking a limited perspective include studies focused on the quantity and quality of teachers’ use of the L1 in L2 classrooms. Considerable variation has been observed both in terms of how much teachers use the L1 and for what purposes (e.g., classroom administration, grammar instruction, empathy or solidarity; Kim & Elder, 2005; Polio & Duff, 1994; Macaro, 2001). Research targeting other teacher behaviours has examined the use of metalanguage. This has primarily included observations of different types of metalanguage (grammatical, sociolinguistic, pragmatic) (Borg, 1998) and the extent to which teachers use metalanguage in communicative tasks (Basturkmen, Loewen, & Ellis, 2002). Classroom research investigating the variables of teacher L1 use and metalanguage have been primarily descriptive (i.e., process-oriented) with few studies investigating their effects on L2 learning (i.e., process-product). An area of narrowly focused L2 classroom observation research, where process-product relationships have been explored, is in teacher

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questioning behaviour. This research has focused on “display” versus “referential” questions, and over the years many studies have reported disproportionately higher numbers of display questions. This is considered problematic because referential questions are characterized as more authentic in nature, more reflective of “real” communicative exchanges, and thus likely to lead to more successful L2 learning. Research that has investigated the effects of types of teacher questions on learner output and L2 learning, however, has been mixed. While some studies have provided evidence that referential questions lead to longer and more complex language use on the part of learners (Brock, 1986; Nunan, 1987), others have indicated the reverse (Long & Sato, 1984; McNeil, 2012). An argument in support of the use of display questions is that they provide scaffolding support for learners and serve important pedagogic and interaction functions (Lee, 2006; McCormick & Donato, 2000). In a large-scale process-product study of teacher questions and learner output in content and languageintegrated learning (CLIL) classes, Dalton-Puffer (2007) investigated the distribution of four different question types (display or referential; open or closed) and their goals (e.g., questions for fact, explanation, reasons, opinions). Results indicated that open-ended questions asking learners for reasons and outcomes were ones that led to the most complex language outcomes. Decisions about whether to use a broad-based or narrow focus to classroom observation is clearly dependent on one’s research goals. There may also be times when both are necessary. An example of this comes from a comparative study of corrective feedback in Japanese and French immersion programmes (Lyster & Mori, 2006). Using the error treatment model described above (Lyster & Ranta, 1997), the researchers documented the teachers’ corrective strategies and learners’ immediate responses to them. The results revealed that the teachers’ corrective feedback strategies in both programmes were the same, but the students’ responses were different. This was perplexing given that both programmes were based on the principles of communicative and content-based language teaching and were assumed to reflect similar pedagogical practices. The researchers decided to use COLT Part A to explore whether there were any differences in the overall communicative orientation of the classes across the two settings that might help to provide an explanation for the observed differences in the corrective feedback interactions. The results indicated a more analytic pedagogic orientation in the Japanese immersion classrooms with a greater focus on accuracy and repetition compared with the French immersion classes in which a more experientially oriented pedagogy was implemented. The researchers would not have been able to fully interpret the differences between these programmes without the use of a comprehensive observation scheme:

Classroom Observation Research Using two coding schemes to support comparisons of instructional settings can be seen as a collaborative innovation … studies that compare classrooms along a single dimension such as interactional feedback often lack other relevant descriptive data to support the comparison.  (Lyster & Mori, 2006, p.278)

8.7 Conclusion In this chapter, I have summarized the history, development, and use of L2 classroom observation instruments within the interaction analysis tradition. This has been one of the main approaches to conducting observation research in L2 classrooms for many decades and, like all research methods, comes with its strengths and limitations. Other traditions to classroom observation such as discourse analysis and ethnography represent different conceptual frameworks and use divergent methodologies and procedures in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of classroom observation data. These three approaches to classroom observation produce different types of knowledge, insights, and perspectives on L2 classroom life. While some might view them as incompatible, they can also be viewed as complementary. To be sure, most L2 classroom researchers agree that using multiple approaches and methods is preferable to using one. Indeed, a multi-method approach combining objective and subjective elements, quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis, structured and unstructured approaches, and macro- and micro-level perspectives is considered to be the best way to achieve a complete description of the highly complex and wide range of linguistic, pedagogic, and social behaviours that occur in L2 classrooms. Such a view is consistent with the mixed-methods movement that has been rapidly growing within the field of applied linguistics and other disciplines in recent years. According to Dörnyei (2007), “the combining of several research strategies [in mixed methods classroom research] can broaden the scope of the investigation and enrich the researcher’s ability to draw conclusions” (p. 186). This is consistent with what Allwright and Bailey (1991) argued almost thirty years ago before the term mixed methods was introduced. Similar recommendations have been made by several other L2 researchers, including Nunan (2005), who states, “classroom researchers appear increasingly reluctant to restrict themselves to a single data collection technique, or even a single research paradigm” (p. 237). In conclusion, the evolution of L2 classroom observation within the interaction analysis tradition has taken it from a focus on teacher education to research, from prescription to description, from process to processproduct research, and from comprehensive, broad-based documentations

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of L2 classroom behaviours to more narrowly focused descriptions. While the shift to small-scale process-product research has permitted more feasible investigations of relationships between L2 teaching and learning, it does not negate the need for comprehensive schemes to provide an overall view of what goes on in L2 classrooms. Nevertheless, more research is needed to address some basic methodological issues associated with the use of comprehensive classroom observation schemes. This includes the empirical validation of observation categories, which can be explored through quantitative multi-factorial research designed to investigate the extent to which specific instructional variables and/or clusters of variables are stronger (or weaker) predictors of learning outcomes.

References Allen, J. P. B., & Carroll, S. (1987). Evaluation of classroom processes in a Canadian core French programme. Evaluation & Research in Education, 1, 49–61. Allen, J. P. B., Fröhlich, M., & Spada, N. (1984). The communicative orientation of second language teaching: An observation scheme. In J. Handscombe, R. Orem, & B. Taylor (eds.), On TESOL ’83 (pp. 232–252). Washington, DC: TESOL. Allwright, D., & Bailey, K. (1991). Focus on the language classroom: An introduction to classroom research for language teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ammar, A., & Spada, N. (2006). One size fits all? Recasts, prompts, and L2 Learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 543–574. Basturkmen, H., Loewen, S., & Ellis, R. (2002). Metalanguage in focus on form in the communicative classroom, Language Awareness, 11, 1–13. Bellack, A., Herbert, A., Kliebard, M., & Smith Jr., F. L. (1966). The language of the classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Beretta, A., & Davies, A. (1985). Evaluation of the Bangalore Project. ELT Journal, 39, 121–127. Borg, S. (1998). Teachers’ pedagogical systems and grammar teaching: A qualitative study. TESOL Quarterly, 32, 9–38. Brock, C. (1986). The effects of referential questions on ESL classroom discourse. TESOL Quarterly, 20, 47–59. Chaudron, C. (1988a). Second language classrooms: Research on teaching and learning. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chaudron, C. (1988b). Classroom research: Recent methods and research findings. In G. Kasper (ed.), AILA review: Classroom research (Vol. 5, pp. 10– 19). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chaudron, C. (1991). Validation in second language classroom research and the evaluation of teaching methods. In R. Phillipson, E. Kellerman,

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L. Selinker, M. Sharwood Smith, & M. Swain (eds.), Foreign language pedagogy: A commemorative volume for Claus Faerch (pp. 187–196). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Dalton-Puffer, C. (2007). Discourse in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classrooms. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Dörnyei, Z. (2007). Research methods in applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, R. (2012). Language teaching research and language pedagogy. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Duff, P. A. (2002). The discursive co-construction of knowledge, identity, and difference: An ethnography of communication in the high school mainstream. Applied Linguistics, 22, 289–322. Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. London: Longman. Fanselow, J. (1977). Beyond “Rashomon”—Conceptualizing and describing the teaching act. TESOL Quarterly, 10, 17–39. Fazio, L., & Lyster, R. (1998). Immersion and submersion classrooms: A comparison of instructional practices in language arts. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 19, 303–317. Flanders, N. (1970). Analyzing teaching behavior. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. Fröhlich, M., Spada, N., & Allen, P. (1985). Differences in the communicative orientation of L2 classrooms. TESOL Quarterly, 19, 27–57. Guilloteaux, M., & Dörnyei, Z. (2008). Motivating language learners: A classroom-oriented investigation of the effects of motivational strategies on student motivation. TESOL Quarterly, 42, 55–77. Harklau, L. (1994). ESL versus mainstream classes: Contrasting L2 learning environments. TESOL Quarterly, 28, 241–272. Kim, S., & Elder, C. (2005). Language choices and pedagogic functions in the foreign language classroom: A cross-linguistic functional analysis of teacher talk. Language Teaching Research, 9, 335–380. Lee, Y. (2006). Respecifying display questions: Interactional resources for language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 40, 691–713. Levin, L. 1972. Comparative studies in foreign-language teaching. Stockholm: Almquist och Wiksell. Li, S. (2010). The effectiveness of corrective feedback in SLA: A meta-analysis. Language Learning, 60(2), 309–365. Lightbown, P., Halter, R., White, J., & Horst, M. (2002). Comprehensionbased learning: The limits of “do it yourself”. Canadian Modern Language Journal, 58, 427–464. Long, M. (1980). Inside the “black box”: Methodological issues in classroom research on language learning. Language Learning, 30, 1–42. Long, M., & Sato, C. (1984). Methodological issues in interlanguage studies: An interactionist perspective. In A. Davies, C. Criper, & A. Howatt (eds.), Interlanguage (pp. 253–280). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Lyster, R. (2007). Learning and teaching languages through content: A counterbalanced approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lyster, R., & Mori, H. (2006). Interactional feedback and instructional counterbalance. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 269–300. Lyster, R., & Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in communicative classrooms. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 37–66. Lyster, R., & Saito, K. (2010). Oral feedback in classroom SLA: A metaanalysis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(2), 265–302. Lyster, R., Saito, K., & Sato, M. (2013). Oral corrective feedback in second language classrooms. Language Teaching, 46, 1–40. Macaro, E. (2001). Analysing student teachers codeswitching in foreign language classrooms: Theories and decision making. The Modern Language Journal, 85, 531–548. Mackey, A., & Goo, J. (2007). Interaction research in SLA: A meta-analysis and research synthesis. In A. Mackey (ed.), Conversational interaction and second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Markee, N. (2005). Conversation analysis for second language acquisition. In E. Hinkel (ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (pp. 355–374). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. McCormick, D., & Donato, R. (2000). Teacher questions as scaffolding assistance in an ESL classroom. In J. Hall & L. Verplaetse (eds.), Second and foreign language learning through classroom interaction (pp. 183–201). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. McKay, S. (2006). Researching second language classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. McNeil, L. (2012). Using talk to scaffold referential questions for English language learners. Teaching and Teacher Education, 28, 396–404. Mitchell, R. (1985a) Communicative interaction research project: Final report. Stirling: Department of Education, University of Stirling. Mitchell, R. (1985b) Process research in second language classrooms. Language Teaching, 18, 330–352. Mitchell, R., Parkinson, B., & Johnstone, R. (1981). The foreign language classroom an observational study. Stirling: University of Stirling. Moskowitz, G. (1976). The FLINT system: An observational tool for the foreign language classroom. In A. Simon & E. Boyer (eds.), Mirrors for behavior: An anthology of classroom observation instruments (pp. 125–157). Philadelphia, PA: Center for the Study of Teaching at Temple University. Nunan, D. (2005). Research methods in language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nunan, D. (1987) Communicative language teaching: Making it work. ELT Journal, 41, 136–145. Polio, C., & Duff, P. A. (1994). Teachers’ language use in university foreign language classrooms: A qualitative analysis of English and target language alternation. The Modern Language Journal, 78, 313–326.

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Prabhu, N. S. (1987). Second language pedagogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell, J., & Spada, N. (2006). Corrective feedback makes a difference: A meta-analysis of the research. In J. Norris & L. Ortega (eds.), Synthesizing research on language learning and teaching (pp. 133–164). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Savignon, S. (1972). Communicative competence: An experiment in foreign language teaching. Philadelphia, PA: Center for Curriculum Development. Scherer, A., & Wertheimer, M. (1964). A psycholinguistic experiment in foreign language teaching. New York: McGrawHill. Seedhouse, P. (2004). The interactional architecture of the language classroom: A conversation analysis perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Shintani, N., & Ellis, R. (2010). The incidental acquisition of plural -s by Japanese children in comprehension-based and production-based lessons: A process-product study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(4), 607–637. Simard, D., & Jean, G. (2011). Exploration of L2 teachers’ use of pedagogical interventions. Language Learning, 61, 759–785. Sinclair, J., & Coulthard, M. (1975). Towards an analysis of discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, P. (1970). A comparison of the audiolingual and cognitive approaches to foreign language instruction: The Pennsylvania foreign language project. Philadelphia, PA: Center for Curriculum Development. Spada, N. (1987). Relationships between instructional differences and learning outcomes: A process-product study of communicative language teaching. Applied Linguistics, 8, 131–161. Spada, N., & Fröhlich, M. (1995). COLT. Communicative orientation of language teaching observation scheme. Sydney: National Center of English Language Teaching and Research. Spada, N., & Lyster, R. (1997). Microscopic and macroscopic views of second language classrooms. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 787–795. Ullman, R., & Geva, E. (1985). Expanding our evaluation perspective: What can classroom observation tell us about Core French programs? The Canadian Modern Language Review, 42, 307–323. Watson-Gegeo, K. A. (1988). Ethnography in ELS: Defining the essentials. TESOL Quarterly, 22, 575–592.

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9 Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Methods Leah Roberts 9.1 Introduction Language learning involves more than acquiring knowledge of the target language; learners must also be able to put their knowledge to use during real-time processing, and in the past twenty years, sophisticated psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods have been employed to allow for a deep investigation into these processes. A number of techniques, such as self-paced reading and cross-modal priming rely on speed responses (for instance a button-push) to infer the underlying comprehension processes that are involved in the real-time processing of linguistic material. Specifically, in comparison to a control condition, a slower response indicates difficulty in, for instance, lexical access, or the processing of ambiguous, complex, or ungrammatical input, at certain points in a sentence. Eye-tracking during reading can also be used to examine lexical and sentence processing in a similar way, but this method can add detail to the study of the comprehension processes via the examination of specific eye-movement measures thought to tap early (first fixations) and later comprehension processes (go-past times and regressions). Currently, expectation/prediction is an important topic in second language acquisition (SLA) processing research (e.g., Hopp, 2013; Kaan, 2014), and visualworld eye-tracking can be usefully employed in this regard, as one can explore listeners’ expectations of, for instance, a continuation of a sentence, or a referent for a pronoun. As well as being interested in the kinds of words or sentences that cause processing difficulty, language and language learning researchers also investigate types of information that are being accessed or applied during online comprehension, and neurolinguistic methods can be used for this purpose, in particular electroencephalography (EEG). This is because certain types of violations and/or unexpected linguistic material (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) can elicit different types of event-related potential (ERP) components in the EEG signal, both in terms of polarity (negative versus positive) and timing (i.e., the onset of

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the component). So, for instance, difficulty with semantic integration of a current linguistic element may elicit a negative-going waveform, with an onset of approximately 400 ms following the beginning of the critical word (the so-called N400 component). The EEG technique thus provides highly time-sensitive data; however, it does not provide reliable topological information. For this, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is more useful, as it can tell us which parts of the brain and which networks of neurons are most activated under various experimental conditions. In sum, using these techniques researchers can examine sentence processing or parsing procedures (activation of words and their integration into the ongoing analysis of a sentence) and for second language (L2) researchers, often this entails a comparison with native speakers’ (NS’) processing, informing theories of (L2) parsing (e.g., Clahsen & Felser, 2006; Cunnings, 2017; Kaan, 2014). For L2 researchers, these methods can also be employed to investigate the types of language that are assumed to be grammatical (or not) for language learners, in particular, looking at implicit knowledge, in comparison to explicit or metalinguistic knowledge which is arguably tapped into via offline tasks such as grammaticality judgments (Ellis, 2005; Tokowicz & MacWhinney, 2005). Focusing on such questions can speak to issues in SLA theory, for instance, whether late (post-puberty) L2 learners’ persistent problems with morphosyntax reflect a representational deficit (e.g., Hawkins & Liszka, 2003; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007) or a processing problem, caused by difficulty in accessing appropriate grammatical knowledge online (e.g., Goad & White, 2006; Prévost & White, 2000; for a review, see Slabakova, 2009). Psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic techniques can also be applied to questions surrounding L2 learners’ ability to acquire phenomena at the (external) interface levels, such as syntax-discourse (e.g., Sorace, 2011; Sorace & Serratrice, 2009; Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006). In this chapter, I will discuss the use of such techniques in SLA research and critically appraise their ability to answer important theoretical topics in SLA research.

9.2  Psycholinguistic Methods 9.2.1  Self-Paced Reading Research on monolingual sentence processing has shown that it is incremental, that is, immediately on encountering each word in the input, grammatical knowledge is applied (the input is parsed). Furthermore, semantic, pragmatic, discourse, and world knowledge are accessed, and the plausibility and appropriateness of the concurrent analysis is assessed (for detailed discussion on parsing models, see van Gompel, 2013). By far the

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most common method in L2 studies for investigating real-time sentence comprehension in general and incremental processing in particular has been self-paced reading (SPR; also known as the moving window technique; Just, Carpenter, & Woolley, 1982). This has been used both to examine readers’ parsing procedures as they integrate each word in the incoming input to create an interpretation of the sentence and the extent to which they are sensitive online to (un)grammatical phenomena. I will discuss each of these applications in the following section.

9.2.1.1  Self-Paced Reading and Incremental Processing Evidence for incremental processing in both native speakers and L2 learners has most often come from self-paced reading studies of temporarily ambiguous (garden-path) sentences like 1a (Juffs & Harrington, 1995; 1996). The time it takes for readers to read through a sentence is recorded via button pushes which bring up each new word of the input. Specifically, readers of such sentences often initially analyse a temporarily ambiguous determiner phrase (DP) (the water) as a direct object of a preceding verb (drank). This evidence for incremental processing is shown by processing slowdowns (slower button-pushes) on and following the disambiguating word, in this case when encountering the main verb (proved). Readers must then reanalyse the DP as subject of this main verb. Critically, reading times (RTs) are measured in comparison to conditions, in which, for instance, the previously encountered verb does not subcategorize for the DP, “arrived” (1b). (1)

a. After Bill drank the water proved to be poisoned. b. After Sam arrived the guests began to eat.

Juffs and Harrington (1995; 1996) found that their Chinese L2 learners performed similarly to native speakers, with garden-path sentences leading to slower processing than those containing intransitive verbs (1b), demonstrating both incremental processing and a sensitivity to subcategorization information in online processing. Incremental processing has also been found in a number of other L2 processing studies employing the SPR method (Dussias and Cramer Scaltz, 2008; Juffs & Harrington, 1995; 1996; Roberts & Felser, 2011; Juffs & Rodriguez, 2014). In fact, L2 learners are often highly sensitive to lexical-semantic information during parsing. For instance, Dussias and Cramer Scaltz (2008) found a similar sensitivity to the semantic biases of verbs. The reading times of their Spanish learners of English in an SPR task demonstrated that the learners had comparative processing difficulty when sentence continuations went against the verb’s bias for taking either a direct object (2a; confirmed the rumour could mean …) or a sentence complement (2b; admitted the mistake …). (2)

a. The CIA director confirmed the rumour could mean a security leak. b. The ticket agent admitted the mistake when he got caught.

Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Methods

Although the learners appeared native-like in their processing of these sentences, when they encountered verbs whose biases for taking sentence complements or direct objects were different between Spanish and English, this influenced their parsing, indicating an L1 transfer effect (see Frenck-Mestre & Pynte, 1997, for similar findings using eye-tracking during reading). These data and others from SPR studies of the processing of garden-path sentences show that, like native speakers, learners can incrementally process the input and can access and employ rapidly subcategorization information of L2 verbs during the real-time interpretation of sentences. However, there is evidence that learners may differ from native speakers in that they appear to have more difficulty in recovering from misanalyses of the input. For example, the learners in Juffs and Harrington (1996) were found to have problems correctly judging items that were temporarily ambiguous but ultimately grammatical (Sam warned the student cheated on the exam). Researchers can therefore employ end-of-sentence tasks like comprehension questions or acceptability judgments to assess the extent to which readers recover from processing problems. Roberts and Felser (2011) also found that learners had difficulty recovering from misanalyses in an SPR study with advanced Greek learners of English. Rather than employing a metalinguistic task together with the SPR experiment, the authors manipulated the pragmatic plausibility of their experimental items as a diagnostic to investigate recovery from temporary ambiguities (see also Pickering & Traxler, 1998), as shown in 3. (3)

The journalist wrote the book (the girl) had amazed all the judges.

The learners were garden-pathed as shown by the fact that their reading times indicated that they attempted to integrate the ambiguous noun phrase (book/girl) with the main verb (wrote). Specifically, they were slower when this misanalysis led to an implausible sentence fragment (wrote the girl) in comparison to plausible conditions (wrote the book). Following this, the plausibility of their initial analysis affected how fast they were to read the remainder of the sentence, an indication of how comparatively easy recovery was. That is, on and beyond the disambiguating verb phrase (had amazed), RT patterns were reversed such that processing difficulty was elicited in the plausible condition (wrote the book had amazed all the judges) compared to the implausible condition (wrote the girl had amazed all the judges). The processing assumption here is that readers are more strongly committed to a semantically (or pragmatically) initial plausible interpretation (wrote the book had amazed), which is harder to abandon in the face of new evidence in comparison to an initial analysis that was implausible. In sum, the learners in this study showed online recovery from their initial misanalyses. This online recovery effect for ambiguous complement

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clause constructions (3) was not, however, in evidence with more structurally complex sentences, such as preposed adjuncts (4), where the learners were found to be garden-pathed, but no online recovery (as in a reversal of reading times) was observed. (4)

While the band played the song (the beer) pleased all the customers.

In sum, the results from SPR garden-path studies show that, like native speakers, learners incrementally process the input, but information from their L1 (such as differences in subcategorization properties of verbs) and structural complexity can affect their online processing decisions and the ability to incrementally process the sentence following any initial misanalysis.

9.2.1.2  Self-Paced Reading and Assessing Grammatical Knowledge SLA researchers have also used SPR to good effect in the study of L2 learners’ grammatical knowledge. Specifically, studies focus on the extent to which learners are sensitive to grammatical violations during L2 processing (e.g., Hopp, 2010; Roberts & Liszka, 2013; Sagarra and Herschensohn, 2011), and the task can therefore be employed to assess a learner’s current interlanguage (Selinker, 1972). It is important to note that L2 learners (of sufficient proficiency) most often perform like native speakers when they are required to undertake a metalinguistic task at the same time (e.g., Hopp, 2010). A number of word-by-word SPR studies have found that learners may not slow down when processing grammatical violations, yet they are able to assess the items as unacceptable or ungrammatical in a separate offline task, particularly if the feature being examined is not instantiated in their L1 (e.g., for subject–verb agreement violations with Chinese L2 learners of English, see Jiang, 2004, and for Spanish and Chinese L2 learners, see Lee, 2002). For example, Roberts and Liszka (2013) examined advanced French and German L2 learners’ ability to employ their knowledge of English tense/aspect in a word-by-word SPR task, focusing on mismatches between a fronted adverbial and the following tensed verb. (5) Yesterday/*Since yesterday, John went swimming three times. (Past Simple). (6) Since yesterday/*Yesterday, John has been swimming three times. (Present Perfect).

Both groups of learners demonstrated explicit knowledge of the constructions under investigation in a cloze production task and an offline acceptability judgment task. Despite this, online, an effect of the learners’ L1 was in evidence. That is, for the past simple (5), both the Germans and the French were slower to read the ungrammatical items, whereas only the French learners showed the same sensitivity to the violation in the present perfect condition (6). The authors argue that these findings can be

Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Methods

explained in terms of transfer, that is, tense is instantiated in all the languages of concern (English, French, German), but aspect is only grammaticalized in French and English. Such findings support the theoretical view that only features available from the L1 are ultimately fully acquirable to native-like levels (see Hawkins & Liszka, 2003) or that explicit knowledge is obtainable, but it may not be possible to employ such grammatical knowledge in online tasks, which is assumed to tap more implicit knowledge (Ellis, 2005; for eye-tracking evidence, see Keating, 2009). However, a number of researchers argue against this position. For instance, Hopp (2010) reports the results of a series of experiments using traditional grammaticality and speeded grammaticality judgment tasks (GJTs), as well as SPR for comprehension with advanced and near-native Russian, Dutch, and English learners of German. The author examined the learner’s real-time grammaticality judgments on sentences involving number (7) and case agreement (8) violations. Sensitivity to the ungrammaticalities was assumed to be in evidence in reading time slow-downs at the point at which the ungrammaticality occurs (haben in 7 and Hund in 8). (7) *Er glaubt, dass der Förster im vorigen Jahr den Angler umgebracht haben. (He believes that the forester (SG) in the previous year the fisherman (SG) killed have (PL)). (8) *Er glaubt, dass die seit langem vermisste Hund im Garten gefunden wurde. (He believes that the (FEM) since long missed (MASC) dog in the garden found was.)

The author examined word-by-word reading times as well as offline grammaticality judgments. The highly advanced learners performed like native speakers, being slower to process the ungrammatical in comparison to the grammatical items and judging the former as less acceptable. One could argue, however, that asking learners to make metalinguistic judgments during online processing can lead them to pay more attention to grammatical information, and thus they are more likely to display “online” knowledge akin to native speakers under these circumstances. The extent to which such tasks actually tap truly implicit knowledge requires much further investigation (see also Roberts, 2013, for more discussion).

9.2.2 Eye-Tracking Eye-tracking is another common technique that has been successfully employed to investigate real-time processing in the L2, for the study of reading processes and comprehension during auditory processing (the visual-world paradigm). Research using the former method has often focused on temporary ambiguities and ungrammaticalities, as with SPR, and also on various types of referential or anaphor resolution. Anaphoric processes such as pronoun resolution can also be investigated by use of

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the visual-world technique, and, more recently, it has been employed to look at L2 learners’ predictive processing. Some of these studies will be discussed in the following sections.

9.2.2.1 Eye-Tracking During Reading—Examining Ambiguity, Ungrammaticality, and Referential Processing During reading, rapid eye movements are made from one fixation point to another. These movements or saccades are too fast for new information to be processed (Liversedge, Paterson, & Pickering, 1998; Rayner, 1998, 2009), but in between them, the eyes remain stationary (fixations) long enough for word recognition to take place (Rayner, 1998, 2009). Comprehension processes are inferred according to the number and duration of such fixations. Thus, as is the case with slower button-pushes during SPR, longer fixation times and a greater number of fixations can indicate processing difficulty. As well as moving progressively from left-to-right through a text while reading, often the eyes move from right-to-left. These latter movements are regressions and may be elicited by comprehension difficulties and failures. For instance, on encountering an unexpected or ambiguous word, a reader may regress to earlier parts of the sentence or discourse in an attempt at comprehension. Alternatively, highly predictable and frequent words are often skipped over. Therefore, taken together, via eye-movement recordings, we can see what has been fixated on, re-fixated on (and for how long), or indeed skipped altogether, during the uninterrupted processing of the input, which provides a highly rich account of real-time and comparatively natural comprehension processes (FrenckMestre, 2005), and this is therefore a great strength of this method, particularly in comparison to SPR (e.g., Duyck et al., 2007). Another strength of this technique in comparison to SPR is that early versus late processes in reading comprehension can be teased apart. Specifically, it is thought that first fixations and first pass durations reflect the earliest stages of processing, such as lexical access and immediate integration of semantic and grammatical information. Total reading times are assumed to reflect later stages of processing, such as re-integration following difficulties and/or recovery from misanalyses (Paterson, Liversedge, & Underwood, 1999; Rayner et al., 1989). Eye-tracking during reading has been used to good effect in the study of L2 learners’ incremental processing, with similar findings to those outlined above for SPR. However, given the greater sensitivity of this method versus SPR, a more fine-grained picture of processing can be obtained. For instance, in an early study by Frenck-Mestre and Pynte (1997), advanced L2 learners of French read sentences in French which were similarly ambiguous in both languages (9), where the critical prepositional phrase (PP) is ambiguous in that it can attach to either the preceding verb, “VP-attachment” (9a), or noun, “NP-attachment” (9b).

Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Methods (9) a. VP-attachment Il accuse son chef de meurtre mais il ne peut pas fournir de preuve. “He accuses his boss of murder but he cannot provide proof.” b. NP-attachment Il accuse son chef de service mais il ne peut pas fournir de preuve. “He accuses his head of department but he cannot provide proof.”

The authors found that both learners and native speakers processed the VP-attachment items more quickly than the NP-attachment constructions, as per earlier monolingual research findings (Rayner, Carlson, & Frazier, 1983). A second set of items used monotransitive verbs (10), to see whether the L2 learners, like native speakers, would be guided in their early parsing by the lexical information in the initial verb, and thus prefer NP-attachment (10b) and VP-attachment (10a) because only one argument is allowed. The predictions were indeed borne out, as in the earliest measures of processing (first fixations and first pass times) an NP-attachment preference was observed in the shorter fixation durations in comparison to the VP-attachment condition. Thus, since the L2 learners’ parsing decisions were affected by lexical information (subcategorization properties of the verbs) in the very early parsing stages, the authors argue that their processing (at least in their use of lexical-semantic information) during real-time comprehension appears to be qualitatively highly similar to native speakers’. (10) a. VP-attachment Il connaît la femme de vue mais ne se rappelle plus son nom. “He knows the woman by sight but no longer remembers her name.” b. NP-attachment Il connaît la femme de chambre mais ne se rappelle plus son nom. “He knows the chambermaid but no longer remembers her name.”

Early processing effects were also observed in a second experiment. The authors examined the incremental processing of garden-path experiments with sentences which were unambiguous in the target language (French) but temporarily ambiguous in English, using verbs which were intransitive in French (obéir) but optionally transitive in the learners’ L1, English (obey), which would thus lead to a “garden-path effect” if translated into the learners’ L1 (11). (11) Chaque fois que le chien obéissait la jolie petite fille montrait sa joie. “Every time the dog obeyed the pretty little girl showed her approval.”

Later fixation time measures (total reading times) showed no differences between the two groups, but for the learners, the very earliest fixations reflected a brief slowdown on those items which were ambiguous in their L1. In sum, initial incremental processing in the L2 was affected by cross-linguistic differences, which were not picked up in later processing measures.

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Eye-tracking during reading is therefore a useful tool to investigate early versus late processes during reading and can therefore offer a more detailed picture of L2 processing than SPR. The eye-tracking technique has also been used to test sensitivity to violations. For example, in Keating (2009), the knowledge and processing of grammatical gender in adult English L2 learners of Spanish was examined, since earlier research had found conflicted findings as to whether English learners were able to demonstrate knowledge of this feature (Franceschina, 2001; Sabourin, Stowe, & de Haan, 2006; White et al., 2004). The author used constructions in which the distance between the NP and the postnominal adjective differed in distance (12). This is an interesting construction to test, because readers need to incrementally process the input while keeping the noun in working memory until they integrate it with its modifier, which is thought to put the processing system under pressure (Gibson et al., 1996). (12)





a. In the DP [IP Una casa pequeña [VP cuesta mucho en San Francisco.]] “A small house costs a lot in San Francisco.” b. In the matrix clause VP [IP La casa [VP es bastante pequeña y necesita muchas reparaciones.]] “The house is quite small and needs a lot of repairs.” c. In the subordinate clause VP [IP Una casa [VP cuesta menos [CP si [VP es pequeña y necesita reparaciones.]]]] “A house costs less if it is small and needs repairs.”

Processing difficulty (and by extention an online sensitivity to gender agreement errors) was reflected in the eye-tracking data when there was a mismatch in gender between the two (e.g., un libr-o [masc] … pequeñ-a [fem]) by both longer fixation times on the critical adjective (e.g., pequeña) and the number of regressions from the adjective back to the modifying noun. Keating’s learners differed in their proficiency, and only those advanced learners of Spanish showed reading profiles akin to native speakers on the longer distance items (12b and c). The less proficient learners showed the same fixation patterns as the natives and higher proficient learners (longer total reading times and more regressions) only in the “local” dependency condition, where the noun and modifier were adjacent (12a). Such data is argued to be supportive of SLA theories that predict that learners are indeed able to ultimately attain grammatical features not available from transfer from the L1 (c.f. the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis; Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996), contra the findings of many offline studies (Franceschina, 2001; White et al., 2004) and against competing theories such as the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (Hawkins & Liszka, 2003). Furthermore, such data suggest that L2 learners, if they are of high enough proficiency, do not have more difficulty than native speakers in computing structural dependencies across clause boundaries (against the

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predictions of the Shallow Structure Hypothesis; Clahsen & Felser, 2006). Keating (2009) did not find effects of ungrammaticality in first fixation for any of his groups, but rather the violation was reflected only in later processing measures (total reading times or regressions after the critical regions). This may be because in his task the participants were instructed to read for meaning and to undertake a meaning-related task (translation matching) after each sentence. In contrast to this, Foucart and FrenckMestre’s (2012a) gender violation sentences (13) elicited longer first pass fixations, as well as total fixation times and regressions, and this may be because the participants were asked to perform an acceptability judgment task at the same time, which arguably directed them to the violations. (13) Au printemps les pommes (fem) son vertes (fem) (*verts [masc]) sur cet arbre. “In spring apples are green on this tree.”

In sum, as with SPR studies, it is important to consider the task(s) that learners (and NSs) are asked to perform together with the online experiment. Overall, it seems that the more metalinguistic the accompanying task, the earlier processing effects are observed, and the more native-like learners appear to be, but this may be caused by the fact that making judgments can push learners to employ more explicit knowledge during online processing (see Roberts, 2013 for an overview). The eye-tracking technique has also been used to explore referential processing in L2 learners and questions concerning the online application of syntactic constraints (e.g., binding). An example comes from reading studies by Felser, Sato, and Bertenshaw (2009) and Felser and Cunnings (2011) who looked at the processing of reflexive pronouns by advanced Japanese and German learners of English. The authors investigated whether, like native speakers, their learners would attempt to link immediately a reflexive anaphor with a grammatically appropriate antecedent NP in the earlier discourse (according to Principle A of the Binding Theory; Chomsky, 1981). Short texts were read (14) which included an introductory sentence containing two referents (e.g., John and Richard), and which were then reintroduced. Only the local referent was “binding-accessible” (Richard) and the other was “binding-inaccessible” but prominent in the discourse (John/Jane). Of interest were reading times on the reflexive pronoun himself/herself and the following few words (to catch spill-over effects). (14) John (Jane) and Richard were very worried in the kitchen of the expensive restaurant. John noticed that Richard had cut himself (herself) with a very sharp knife.

For items in which there was a mismatch between the gender of the pronoun (herself) and the local, binding-accessible antecedent (Richard), longer first pass fixations as well as total reading times, reflecting later processing,

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were in evidence for the native speakers. The learners’ fixation patterns were similar to those of the natives in this regard. However, for both the German and the Japanese learners, a fleeting effect of “interference” was observed, in that first fixation and first pass reading times were longer on the reflexive anaphor when there was a gender mismatch. That is, despite only German being structurally similar to English in the binding of reflexives, for both groups, when the discourse prominent, binding-inaccessible referent differed in gender from the reflexive pronoun (Jane … Richard … himself; see also Roberts, Gullberg, & Indefrey, 2008, for similar “disruption” effects in L2 processing of pronouns). The results could be argued to support theories of L2 acquisition that argue that L2 learners may have trouble with phenomena that lie at the (external) interfaces (e.g., between discourse-pragmatics and syntax; c.f. the Interface Hypothesis; Sorace, 2011; Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006) and that, therefore, differences may reflect processing rather than underlying competence issues.

9.2.2.2  The Visual-World Paradigm: Predictive Processing In the visual-world paradigm, participants listen to sentences while their eyes are tracked as they look at a visual array. For example, research has shown that within 200  ms of hearing a word in the input, the eyes will move to an image of the word that appears on the screen (Altmann, 2011). Thus, the visual-world eye-tracking can be successfully used to investigate word recognition (e.g., Marian & Spivey, 2003) and anaphor resolution, for instance, the real-time interpretation of subject pronouns in auditory discourse (Ellert, 2011; Wilson, 2009). Of recent theoretical interest has been the study of predictive processing in L2 comprehension, and this technique has been proved to be useful in this regard. For instance, Dussias et al. (2013) recorded the eye-movements of English and Italian learners of Spanish as they heard sentences, while looking at a display on which appeared a picture of a masculine (15) and feminine noun. Native speakers have been found to look at the picture of the corresponding noun as soon as they hear the determiner (in 15 el); thus they predict immediately the following noun on the basis of the gender of the determiner (Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010). (15) El estudiante estaba dibujando el reloj que vio ayer. “ The student was drawing the clock that he saw yesterday.”

The learners in the Dussias et al. study did not pattern with the native speakers, as their eyes moved towards the correct target only on hearing the noun itself (reloj), including even the Italian learners, in whose L1 gender is instantiated. Similar findings have been observed in other visual-world eye-tracking studies with other languages (e.g., Grüter, Lew-Williams, & Fernald, 2012; Grüter, Rohde, & Schafer, 2014; Hopp, 2013; Martin et al., 2013), although the ability appears to increase with greater proficiency (see Hopp, 2013). Such findings have led to the theory that L2 learners may

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be less able to predict upcoming information during real-time processing because their (lexical) representations are less established than those of native speakers (c.f., Reduced Ability to Generate Expectations during language processing; Grüter, Rohde, & Schafer, 2014; Kaan, 2014).

9.3  Neurolinguistic Methods 9.3.1 EEG/ERPs Most L2 processing studies to date have employed psycholinguistic methods such as SPR and eye-tracking, and such techniques can arguably tap implicit processes to some extent. However, a more sensitive method for this purpose is to take EEG (electroencephalogram) recordings while comprehenders are processing the input, because it can provide highly finegrained temporal resolution information. The use of this technique most often involves the examination of which event-related potential (ERP) components (which reflect the simultaneous activation of populations of neurons which are time-locked to a specific stimulus such as a word) are elicited by different types of violation, and thus can be seen to be of great interest to SLA researchers. ERP responses are time-locked in the EEG recording to the word or segment of the anomalous item in comparison to a control condition (e.g., The winner of the big trophy has/* have proud parents), and researchers compare the brain responses to the grammatical versus the ungrammatical items during reading or listening. Language researchers have found this technique useful because different types of violations elicit qualitatively and quantitatively different ERP components. For instance, lexical integration problems consistently elicit a negative-going waveform with a peak in amplitude at approximately 400  ms following the onset of the critical word (the N400 effect). The N400 component has been reliably elicited in L2 processing studies, particularly with learners of high proficiency (Kotz, Holcomb, & Osterhout, 2008; Proverbio, Cok, & Zani, 2002; Weber & Lavric, 2008; Zawiszewski et al., 2011). Much sentence processing research has, however, focused on grammatical processing. Syntactic agreement and integration violations tend to provoke the so-called P600 component, a positive-going wave, peaking at about 600  ms, in both monolingual and L2 studies (e.g., Alemán Bañón, Fiorentino, & Gabriele, 2012; Hagoort & Brown, 1999; Kolk et al., 2003; Nevins et al., 2007; Wicha, Moreno, & Kutas, 2004), and in some studies the P600 is preceded by a left-anterior negativity (LAN) at approximately 200–300 ms (e.g., Barber & Carreiras, 2005; O’Rourke & Van Petten, 2011). There is debate in the literature as to what exactly the P600 may be indexing. Some argue that it reflects later, repair operations (semantic and syntactic reanalysis, for instance), and it is therefore assumed at least to be an

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indirect correlate to syntactic processing in contrast to the lesser observed LAN effect, which is elicited by earlier, more automatic processes (e.g., Friederici, Hahne, & Mecklinger, 1996; Molinaro, Barber, & Carreiras, 2011; Molinaro et al., 2015). Some studies have found a comparable P600 effect in L2 learners to that of native speakers when processing agreement violations, for instance in a study by Tokowicz and MacWhinney (2005), who examined violation processing in English L2 learners of Spanish. However, such effects appear to be strongest when the constructions under investigation are similar in the learners’ L1 and L2 (tense violations; 16a). The P600 effect may be reduced or even not appear for grammatical phenomena that differ between the two languages (determiner–noun number agreement; 16b) or are unique to the target language (gender agreement; 16c). (16)

a. Su abuela *cocinando/cocina muy bien. His grandmother *cooking/cooks very well. b. *El/Los niños están jugando. *The (s.)/the (pl.) boys are playing. c. Ellos fueron a *un/una fiesta. They went to *a (m.)/a (f.) party.

Such evidence of an influence of a learner’s L1 have been observed in a number of other ERP studies (Chen et al., 2007; Foucart & FrenckMestre, 2012b; Ojima, Nakata, & Kakigi, 2005; Sabourin and Stowe, 2008; Zawiszewski et al., 2011) and have led to the view that constructions that are different from or not available in a learner’s L1 are not salient enough to be picked up by such implicit techniques. However, in comparison to psycholinguistic studies of L2 processing, ERP work is rare, and it may be that a number of factors influence the extent to which native-like components can be provoked, such as age of onset of L2 acquisition (Weber-Fox and Neville, 1996), proficiency (Ojima, Nakata, & Kakigi, 2005; Rossi et al., 2006), and type of exposure (Caffarra et al., 2015, for a detailed overview). One should take care in the interpretation of ERP data, however, since there is recent evidence that individuals may differ in their responses to the same input stimuli in different ways, specifically, that there may be some individuals who are more N400- and some who are more P600dominant (Tanner et al., 2013; Tanner, Inoue, & Osterhout, 2014). It has been argued that the biphasic responses that have been observed in the processing of agreement violations may be artefactual, caused by researchers averaging over these different sub-groups of participants (see Tanner & van Hell, 2014, for a review and discussion). Of great interest to SLA researchers is language learners’ development over time, and there have been some studies in this area using the ERP technique in longitudinal (Davidson & Indefrey, 2011; McLaughlin et al., 2010; Morgan-Short et al., 2010) rather than cross-sectional studies (e.g.,

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Hahne & Friederici, 2001; Friederici, Steinhauer, & Pfeifer, 2002; Rossi et al., 2002). For instance, Osterhout et al. (2006) tested beginning learners of French over time, on subject–verb agreement violations. Following one month’s training, the ERP study found that the violations elicited an N400. After four months of classroom training, a P600 effect was observed for the same grammatical violations. This suggests that in the very early stages of acquisition, grammatical violations are treated in a comparable way to infrequent lexical items, and only later do grammatical processes come into play (Steinhauer, White, & Drury, 2009; Osterhout et al., 2006; see Roberts et al., 2018 for discussion).

9.3.2 fMRI Another neurolinguistic technique that can be employed to examine L2 processing is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), although there are comparably fewer studies employing this methodology. While the ERPs can offer highly time-sensitive data, fMRI can address questions regarding which areas of the brain may be active during language processing, as the method records activation via minute changes in blood flow in the brain. Complete sentences are presented to participants (in contrast to most ERP studies), while activation is charted across the entire sentence. Hagoort and Indefrey (2014) present a meta-analysis of fMRI language processing studies and conclude that different populations of neurons may be recruited for the processing of semantic versus syntactic violations, specifically, violations that involve syntactic phenomena elicit stronger activation in left-posterior inferior frontal gyrus (IFG; Brodmann Area 44) compared to semantic violations. Another area relevant for complex syntactic processing is the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), an area that also appears to subserve working memory (see Friederici, 2011, for a comprehensive review). Most fMRI research with L2 populations shows that there is little qualitative difference between learners and natives, particularly when the learners are of a high proficiency. Specifically, it seems that the same brain regions are involved in language processing, but in L2 learners, activation is larger and more extended, which arguably reflects the greater processing cost involved in L2 versus L1 processing in general (Rüschemeyer et al., 2005; Rüschemeyer, Zysset, & Friederici, 2006), and similar effects have been reported for late versus early L2 learners (Hernandez, Hofmann, & Kotz, 2007; see Roncaglia-Denissen & Kotz, 2016, for an overview). One study on L2 grammatical processing using fMRI which found that L2 learners differed from native speakers is that of Suh et al. (2007). The authors investigated brain activation in KoreanEnglish bilinguals’ processing of complex (embedded; 17) and less complex (conjoined; 18) constructions in both languages.

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(17) (18)

The director that the maid introduced ignored the farmer. The maid introduced the director and ignored the farmer.

The authors found involvement of the areas predicted for language processing for both L1 and L2 processing; however, only a difference between the embedded and the conjoined condition was found during L1 (Korean) processing, with greater activation for the former, more complex construction. In contrast, no difference was observed between the two sentence types during L2 processing. One could argue that these results support the view that L2 grammatical processing may be fundamentally different from L1 processing (c.f. Clahsen & Felser, 2006); however, given that there are so few fMRI studies, and that most have found parallel types of activation, much more research with this method is needed before solid conclusions can be made.

9.4 Conclusion Psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods have been applied in the area of SLA research relatively recently, and there is much more research employing psycholinguistic techniques, particularly self-paced reading. Nevertheless, such online methods can be employed to great effect in the study of what kinds of information L2 learners may be able to employ during their real time comprehension of the target input. SPR and eyetracking research has provided evidence that L2 learners can incrementally process the input like native speakers and can make use very rapidly of lexical-semantic information to inform parsing decisions. They may be at a disadvantage, however, with more highly complex constructions and those involving structural reanalysis processes. Learners of high proficiency may be sensitive online to grammatical violations, particularly those which involve features instantiated in their L1. However, researchers need to take care in choosing which methods to combine with online tasks, since there is consistent evidence that L2 learners process more akin to native speakers when required to make metalinguistic judgments during comprehension. Therefore, if one wishes to investigate implicit processes, such supplementary tasks should be avoided. Neurolinguistic methods such as ERP and fMRI recording can offer insights into implicit processes, but we are only beginning to understand if, and, if so, to what extent, L2 learners’ processing involves the same brain regions and underlying processes as those of native speakers. Nevertheless, as this overview makes clear, data from psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods can address questions of central concern to SLA researchers, such as how a learner’s L1 may influence their knowledge and processing of the L2, what

Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Methods

effects there may be of individual differences such as proficiency, and, by extension, how such data can help push forward theories of SLA in general.

References Alemán Bañón, J., Fiorentino, R., & Gabriele, A. (2012). The processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish: An event-related potential investigation of the effects of structural distance. Brain Research, 1456, 49–63. Altmann, G. (2011). Language can mediate eye movement control within 100 milliseconds, regardless of whether there is anything to move the eyes to. Acta Psychologica, 137, 190–200. Barber, H., & Carreiras, M. (2005). Grammatical gender and number agreement in Spanish: An ERP comparison. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 137–153. Caffarra S., Molinaro, N., Davidson, D., & Carreiras, M. (2015). Second language syntactic processing revealed through event-related potentials: An empirical review. Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews, 51, 31–47. Chen, L., Shu, H., Liu, Y., Zhao, J., & Li, P. (2007). ERP signatures of subject– verb agreement in L2 learning. Bilingualism, Language and Cognition, 10, 161–174. Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures in government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris. Clahsen, H., & Felser, C. (2006). How native-like is non-native language processing? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 564–570. Cunnings, I. (2017). Parsing and working memory in bilingual sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20, 659–678. Davidson, D., & Indefrey, P. (2011). Error-related activity and correlates of grammatical plasticity. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 219. Dussias, P. E., & Cramer Scaltz, T. R. (2008). Spanish-English L2 speakers’ use of subcategorization bias information in the resolution of temporary ambiguity during second language reading. Acta Psychologia, 128, 501–513. Dussias, P. E., Valdés Kroff, J. R., Guzzardo Tamargo, R. E., & Gerfen, C. (2013). When gender and looking go hand in hand: Grammatical gender processing in L2 Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35, 353–387. Duyck, W., Van Assche, E., Drighe, D., & Hartsuiker, R. (2007). Visual word recognition by bilinguals in a sentence context: Evidence for nonselective lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 663–679. Ellert, M. (2011). Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution in L1 and L2 German and Dutch. Unpublished PhD thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen.

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Ellis, R. (2005). Measuring implicit and explicit knowledge of a second language. A psychometric study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27, 141–172. Felser, C., & Cunnings, I. (2011). Processing reflexives in English as a second language: The role of structural and discourse-level constraints. Applied Psycholinguistics, 33, 571–603. Felser, C., Sato, M., & Bertenshaw, N. (2009). The online application of binding Principle A in English as a second language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 485–502. Foucart, A., & Frenck-Mestre, C. (2012a). Can late L2 learners acquire grammatical features? Evidence from ERPs and eye-tracking. Journal of Memory and Language, 66, 226–248. Foucart, A., & Frenck-Mestre, C. (2012b). Grammatical gender processing in L2: Electrophysiological evidence of the effect of L1-L2 syntactic similarity: Erratum. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(1), 202. Franceschina, F. (2001). Morphological or syntactic deficits in near-native speakers? An assessment of some current proposals. Second Language Research, 17, 213–247. Frenck-Mestre, C. (2005). Eye-movement recording as a tool for study­ing syntactic processing in a second language: A review of methodologies and experimental findings. Second Language Research, 21, 175–198. Frenck-Mestre, C., & Pynte, J. (1997). Syntactic ambiguity resolution while reading in second and native languages. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, section A: Human Experimental Psychology, 50A, 119–148. Friederici, A. D. (2011). The brain basis of language processing: From structure to function. Physiological Reviews, 91(4), 1357–1392. Friederici, A. D., Hahne, A., & Mecklinger, A. (1996). Temporal structure of syntactic parsing: Early and late event-related brain potential effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22, 1219–1248. Friederici, A., Steinhauer, K., & Pfeifer, E. (2002). Brain signatures of artificial language processing: Evidence challenging the critical period hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 99, 529–534. Gibson, E., Pearlmutter, N., Canseco-Gonzalez, E., & Hickok, G. (1996). Recency preference in the human sentence processing mechanism. Cognition, 59, 21–39. Goad, H., & White, L. (2006). Ultimate attainment in interlanguage grammars: A prosodic approach. Second Language Research, 22(3), 243–268. Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2012). Grammatical gender in L2: A production or a real-time processing problem? Second Language Research, 28(2), 191–215. Grüter, T., Rohde, H., & Schafer, A. J. (2014). The role of discourse-level expectations in nonnative speakers’ referential choices. In W. Orman and M. J. Valleau (eds.), Proceedings of the 38th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, BUCLD 38 (pp. 179–191). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

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10 Interaction in L2 Learning Jaemyung Goo

10.1 Introduction Cognitive interactionists claim that interaction provides valuable opportunities for learners to refine and restructure their interlanguage by drawing their focal attention to linguistic code features during negotiation for meaning (see Gass, 1997, 2003; Gass & Mackey, 2006, 2015; Long, 1996, 2007; Mackey, 2012; Mackey, Abbuhl, & Gass, 2012; Pica, 1994, 1996). Negotiated interaction activates cognitive learning processes that involve processing (modified) input, receiving corrective feedback (CF), and producing (modified) output, during which learner attention is directed to L2 linguistic features, leading to noticing and in turn L2 development. Over two decades of empirical research designed to explore the link between interaction and actual learning has yielded abundant evidence that clearly indicates that interaction precipitates L2 learning (see Mackey, 2012 for a review of interaction research; Keck et al., 2006 and Mackey & Goo, 2007 for meta-analytic reviews of early interactionacquisition studies). A number of interactional features or processes and learner-internal and -external factors mediating (assumed to mediate) the extent of interaction effects (e.g., modified output opportunities, noticing, CF type, task type and complexity, working memory, language aptitude, etc.) have been investigated in various learning contexts and from diverse research perspectives. Although the overall results contribute to a great extent to deepening our understanding of how interaction aids L2 learning, the results also bespeak a complex and multifaceted nature of interaction-based learning that involves a multitude of potential mediating factors interacting with each other. In this chapter, I first illustrate the Interaction Hypothesis along with relevant research findings, then discuss several mediating factors in terms of whether they influence interactional

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benefits and, if so, how, and end the chapter with a brief summary of findings and implications for teaching.

10.2 Interactional Modifications During Negotiation for Meaning Long’s (1996) updated Interaction Hypothesis, vis-à-vis its earlier version focusing on the relationship among interactional and linguistic adjustments and L2 comprehension assumed to lead to L2 acquisition, presents a more specific framework involved in interaction-driven L2 learning with great emphasis placed on the nontrivial roles of such additional components as noticing, L2 processing capacity, and corrective feedback (CF). He proposed that environmental contributions to acquisition are mediated by selective attention and the learner’s developing L2 processing capacity, and that these resources are brought together most usefully, although not exclusively, during negotiation for meaning. Negative feedback obtained during negotiation work or elsewhere may be facilitative of L2 development, at least for vocabulary, morphology, and language-specific syntax, and (p. 414) essential for learning certain specifiable L1–L2 contrasts.

That is, negotiation for meaning contributes to L2 development by providing propitious conditions for, and facilitating, attentional and psycholinguistic processes involved in L2 learning. One critical concept to note in the updated Interaction Hypothesis is negotiation for meaning, which he defines as the process in which, in an effort to communicate, learners and competent speakers provide and interpret signals of their own and their interlocutor’s perceived comprehension, thus provoking adjustments to linguistic form, conversational structure, message content, or all three, until an acceptable level of understanding is achieved. (p. 418)

In other words, negotiation for meaning enhances the comprehensibility of the message content, and also renders certain linguistic features more salient so that they become more available for acquisition. Similarly, Pica (1994), underlining the significance of negotiation, contends that “the twofold potential of negotiation—to assist L2 comprehension and draw attention to L2 form—affords it a more powerful role in L2 learning than has been claimed so far” (p. 508). On the specific role of negotiation for meaning in L2 learning, Long (1996) states that negotiation for meaning, and especially negotiation work that triggers interactional adjustments by the NS or more competent interlocutor, facilitates acquisition because it connects input, internal learner capacities, particularly selective attention, and output in productive ways.  (pp. 451–452)

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Negotiation for meaning functioning as one fundamental element of interaction provides breeding grounds for, and effectuates, interaction-driven L2 acquisition by combining and coordinating interactional features and cognitive learning processes in an optimal way. Negotiated interaction can be initiated by either L2 learners or their interlocutors. Learner-initiated negotiation induces interactionally modified input, and interlocutor-initiated negotiation via three typical negotiation moves (i.e., clarification requests, confirmation checks, comprehension checks) or negative feedback may elicit output modifications when needed. Benefits of negotiation for meaning transpire in either direction. For example, early interaction research focused on comprehension through input modifications in interaction contexts (e.g., Ellis, Tanaka, & Yamazaki, 1994; Gass & Varonis, 1994; Long, 1985; Loschky, 1994; Pica, 1992; Pica, Young, & Doughty, 1987). Overall results showed that interactionally modified input facilitated L2 comprehension and often resulted in better comprehension than premodified input (e.g., Ellis, Tanaka, & Yamazaki, 1994; Pica, Young, & Doughty, 1987; Loschky, 1994). Also, input modifications made for L2 learners during negotiated interaction contributed to boosting subsequent L2 production (Gass & Varonis, 1994). Based on his findings of nonsignificant between-group differences in terms of L2 learning, despite better comprehension observed in the performance of the interactionally modified input condition, Loschky (1994) noted that “posing a linear relationship between comprehension of input and intake of the structures contained therein may be untenable” (p. 320). Therefore, interaction researchers began to investigate the link between interaction and actual L2 learning. Mackey’s (1999) study is one of the earliest empirical attempts in that respect. She found that active participation in negotiated interaction led to the production of developmentally more advanced English question forms than simple observations or passive participation in interaction without negotiation. Given these early empirical findings, it is evident that negotiated interaction functions as a critical bridge that connects input with learning, increasing and maximizing the value of input as a fundamental element of language learning. Echoing the significant role of negotiated interaction and its relation to input, Swain (1985) states that “it is not input per se that is important to second language acquisition but input that occurs in interaction where meaning is negotiated” (p. 246). Mackey (2012) also suggests that “through negotiation of meaning, input can be uniquely tailored to individuals’ strengths, weaknesses, and communicative needs, providing language that suits their distinct developmental levels” (p. 12).

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Interlocutor-initiated negotiation involving negotiation moves and/ or negative feedback motivates output modifications by the L2 learner, another crucial aspect of interaction. Building on her seminal work (1985) that clearly indicated the need for L2 production opportunities, Swain proposed the Output Hypothesis (see also Swain, 1995, 2005) and argued that L2 “learners need to be pushed to make use of their resources; they need to have their linguistic abilities stretched to their fullest; they need to reflect on their output and consider ways of modifying it to enhance comprehensibility, appropriateness, and accuracy” (1993, pp. 160–161). Swain (1995, 2005) propounded three functions of pushed output in SLA, in addition to its obvious role in enhancing fluency and automatization: noticing the interlanguage (IL)–L2 gap, hypothesis testing, and metalinguistic reflection on L2 features. Due to these functions, according to Swain (1995), output may stimulate learners to move from the semantic, open-ended, non-deterministic, strategic processing prevalent in comprehension to the complete grammatical processing needed for accurate production. Output, thus, would seem to have a potentially significant role in the (p. 128) development of syntax and morphology.

Swain’s (1985, 1995, 2005) Output Hypothesis changed the conceptual paradigm with respect to output, extending its role as an integral part of L2 learning, not just as a simple means of practising what has already been learned or eliciting information. Empirical studies have been conducted to identify patterns of output modifications, and they have shown that different types of negotiation moves or negative feedback led to different types of output modifications (e.g., Pica et al., 1989; Shehadeh, 1999, 2001; Van den Branden, 1997). Nevertheless, relevant research findings, in general, accord more or less with expected benefits of output modifications (e.g., Egi, 2010; Ellis & He, 1999; Izumi et al., 1999; Loewen, 2005; McDonough, 2005; Nobuyoshi & Ellis, 1993). For example, McDonough (2005) showed that modified output production was the only significant predictor of English question development. Also, Loewen (2005), having examined 491 focus-on-form episodes, found that successful immediate modified output was a significant predictor of learner accuracy observed in individualized tailor-made post-tests. As for noticing, Egi’s (2010) study revealed that repairs (i.e., successful modified output), but not needsrepairs, were associated with learner noticing of both the corrective intent of recasts and their linguistic gap (see also Gurzynski-Weiss & Baralt, 2015, for similar results). Notwithstanding the potentially crucial role of negotiation for meaning, Foster (1998) questioned the ecological validity of research findings regarding negotiated interaction and analysed classroom-based interaction data.

Interaction in L2 Learning

Based on her observation that there occurred only a few instances of negotiation for meaning (see also Foster & Ohta, 2005; Pica, 2002 for similar results), she suggested that it is the type of setting that determines the amount of negotiation for meaning, with little or no negotiation in actual classroom contexts and much more negotiation in tightly controlled research contexts. In their study designed to compare classroom and laboratory settings in terms of negotiation for meaning, Gass, Mackey, and Ross-Feldman (2005) found few differences in the amount of negotiation and interaction patterns, and, instead, observed the impacts of task type on learner interaction. These studies function as a reminder that task features including task type (see Pica, Kanagy, & Falodun, 1993) and complexity-based task sequencing (e.g., Robinson, 2011b) should be taken into consideration to ensure that ample negotiated interaction transpires in classroom contexts. Of course, more research on this issue of laboratory versus classroom contexts in regard to instances of negotiation appears necessary. Digging deeper into the positive potential of negotiation for meaning, interaction researchers have shown a great interest in CF with respect to how different CF moves create L2 learning opportunities, why certain CF moves are relatively more effective at promoting L2 development than others, and whether their positive effects are mediated by certain factors, to which I now turn.

10.3  Corrective Feedback, Noticing, and L2 Learning CF, claimed to serve as an effective tool for drawing learners’ attention to L2 forms, as another crucial feature of interaction, has received a great amount of attention from interaction researchers and, as such, has generated much discussion and numerous empirical studies on its potential relation to L2 development (see Brown, 2016; Goo & Mackey, 2013; Li, 2010; Lyster & Ranta, 2013; Lyster & Saito, 2010; Lyster, Saito, & Sato, 2013; Mackey & Goo, 2007; Nassaji, 2016, for overall reviews and meta-analyses). It has been observed that various types of CF, albeit not in an equal proportion, have been employed in L2 interactional learning contexts. Lyster and Ranta (1997) identified six types of CF moves in their French immersion classroom data: explicit correction, recasts, repetitions, elicitations, clarification requests, and metalinguistic feedback. These CF moves are often categorized as either input-providing (e.g., explicit correction, recasts) or output-prompting (e.g., clarification requests, elicitations), and also as either explicit (e.g., metalinguistic feedback) or implicit feedback (e.g., recasts), and compared in terms of learner responses or reactions to CF and their effects on L2 learning. Brown (2016), in his recent metaanalysis of classroom-based CF studies, observed that recasts were the

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most frequently used CF moves that teachers provided in L2 classrooms (57%), followed by prompts (30%), i.e., repetition, elicitation, clarification, and metalinguistic feedback. Further, L2 learners received significantly more CF moves on their grammatical errors (42.7%) than on lexical and phonological errors (27.6% and 22.4%, respectively). Lyster and Ranta (1997), as regards L2 learners’ immediate responses or reactions to CF, which they called uptake, the pedagogic significance or value of which interaction researchers have doubted (e.g., Gass, 2003; Mackey & Philp, 1998; McDonough & Mackey, 2006), found that although recasts were the most frequently used feedback type, they induced the least amount of uptake. Later studies, however, showed somewhat differing results, indicating the amount of learner uptake following recasts and other CF moves may vary depending upon L2 learning contexts (e.g., Ellis, Basturkmen, & Loewen, 2001; Lyster & Mori, 2006; Sheen, 2004). Findings suggest that recasts lead to substantial uptake in some instructional settings where teachers and learners focus on language as form (Sheen, 2004) and interactional contexts where explicit language-focused exchanges are involved (Oliver & Mackey, 2003): see Lyster and Mori’s (2006) idea on the role of instructional focus in the choice of CF moves. Brown (2016) found that educational contexts (level of education) influenced teachers’ CF choices with more recasts supplied to university or adult learners and elementary-level learners than prompts and with more prompts to high school learners than recasts. In addition to these and other relevant observations regarding learner responses to various CF moves during negotiated interaction, and given their pedagogical and acquisitional values, CF moves have been extensively researched in terms of their relative efficacy (e.g., recasts versus prompts or implicit versus explicit) in the development of specific L2 target features, with recasts at the epicentre of much scholarly attention (see Brown, 2016; Goo & Mackey, 2013; Lyster & Ranta, 2013; Lyster, Saito, & Sato, 2013; Nassaji, 2016, for recent reviews). This overwhelming interest in recasts has stemmed not just from their observed high frequency in L2 learning contexts but also from cognitive benefits that likely effectuate noticing, which in turn promotes L2 learning. Recasts are provided immediately following the learner’s erroneous utterance, the intended meaning of which has already been comprehended, that is, more attentional resources can be directed to the linguistic code features targeted in recasts (e.g., Doughty, 2001; Long, 1996, 2007). These freed-up attentional resources, along with an immediate juxtaposition of the learner’s erroneous utterance and the recast provided, render it highly plausible to go through a cognitive comparison of the two versions that are in contrast and perceive the form contained in the recast as a correct alternative to their erroneous form. Long (2007) states that “recasts convey

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needed information about the target language in context, when interlocutors share a joint attentional focus, and when the learner already has prior comprehension of at least part of the message, thereby facilitating form– function mapping” (p. 77). He further notes that “learners are vested in the exchange, as it is their message that is at stake, and so will probably be motivated, and attending, conditions likely to facilitate noticing of any new linguistic information in the input” (pp. 77–78). Regarding the effectiveness of recasts, one recent study (Nassaji, 2017) deserves attention due to its interesting results. Nassaji compared intensive recasts with extensive recasts in their effects on the development of English articles. The intensive group received recasts on article errors only, whereas the extensive group received recasts on any L2 errors. Extensive recasts turned out to be more beneficial than intensive recasts, contrary to the assumption that intensive recasts direct L2 learners’ focused attention to the targeted L2 feature more effectively than extensive recasts, and, thus, likely lead to more noticing and learning as a result. He attributed the findings to learners’ increased sensitivity to recasts due to an overall greater number of recasts provided for the extensive group (seventy per cent more compared to the intensive group), leading to the enhanced saliency and noticeability of recasts as negative feedback. It is suspected, then, that this heightened noticing of overall recasts as CF, regardless of the target, may have effectuated the increased awareness of recasts provided in response to errors on other linguistic features and aided the learning of those features not in the main focus of instruction. Learning this way, albeit not measured in his study, would bespeak further evidence of recasts promoting incidental learning of L2 features outside of instructional focus. This, of course, needs to be tested in future research. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of recasts, especially in comparison with other CF moves, has been questioned and, as such, tested empirically. Although some studies showed recasts were slightly more beneficial than, or as effective as, other CF moves such as prompts and explicit correction (e.g., Adams, Nuevo, & Egi, 2011; Goo, 2012; Lyster & Izquierdo, 2009; McDonough, 2007; Nassaji, 2009; see Mackey & Goo, 2007; Goo & Mackey, 2013, for reviews on general benefits of recasts), far more evidence has been obtained in favour of other CF moves (e.g., Ammar, 2008; Ammar & Spada, 2006; van de Guchte et al., 2015; Ellis, 2007; Ellis, Loewen, & Erlam, 2006; Goo, 2016; Gooch, Saito, & Lyster, 2016; Lyster, 2004; Sheen, 2007; Yang & Lyster, 2010; Yilmaz, 2012, 2013a; see also Lyster & Ranta, 2013; Lyster & Saito, 2010; Lyster, Saito, & Sato, 2013, for reviews). Lyster and colleagues (e.g., Lyster, Saito, & Sato, 2013) suggested that prompts are more effective at facilitating L2 development than recasts due to the nature of prompts as placing cognitive demands for self-repair on L2 learners, as supported by Swain’s Output Hypothesis (Swain, 1985, 1995).

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Goo and Mackey (2013), however, raised several methodological issues, questioning the validity and reliability of previous findings on recasts versus prompts (see Goo & Mackey, 2013; Lyster & Ranta, 2013 for more discussion and debate on recasts versus prompts). Ellis (2015) notes that the recasts-versus-prompts debate may be unnecessary because recasts may function better than prompts, and vice versa depending on particular learning contexts, for instance, with recasts providing positive evidence of new linguistic items for L2 learners to acquire (e.g., Goo & Mackey, 2013; Long, 2007) and prompts providing opportunities for learners to refine their prior knowledge of target items via self-repair (e.g., Lyster, Saito, & Sato, 2013). Thus, he suggests that L2 learners may benefit most from a mixture of these two CF types. Also, given varied factors (e.g., social and contextual) may affect the effectiveness of different CF moves in a different way; as Ortega (2009) noted earlier, it may be “necessary to reconceptualize the all-or-nothing comparative approach that has characterized L2 research on negative feedback to date” (p. 76). However, considering that noticing precipitates L2 development (Schmidt, 1990, 1995, 2001), it should be noted that the effectiveness of CF moves during negotiation for meaning depends, to a great extent, on whether L2 learners notice CF moves, and, if so, how they perceive different CF moves, which has also invited L2 researchers’ attention (e.g., Bao, Egi, & Han, 2011; Egi, 2007, 2010; Gurzynski-Weiss & Baralt, 2014, 2015; Mackey, Gass, & McDonough, 2000; Philp, 2003). A study by Mackey, Gass, and McDonough (2000), widely cited in this respect, examined two L2 groups about their perceptions of CF—English as a second language (ESL) and Italian as a foreign language (IFL) learners—and found that, whereas the learners were relatively more accurate in their perceptions of lexical and phonological feedback, their perceptions of morphosyntactic feedback were generally inaccurate. They further observed that morphosyntactic feedback was provided predominantly in the form of recasts (their ESL data), which indicates recasts on morphosyntactic errors may sometimes go unnoticed. Similarly, Gurzynski-Weiss and Baralt (2014) reported that L2 Spanish learners’ noticing of morphosyntactic feedback was relatively inaccurate compared to lexical and semantic feedback in both face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated communication (CMC) modes. More specifically, Egi (2007) observed that L2 learners tended to interpret long recasts with three or more changes as responses to content (see Lyster, 1998a, 1998b, for a similar position about recasts) and short recasts with one or two corrective changes as linguistic evidence (positive, negative, or both). She suggested the length and number of changes in recasts may influence L2 learners’ interpretations of recasts (see Philp, 2003, for similar results). These characteristics of recasts also appear to affect the amount of learner uptake and L2 learning as well (e.g., Loewen & Philp, 2006; Sheen, 2006). It

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should be noted, however, that uptake, in and of itself, may not provide an accurate representation of learner noticing (e.g., Bao, Egi, & Han, 2011). In a similar vein, repairs, but not needs-repairs, have been found to be associated with learner noticing of CF moves (e.g., Egi, 2010; Gurzynski-Weiss & Baralt, 2015). These studies indicate that, although noticing and modified output production are not isomorphic (e.g., Goo & Mackey, 2013; Long, 2007; Mackey & Philp, 1998), learner noticing may still be reflected in the production of modified output, as Chaudron (1977) noted. Nonetheless, as Mackey (2006) observed, it should be remembered that, although noticing may activate cognitive processing facilitative of L2 learning, noticing does not always lead to L2 learning. Furthermore, noticing may or may not transpire depending upon several mediating factors (e.g., target type, CF type, task type, L2 proficiency, cognitive capacities, etc.), resulting in varying degrees of L2 learning through interaction (see also Nakatsukasa, 2016, for a recent empirical attempt to examine gestures in noticing and learning). Due to their nontrivial roles in interaction-driven L2 learning, some of these mediating variables that have been found to influence noticing, interaction, and/or overall L2 learning are discussed in the following sections.

10.4  Factors Mediating Interaction Effects Benefits of CF moves in L2 learning have also been examined in regard to L2 proficiency (and developmental readiness), with results indicating that more proficient learners are better able to profit from recasts (e.g., Ammar, 2008; Ammar & Spada, 2006; Mackey & Philp, 1998; Trofimovich, Ammar, & Gatbonton, 2007). Some studies (e.g., Ammar, 2008; Ammar & Spada, 2006) suggested that low proficient learners may benefit more from prompts than recasts. Target type has also been found to mediate the effectiveness of CF moves (e.g., Adams et al., 2011; van de Guchte et al., 2015; Ellis, 2007; Jeon, 2007; Long, Inagaki, & Ortega, 1998; Mackey, 2006; Yang & Lyster, 2010), more often than not, with different CF moves differentially affecting the learning of different target features (but see Yilmaz, 2012, 2013a, for relatively consistent findings in favour of explicit feedback). Long (2007) suggests that unobtrusive implicit negative feedback (e.g., recasts) works for salient linguistic features, and more explicit types of feedback (e.g., metalinguistic feedback) for communicatively redundant and phonologically nonsalient linguistic features (e.g., past tense –ed). He also notes that recasts may be more effective for linguistic structures and forms that are hard to learn and thus require long-term treatments, compared to easy structures and forms that short-term treatments of explicit feedback may be sufficient to learn. This interaction between target type

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and CF type is still an ongoing empirical question that merits further research. Interlocutor type and characteristics have also been examined as a mediating variable that affects L2 performance during interaction (e.g., Gurzynski-Weiss, 2016; Mackey, Oliver, & Leeman, 2003; Mackey, Polio, & McDonough, 2004; Polio, Gass, & Chapin, 2006; Sato & Lyster, 2007; see Gurzynski-Weiss, 2017, for a review). Learners likely produce more modified output when interacting with their non-native speaker (NNS) peers than with native speaker (NS) interlocutors, and CF type, amount of CF, and opportunities for modified output have also been found to differ the type of dyad, that is, NS–NNS versus NNS–NNS dyads (e.g., Mackey, Oliver, & Leeman, 2003; Sato & Lyster, 2007). As shown in Mackey, Oliver, & Leeman’s (2003) study, age may also affect language learning opportunities. As for teachers as interlocutors, their teaching experience has been found to be an important factor that influences interactional patterns and decisions on CF choices and use (e.g., Mackey, Polio, & McDonough, 2004; Gurzynski-Weiss, 2016), and enables more accurate perceptions of learner performance (e.g., Polio, Gass, & Chapin, 2006), with SLA training and teachers’ L1 also playing a role (Gurzynski-Weiss, 2016). Lastly, task complexity, given “task demands are a powerful determinant of what is noticed” (Schmidt, 1990, p. 143), has attracted a great amount of attention and yielded a recent surge of empirical research on whether it mediates L2 performance and development, and, if so, how (e.g., Baralt, 2013; Gilabert, Barón, & Llanes, 2009; Kim, 2009, 2012; Nuevo, 2006; Nuevo, Adams, & Ross-Feldman, 2011; Révész, 2009, 2011; Révész, Sachs, & Hama, 2014; Révész, Sachs, & Mackey, 2011). Much research has been motivated by, and designed specifically to test, Robinson’s (2001a, 2003, 2007, 2011a, 2011b) Cognition Hypothesis. Increasing task complexity along resource-directing dimensions (e.g., ± reasoning, ± few elements, ± here-and-now), according to the Cognition Hypothesis, “has the potential to connect cognitive resources, such as attention and memory, with effort at conceptualization and the L2 means to express it” (Robinson, 2011b, p. 14), engendering greater accuracy and complexity of production, and thus aiding L2 learning. Robinson (2007) notes that increased cognitive or conceptual demands of tasks generate “more noticing of task relevant input, and heightened memory for it, and so lead to more uptake of forms made salient in the input through various focus on form interventions” (p. 23). This line of research has observed that more complex tasks led to more negotiation and language learning opportunities with task type and proficiency mediating the overall impacts (e.g., Gilabert, Barón, & Llanes, 2009; Kim, 2009; Révész, 2011; Robinson, 2001b). In terms of uptake/modified output and L2 learning, findings are far from being conclusive, with some showing (partial) supportive evidence for the Cognition Hypothesis (e.g., Baralt, 2013; Kim, 2012) and others providing counterevidence (e.g.,

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Nuevo, 2006; Nuevo, Adams, & Ross-Feldman, 2011; Révész, Sachs, & Hama, 2014; Révész, Sachs, & Mackey, 2011). Furthermore, Révész’ (2009) findings suggest that task complexity interacts with the effectiveness of recasts, depending upon the type of resource-directing and resourcedispersing dimension, and related task types. As indicated, overall results are not straightforward, which necessitates much more empirical research to uncover a potential link between task complexity and actual L2 learning through interaction.

10.5 WM, Language Aptitude, and Other Individual Differences Cognitive interactionists have also explored whether individual differences (ID) in cognitive capacities are associated with selective attention and noticing that likely determine the extent of beneficial impacts of negotiation for meaning on L2 learning. Working memory (WM) is one such area of interest (see Wen, 2016, for an extensive review on WM and SLA research), and much attention has been drawn to WM within the interactionist framework to investigate its role in the extent to which L2 learners benefit from interaction (e.g., Ahmadian, 2012; Goo, 2012, 2016; Kim, Payant, & Pearson, 2015; Kormos & Trebits, 2011; Li, 2013; Mackey et al., 2010; Mackey et al., 2002; Mackey & Sachs, 2012; Révész, 2012; Sagarra, 2007; Sagarra & Abbuhl, 2013; Trofimovich, Ammar, & Gatbonton, 2007; Yilmaz, 2013b). Overall research findings suggest that high-working memory capacity (WMC) learners are likely to benefit more from interaction compared to low-WMC learners in terms of noticing of CF (e.g., Kim, Payant, & Pearson, 2015; Mackey et al., 2002) and modified output production (e.g., Mackey et al., 2010; Sagarra, 2007), and actual L2 learning through CF (e.g., Goo, 2012; Li, 2013; Mackey & Sachs, 2012; Révész, 2012; Sagarra, 2007; Sagarra & Abbuhl, 2013; Yilmaz, 2013b). As for the relationship between WM and different CF moves, nevertheless, somewhat mixed results have been reported. For instance, Goo (2012) found WM was predictive of the effectiveness of implicit feedback (i.e., recasts), as expected given their role in cognitive comparisons (see Long, 2015), but not that of explicit feedback (i.e., metalinguistic feedback), in the development of an L2 grammatical feature (see also Sagarra, 2007; Sagarra & Abbuhl, 2013, for links between recasts and WM), whereas Li (2013) and Yilmaz (2013b) showed the exact opposite. More recently, task design and implementation variables such as task planning and task complexity were investigated in terms of whether they interact with L2 learners’ WMC (e.g., Ahmadian, 2012; Kim, Payant, & Pearson, 2015; Kormos & Trebits, 2011). Ahmadian (2012) found that WM was significantly correlated

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with accuracy and fluency, but not with complexity, of oral production under an unpressured careful online task-planning condition. On the contrary, Kormos and Trebits (2011) observed WM affected the complexity of learner output only in the cognitively less complex task. Unlike what the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2001a, 2001b, 2011) predicts, WMC did not influence learner performance on the more complex task. More recently, Kim, Payant, & Pearson (2015) explored potential relationships among task complexity, WM, and L2 development during interaction. WM was found to be significantly associated with the noticing of recasts provided during interaction, regardless of task complexity, and significantly predictive of English question development. The cognitive advantage of having high WMC was observable only in the complex task condition, which confirms Robinson’s (2011b) suggestion that “there should be less variation between learners in performing simple tasks than there is when performing more complex versions” (p. 19). However, important caveats are ahead. WM performance and its relation to L2 learning may vary depending upon the type of WM task (e.g., Révész, 2012) and the type of WM scoring procedure (e.g., Leeser & Sunderman, 2016). Thus, care must be taken when interpreting data as to the nature of WM in L2 research and its effects on interaction-driven L2 learning. Language aptitude has also been researched as another potentially critical cognitive factor that may determine the extent of beneficial effects of interactional features, especially corrective feedback (e.g., Li, 2013; Sheen, 2007; Trofimovich, Ammar, & Gatbonton, 2007; Yilmaz, 2013b; Yilmaz & Granena, 2016; see also Li, 2017, for a brief review of research on language aptitude in interactional contexts). Overall findings are rather mixed, and, as shown in relation to the role of WM in interaction, the current state of affairs is still far from providing a clear picture of whether and how it relates to interaction-driven L2 learning, with some studies showing evidence of a significant role of language aptitude in the learning of L2 features through implicit feedback (e.g., Li, 2013; Trofimovich, Ammar, & Gatbonton, 2007) and others a significant relationship between language aptitude and beneficial effects of explicit, but not implicit, feedback (e.g., Sheen, 2007; Yilmaz, 2013b; Yilmaz & Gisela, 2016). Obviously, any conclusions are still premature with respect to the role of language aptitude in interaction-driven L2 learning, given various factors such as the type of language and target, type of aptitude measure, treatment measures (e.g., operationalization of feedback conditions), and so forth. More research needs to be conducted to obtain a better understanding of the role of language aptitude and its relation to other cognitive variables (e.g., WM, attention control, etc.) as well. Other moderating variables such as language anxiety, self-confidence, cognitive style, creativity, etc. have also been investigated in terms

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of the extent to which they interact with interactional features (e.g., McDonough, Crawford, & Mackey, 2015; Nakatsukasa, 2016; Rassaei, 2015a, 2015b; Révész, 2011; Sheen, 2008). As regards language anxiety in relation to L2 learning through recasts, whereas Sheen (2008) showed relative advantages for low-anxiety learners vis-à-vis their high-anxiety counterparts, Rassaei (2015a) found the opposite results. Rassaei also observed that low-anxiety learners benefited more from metalinguistic feedback than from recasts, and the reverse was true for high-anxiety learners. Adding further confusion, Révész (2011) reported no impact of language anxiety (also linguistic self-confidence and self-perceived communicative competence) on L2 learners’ speech production and the quality and quantity of language-related episodes (LREs), regardless of the level of task complexity. More research, obviously, seems necessary to untangle this rather conflicting puzzle. Research on other individual difference (ID) variables (e.g., cognitive style, creativity) rarely explored in interaction contexts has also emerged in recent years and contributed to providing further insights into how much and in what way interaction benefits L2 development. Rassaei (2015b), for instance, observed that field-independent (FI) learners benefited significantly more from recasts when compared to field-dependent (FD) learners, which indicates FI learners’ superior cognitive ability to manipulate selective attention for noticing recasts. In another interesting attempt to broaden the scope of interaction-based research, McDonough, Crawford, & Mackey (2015) explored whether there was any noticeable association between creativity and L2 task performance. Creativity was significantly correlated with the production of some linguistic features, but not with that of other features. The findings suggest that creativity may, to some extent, function as another moderator variable affecting L2 learners’ task performance (see also Albert, 2011, for creativity and task complexity). The above-mentioned studies, designed to examine whether and how varied ID factors mediate interaction-driven L2 learning, have contributed to diversifying interaction research. However, relevant findings are a long way from offering a complete picture of the specific functions of these ID variables. To make matters more complicated, some ID variables (e.g., language aptitude, WM, cognitive style, etc.) interact with other mediating factors (e.g., target type, CF type, etc.). Long (2015) claimed that it is the interaction of input sensitivity (a constant within the individual, but varying across individuals) and perceptual saliency (which varies across structures) that has the potential to account for success and failure at the level both of individual learners and individual structures. (Emphases in original; p. 60)

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More empirical research including replication studies needs to be conducted to allow us to better understand these already complicated cognitive phenomena that various ID variables have brought to our attention.

10.6  Conclusion and Implications for Teaching Interaction researchers have obtained clear evidence that L2 learners benefit from negotiated interaction because it affords L2 learners potential learning opportunities to receive modified input and CF on their erroneous output and produce modified output in response to their interlocutors’ CF moves (see Gass & Mackey, 2015; Mackey, 2012, for reviews). Early days of interaction research observed that negotiation for meaning facilitated L2 comprehension and subsequent oral production. Beginning in the mid 1990s, researchers began to investigate a link between interaction and actual learning, and numerous studies have evidenced benefits of interaction ever since. Meanwhile, a good number of descriptive, observational, and empirical studies have also examined specific features of interaction (e.g., CF, uptake, modified output, noticing, etc.) in terms of how they relate to L2 learning and/or learning opportunities. Overall findings in regard to the effectiveness of CF suggest that CF is facilitative of L2 development with recasts more effective than, or as effective as, other CF moves (e.g., prompts, explicit corrections) in some studies, but less effective in others (see Lyster, Saito, & Sato, 2013; Nassaji, 2016, for recent reviews). It should be noted, however, that accumulated evidence bespeaks relatively more beneficial roles of prompts compared to recasts. As for uptake, the amount of uptake following recasts may vary depending upon learning contexts, with relatively more uptake in form-oriented, and less in meaning-oriented, contexts. Successful modified output (repairs), but not needs-repairs, has been found to be associated with actual learning as well as learner noticing. In terms of language areas, relevant findings suggest that L2 learners are not quite accurate in their perceptions of morphosyntactic feedback, compared to phonological and lexical or semantic CF. Previous research findings also indicate that characteristics of recasts (e.g., length, number of changes, etc.) tend to mediate learner noticing and overall effects of recasts, with recasts involving short and one or two changes likely to be noticed more often than those involving long and three or more changes. Noticing, L2 learning opportunities, and the effectiveness of CF can be mediated by various factors, such as type of target, developmental readiness, interlocutor characteristics, task complexity, and so forth. We have also obtained some evidence of mediating roles of learner-internal ID variables (e.g., WM, language aptitude, cognitive style, etc.), however,

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with some studies showing conflicting results and depicting a rather complex picture of the issue, because these ID variables often interact with other mediating variables with possibilities of certain ID variables interplaying with other ID variables. As far as these mediating factors are concerned, interaction research to date has not yet arrived at any level of conclusive end. Given that the field of SLA has expanded its theoretical and experimental boundaries by adopting, adapting, and borrowing varied research methods and theoretical frameworks, our burden of proof has been diversified along with quite a few factors that may mediate the extent to which L2 learners benefit from negotiated interaction. The topics (and relevant studies) that I illustrated in this chapter are just a few of many potential variables of that kind. Accordingly, these features have been discussed and investigated extensively at the centre of current interaction research. Although more than thirty years of interaction research have no doubt revealed that interaction precipitates L2 learning, we now have much more complicated issues to deal with than when this idea of interaction first emerged, and far more questions than answers when it comes to how it does so. From a pedagogical standpoint, task-based language teaching (TBLT) creates an optimal condition for interaction-driven L2 learning (see Long, 2015, for a recent volume on TBLT) because negotiation for meaning, during which “important brief opportunities for attention to linguistic code features, and for explicit learning (cf. explicit teaching) to improve implicit input processing, occur” (Long, 2015, p. 53), likely abounds in most interactional tasks that require L2 learners’ active involvement. However, given that various mediating factors (e.g., task type, task complexity, target type, proficiency, etc.) can affect the amount of negotiation for meaning and overall task performance, teachers should be cautious when designing tasks to ensure learners are provided with enough opportunities for negotiated interaction befitting their proficiency, but in a rather challenging way. Well-designed two-way, rather than one-way, tasks with complexity manipulated from simple to complex and with enough cognitive challenges are most likely to elicit much negotiated interaction and afford L2 learners ample opportunities to engage in cognitive processing of the target language with input and output often modified by means of negotiation moves and negative feedback (see Long, 2015, for more suggestions). Of course, focus on form (e.g., Long, 1991, 2000; Long & Robinson, 1998; see also Loewen, 2015, for a recent review), which refers to overtly drawing “students’ attention to linguistic elements as they arise incidentally in lessons whose overriding focus is on meaning, or communication” (Long, 1991, p. 46), should be embedded in TBLT contexts. Long (2015) further elaborates that focus on form involves

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reactive use of a wide variety of pedagogic procedures (PPs) to draw learners’ attention to linguistic problems in context, as they arise during communication (in TBLT, typically as students work on problem-solving tasks), thereby increasing the likelihood that attention to code features will be synchronized with the learner’s internal syllabus, developmental stage, and processing ability. (p. 27)

Focus on form can be achieved through various attention-drawing techniques, including CF moves (see Doughty & Williams, 1998, for a wider taxonomy as compared to Long’s definition of focus on form). Given interaction researchers have obtained enough empirical findings that clearly suggest CF moves during interaction foster L2 development (see Mackey, 2012; Nassaji, 2016, for reviews), focus on form through various CF moves, not just recasts or just prompts, must be considered as an important teaching practice, and implemented as such. Lastly, Long’s (2009, 2015) list of ten methodological principles for TBLT deserves much attention from language teachers, as they represent previous research findings (e.g., use task as the unit of analysis, focus on form, promote learning by doing, encourage inductive learning, etc.). The proposed principles (see Long, 2015, for detailed discussion) are an important source of reference that language teachers should consult when they plan, design, and reflect on classroom activities and various types of in-class phenomena.

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Baralt, M. (2013). The impact of cognitive complexity on feedback efficacy during online versus face-to-face interactive tasks. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35, 689–725. Brown, D. (2016). The type and linguistic foci of oral corrective feedback in the L2 classroom: A meta-analysis. Language Teaching Research, 20, 436–458. Chaudron, C. (1977). A descriptive model of discourse in the corrective treatment of learners’ errors. Language Learning, 27, 29–46. Doughty, C. (2001). Cognitive underpinnings of focus on form. In P. Robinson (ed.), Cognition and second language instruction (pp. 206–257). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doughty, C., & Williams, J. (eds.) (1998). Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Egi, T. (2007). Interpreting recasts as linguistic evidence: The roles of linguistic target, length, and degree of change. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 29, 511–537. Egi, T. (2010). Uptake, modified output, and learner perceptions of recasts: Learner responses as language awareness. The Modern Language Journal, 94, 1–21. Ellis, R. (2007). The differential effects of corrective feedback on two grammatical structures. In A. Mackey (ed.), Conversational interaction in second language acquisition: A collection of empirical studies (pp. 339–360). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, R. (2015). Understanding second language acquisition (2nd edn.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, R., Basturkmen, H., & Loewen, S. (2001). Learner uptake in communicative ESL lessons. Language Learning, 51, 281–318. Ellis, R., & He, X. (1999). The roles of modified input and output in the incidental acquisition of word meanings. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21, 285–301. Ellis, R., Loewen, S., & Erlam, R. (2006). Implicit and explicit corrective feedback and the acquisition of L2 grammar. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 339–368. Ellis, R., Tanaka, Y., & Yamazaki, A. (1994). Classroom interaction, comprehension and the acquisition of L2 word meanings. Language Learning, 44(3), 449–491. Foster, P. (1998). A classroom perspective on the negotiation of meaning. Applied Linguistics, 19, 1–23. Foster, P., & Ohta, A. S. (2005). Negotiation for meaning and peer assistance in second language classrooms. Applied Linguistics, 26, 402–430. Gass, S. M. (1997). Input, Interaction, and the Second Language Learner. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gass, S. M. (2003). Input and interaction. In C. J. Doughty & M. H. Long (eds.), The handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 224–255). Oxford: Blackwell.

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Gass, S. M., & Mackey, A. (2006). Input, interaction and output: An overview. AILA Review, 19, 3–17. Gass, S. M., & Mackey, A. (2015). Input, interaction, and output in second language acquisition. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds.), Theories in second language acquisition (pp. 180–206). New York: Routledge. Gass, S. M., Mackey, A., & Ross-Feldman, L. (2005). Task-based interactions in classroom and laboratory settings. Language Learning, 55, 575–611. Gass, S. M., & Varonis, E. (1994). Input, interaction, and second language production. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 282–302. Gilabert, R., Baron, J., & Llanes, M. (2009). Manipulating task complexity across task types and its influence on learners’ interaction during oral performance. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 47, 367–395. Goo, J. (2012). Corrective feedback and working memory capacity in interaction-driven L2 learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 34, 445–474. Goo, J. (2016). Corrective feedback and working memory capacity: A replication. In G. Granena, D. O. Jackson, & Y. Yilmaz (eds.), Cognitive individual differences in second language processing and acquisition (pp. 279–302). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goo, J., & Mackey, A. (2013). The case against the case against recasts. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35, 127–165. Gooch, R., Saito, K., & Lyster, R. (2016). Effects of recasts and prompts on L2 pronunciation development: Teaching English /ɹ/ to Korean adult EFL learners. System, 60, 117–127. Gurzynski-Weiss, L. (2016). Factors influencing Spanish instructors’ in-class feedback decisions. The Modern Language Journal, 100, 255–275. Gurzynski-Weiss, L. (2017). L2 instructor individual characteristics. In S. Loewen & M. Sato (eds.), The Routledge handbook of instructed second language acquisition (pp. 451–467). New York: Routledge. Gurzynski-Weiss, L., & Baralt, M. (2014). Exploring learner perception and use of task-based interactional feedback in FTF and CMC modes. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 36, 1–37. Gurzynski-Weiss, L., & Baralt, M. (2015). Does type of modified output correspond to learner noticing of feedback? A closer look in face-to-face and computer-mediated task-based interaction. Applied Psycholinguistics, 36, 1393–1420. Izumi, S., Bigelow, M., Fujiwara, M., & Fearnow, S. (1999). Testing the Output Hypothesis: Effects of output on noticing and second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21, 421–452. Jeon, S. (2007). Interaction-driven L2 learning: Characterizing linguistic development. In A. Mackey (ed.), Conversational interaction in second language acquisition (pp. 379–403). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keck, C. M., Iberri-Shea, G., Tracy-Ventura, N., & Wa-Mbaleka, S. (2006). Investigating the empirical link between task-based interaction and acquisition: A meta-analysis. In J. M. Norris & L. Ortega (eds.), Synthesizing

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research on language learning and teaching (pp. 91–131). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kim, Y. (2009). The effects of task complexity on learner–learner interaction. System, 37, 254–268. Kim, Y. (2012). Task complexity, learning opportunities and Korean EFL learners’ question development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 34, 627–658. Kim, Y., Payant, C., & Pearson, P. (2015). The intersection of task-based interaction, task complexity, and working memory: L2 question development through recasts in a laboratory setting. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 37, 549–581. Kormos, J., & Trebits, A. (2011). Working memory capacity and narrative task performance. In P. Robinson (ed.), Second language task complexity: Researching the Cognition Hypothesis of language learning and performance (pp. 267–285). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Leeser, M. J., & Sunderman, G. L. (2016). Methodological implications of working memory tasks for L2 processing research. In G. Granena, D. O. Jackson, & Y. Yilmaz (eds.), Cognitive individual differences in second language processing and acquisition (pp. 279–302). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Li, S. (2010). The effectiveness of corrective feedback in SLA: A metaanalysis. Language Learning, 60, 309–365. Li, S. (2013). The interactions between the effects of implicit and explicit feedback and individual differences in language analytic ability and working memory. The Modern Language Journal, 97, 634–654. Li, S. (2017). Cognitive differences and ISLA. In S. Loewen & M. Sato (eds.), The Routledge handbook of instructed second language acquisition (pp. 396– 417). New York: Routledge. Loewen, S. (2005). Incidental focus on form and second language learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27, 361–386. Loewen, S. (2015). Introduction to instructed second language acquisition. New York: Routledge. Loewen, S., & Philp, J. (2006). Recasts in the adult English L2 classroom: Characteristics, explicitness, and effectiveness. The Modern Language Journal, 90, 536–556. Long, M. H. (1985). Input and second language acquisition theory. In S. M. Gass & C. G. Madden (eds.), Input in second language acquisition (pp. 377– 393). Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Long, M. H. (1991). Focus on form: A design feature in language teaching methodology. In K. De Bot, R. B. Ginsberg, & C. Kramsch (eds.), Foreign language research in cross-cultural perspective (pp. 39–52). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Long, M. H. (1996). The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition. In W. Richie & T. K. Bhatia (eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 413–468). New York: Academic Press.

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Mackey, A. (2012). Input, interaction, and corrective feedback in L2 classrooms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mackey, A., Abbuhl, R., & Gass, S. (2012). Interactionist approach. In S. Gass & A. Mackey (eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 7–24). New York: Routledge. Mackey, A., Adams, R., Stafford, C., & Winke, P. (2010). Exploring the relationship between modified output and working memory capacity. Language Learning, 60, 501–533. Mackey, A., Gass, S. M., & McDonough, K. (2000). How do learners perceive interactional feedback? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22, 471–497. Mackey, A., & Goo, J. (2007). Interaction research in SLA: A meta-analysis and research synthesis. In A. Mackey (ed.), Conversational interaction in second language acquisition: A collection of empirical studies (pp. 407–452). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mackey, A., Oliver, R., & Leeman, J. (2003). Interactional input and the incorporation of feedback: An exploration of NS–NNS and NNS–NNS adult and child dyads. Language Learning, 53, 35–66. Mackey, A., & Philp, J. (1998). Conversational interaction and second language development: Recasts, responses, and red herrings? The Modern Language Journal, 82, 338–356. Mackey, A., Philp, J., Egi, T., Fujii, A., & Tatsumi, T. (2002). Individual differences in working memory, noticing of interactional feedback and L2 development. In P. Robinson (ed.), Individual differences and instructed language learning (pp. 181–209). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Mackey, A., Polio, C., & McDonough, K. (2004). The relationship between experience, education and teachers’ use of incidental focus-on-form techniques. Language Teaching Research, 8, 301–327. Mackey, A., & Sachs, R. (2012). Older learners in SLA research: A first look at working memory, feedback, and L2 development. Language Learning, 62, 704–740. McDonough, K. (2005). Identifying the impact of negative feedback and learners’ responses on ESL question development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27, 79–103. McDonough, K. (2007). Interactional feedback and the emergence of simple past activity verbs in L2 English. In A. Mackey (ed.), Conversational interaction in second language acquisition: A collection of empirical studies (pp. 323–338). Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDonough, K., Crawford, W. J., & Mackey, A. (2015). Creativity and EFL students’ language use during a group problem-solving task. TESOL Quarterly, 49, 188–199. McDonough, K., & Mackey, A. (2006). Responses to recasts: Repetitions, primed production, and linguistic development. Language Learning, 56, 693–720. Nakatsukasa, K. (2016). Efficacy of recasts and gestures on the acquisition of locative prepositions. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 38, 771–799.

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Nassaji, H. (2009). Effects of recasts and elicitation in dyadic interaction and the role of feedback explicitness. Language Learning, 59, 411–452. Nassaji, H. (2016). Interactional feedback in second language teaching and learning: A synthesis and analysis of current research. Language Teaching Research, 20, 535–562. Nassaji, H. (2017). The effectiveness of extensive versus intensive recasts for learning L2 grammar. The Modern Language Journal, 101, 353–368. Nobuyoshi, J., & Ellis, R. (1993). Focused communication tasks and second language acquisition. English Language Teaching Journal, 47, 203–210. Nuevo, A.-M. (2006). Task complexity and interaction: L2 learning opportunities and development. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Nuevo, A.-M., Adams, R., & Ross-Feldman, L. (2011). Task complexity, modified output, and L2 development in leaner–learner interaction. In P. Robinson (ed.), Second language task complexity: Researching the Cognition Hypothesis of language learning and performance (pp. 175–201). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Oliver, R., & Mackey, A. (2003). Interactional context and feedback in child ESL classrooms. The Modern Language Journal, 87, 519–533. Ortega, L. (2009). Understanding second language acquisition. London: Hodder Education. Philp, J. (2003). Constraints on noticing the gap: Nonnative speakers’ noticing of recasts in NS–NNS interaction. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 99–126. Pica, T. (1992). The textual outcomes of native speaker–non-native speaker negotiation: What do they reveal about second language learning? In C. Kramsch & S. McConnell-Ginet (eds.), Text and context: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on language study (pp. 198–237). Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company. Pica, T. (1994). Research on negotiation: What does it reveal about second language learning conditions, processes, and outcomes? Language Learning, 44, 493–527. Pica, T. (1996). Do second language learners need negotiation? International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL), 34, 1–21. Pica, T. (2002). Subject-matter content: How does it assist the interactional and linguistic needs of classroom language learners? The Modern Language Journal, 86, 1–19. Pica, T., Holliday, L., Lewis, N. E., & Morgenthaler, L. (1989). Comprehensible output as an outcome of linguistic demands on the learner. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 11, 63–90. Pica, T., Kanagy, R., & Falodun, J. (1993). Choosing and using communication tasks for second language instruction. In G. Crookes & S. M. Gass (eds.), Tasks and language learning (pp. 9–34). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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Pica, T., Young, R., & Doughty, C. (1987). The impact of interaction on comprehension. TESOL Quarterly, 21, 737–58. Polio, C., Gass, S., & Chapin, L. (2006). Using stimulated recall to investigate native speaker perceptions in native–nonnative speaker interaction. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 237–267. Rassaei, E. (2015a). Recasts, field dependence/independence cognitive style, and L2 development. Language Teaching Research, 19, 499–518. Rassaei, E. (2015b). Oral corrective feedback, foreign language anxiety and L2 development. System, 49, 98–109. Révész, A. (2009). Task complexity, focus on form, and second language development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 31, 437–470. Révész, A. (2011). Task complexity, focus on L2 constructions, and individual differences: A classroom-based study. The Modern Language Journal, 95(S), 162–181. Révész, A. (2012). Working memory and the observed effectiveness of recasts on different L2 outcome measures. Language Learning, 62, 93–132. Révész, A., Sachs, R., & Hama, M. (2014). The effects of task complexity and input frequency on the acquisition of the past counterfactual construction through recasts. Language Learning, 64, 615–650. Révész, A., Sachs, R., & Mackey, A. (2011). Task complexity, uptake of recasts, and L2 development. In P. Robinson (ed.), Second language task complexity: Researching the Cognition Hypothesis of language learning and performance (pp. 203–235). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Robinson, P. (2001a). Task complexity, cognitive resources, and syllabus design: A triadic framework for examining task influences on SLA. In P. Robinson (ed.), Cognition and second language instruction (pp. 287–318). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, P. (2001b). Task complexity, task difficulty, and task production: Exploring interactions in a componential framework. Applied Linguistics, 22, 27–57. Robinson, P. (2003). The Cognition Hypothesis, task design, and adult taskbased language learning. Second Language Studies, 21, 45–105. Robinson, P. (2007). Criteria for classifying and sequencing pedagogic tasks. In M. P. García Mayo (ed.), Investigating tasks in formal language learning (pp. 7–26). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Robinson, P. (2011a). Task-based language learning: A review of issues. Language Learning, 61(S1), 1–36. Robinson, P. (2011b). Second language task complexity, the Cognition Hypothesis, language learning, and performance. In P. Robinson (ed.), Second language task complexity: Researching the Cognition Hypothesis of language learning and performance (pp. 3–37). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sagarra, N. (2007). From CALL to face-to-face interaction: The effect of computer-delivered recasts and working memory on L2 development. In A. Mackey (ed.), Conversational interaction in second language acquisition:

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11 Speaking Dustin Crowther and Susan M. Gass 11.1 Introduction In describing the difficulties of establishing a definition for the construct second language (L2) “speaking”, Fulcher (2014) notes that “speaking is the verbal use of language to communicate with others” (p. 23). Such a broad definition is of course limited, as what enables successful spoken communication is variable. For example, Fulcher lists the following considerations: pronunciation and intonation; accuracy and fluency; strategies for speaking; structuring speech; speaking in context; and interactional competence. Such variability is evident when considering how high-stakes language assessments (e.g., the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), instruments based on the Common European Framework of Reference, International English Language Testing System (IELTS), Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL)) define speaking within their frameworks. For example, whereas the IELTS speaking rubric includes categories for Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation, the TOEFL speaking rubrics emphasize General Description, Delivery, Language Use, and Topic Development.1 A quick glance across the two rubrics would seemingly indicate that IELTS emphasizes the linguistic and TOEFL the contextual considerations of L2 speaking. While IELTS and TOEFL are English specific, the ACTFL guidelines were developed to be language neutral, being relevant to a wide range of languages. While making reference to linguistic dimensions (phonology, lexicon, syntax), ACTFL emphasizes the effectiveness in which speakers are expected to carry out a range of tasks. For example, a superior (a term used to designate one of five broad proficiency levels) speaker will be able to communicate with accuracy and fluency in order to participate fully and effectively in conversations on a variety of topics in formal and informal settings … present their opinions on a number of issues of interest to them, such as social and political issues, and provide structured arguments to support these opinions. (ACTFL, 2012, p. 5)  Refer to https://www.ielts.org/en-us/ielts-for-organisations/ielts-scoring-in-detail for the IELTS speaking rubric and to

1

https://www.ets.org/toefl/ibt/scores/understand for the TOEFL speaking rubrics.

Speaking

Recognizing this variability in defining L2 speaking, in this chapter, we address the construct from macro- and micro-perspectives. We first draw upon a large database of oral proficiency interviews across foreign languages (e.g., French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese) to see what gains universitylevel learners in the US make across multiple semesters of study. We then review phonology-, fluency-, and sociolinguistic-based variables associated with listener perception of L2 speech performance. We conclude with a discussion on developmental variables (e.g., age, immersion, study abroad) that may influence the extent to which L2 learners may develop their L2 speaking ability.

11.2  Attainment: What are Reasonable Expectations? We explore attainment from the perspective of a large dataset that considered proficiency attainment across different skills: speaking, listening, and reading. The data come from a three-year study (2014–2017) that considered proficiency results across multiple languages and multiple years of university study.2 In that study, data were collected from students enrolled in Chinese, French, Russian, or Spanish classes at a large Midwestern US university. Table 11.1 reflects the numbers of tests administered. Standardized tests, based on ACTFL standards, were used to assess speaking, listening, and reading. For speaking, a computerized test (OPIc) was administered online through Language Testing International, who was responsible for grading the oral sample provided by the student.

Table 11.1.  Number of students who took proficiency tests administered at Michigan State University from 2014–2017 in four languages. 2014–2015

2015–2016

2016–2017*

Chinese

250

272

162

French

526

510

301

Russian

116

115

57

Spanish

1155

962

936

Total

2047

1859

1456

Note. Tests were not administered in Fall 2016, so the 2016–2017 numbers only include Spring 2017.

 Partial funding for this research comes from the National Security Education Program’s Language Flagship

2

Proficiency Initiative, Award Number 0054-MSU-22-PI-280-PO2, granted to Paula Winke and Susan Gass.

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8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

AL IL NM Year 1

Year 2 Speaking

Year 3 Listening

Year 4 Reading

Figure 11.1.  ACTFL spring 2017 results for speaking, listening, and reading. Note: Years 1–4 on the x-axis indicate years of study (e.g., first-year courses through fourth-year courses).

The listening and reading tests were computer-graded, and scores were determined immediately. The OPIc used an avatar to deliver questions. Following the ACTFL scale, students were given ratings in one of five categories: (1) Novice; (2) Intermediate; (3) Advanced; (4) Superior; and (5) Distinguished. The three lowest levels were subdivided into sublevels low (L), mid (M), and high (H). Thus, there are essentially eleven possible ratings, although none of our students reached distinguished, and very few reached superior in any skill. The majority of speakers fell into the Novice (N), Intermediate (I), and Advanced (A) bands. More information on the descriptors can be found in ACTFL (2012). For purposes of displaying the results, each level was converted into a numerical value, ranging from 1 (Novice low (NL)) to 10 (Superior). Figure 11.1 shows the results from the final year of our study (Spring 2017). As can be seen, at the end of four years of study, speaking was the lowest skill attained, with students not even reaching the Intermediate High level. The increase in speaking skills over a four-year period is somewhat flat when compared to the rapid jump in the other skills, in particular, from year two to year three. Although both of these observations may be a reflection of curricular emphases, it is noteworthy that these data do include students with study abroad experience where speaking was undoubtedly a part of a student’s daily life. What we have seen thus far is that for skill development in a US foreign language setting, speaking is the weakest skill. This is surprising given the emphasis on the importance of speaking from an L2 acquisition perspective, where the Interaction Approach has been on the forefront of research and emphasizes the important role of output, a topic to which we turn next.

Speaking

11.3  The Importance of Speaking: Output Output, in its simplest form, refers to the production of language, and incorporates oral, written, or signed production. The construct of output became theoretically important in the 1980s when Swain (1985) introduced the notion of comprehensible output, further elaborated on in Swain (1995, 2005). Output “may force the learner to move from semantic processing to syntactic processing” (1985, p. 249). In other words, using language productively (as opposed to receptively) forces learners to join sounds and put words in a particular order. Comprehensible output refers to the benefits derived when learners are “pushed toward the delivery of a message that is not only conveyed, but that is conveyed precisely, coherently, and appropriately’ (1985, p. 249). Swain (1995) further claimed that output may stimulate learners to move from the semantic, open-ended, nondeterministic, strategic processing prevalent in comprehension to the complete grammatical processing needed for accurate production. Output, thus, would seem to have a potentially significant role in the development of syntax and morphology. (p. 128)

Thus, speaking, as an activity, coupled with feedback from an interlocutor, is a necessary (although not sufficient) part of learning. This is so because in an interactive context, feedback is frequent and draws a learner’s attention to some (usually erroneous) part of his/her spoken utterance, enabling the learner to focus on that part of language and make corrections, as may be appropriate. The Interaction Approach (Long, 1996; Gass & Mackey, 2006, 2007; Mackey, Abbuhl, & Gass, 2012) includes a number of important constructs, of which output is one and feedback another. From a theoretical standpoint, feedback is part of what is known as negative evidence, that is, information to a speaker that there is something that differs from acceptable norms of language. Negative evidence is not a necessary condition for child language acquisition but may play a different role in the case of L2 learning (see for example White, 1991). Within a classroom context, feedback is clearly prevalent and is in fact common although not always pervasive as Zyzik and Polio (2008) showed in the context of Spanish literature classrooms. Loewen (2003) also found variation in feedback even within the same language school and from student to student. In other words, speaking, coupled with feedback, may be important for L2 learning, but caution is warranted because of the lack of consistency in which feedback is given to oral production and the selective nature of L2 learners in incorporating feedback (see Mackey, Gass, & McDonough, 2000). While acknowledging the importance of producing comprehensible output and receiving feedback on this output, the previously referenced ACTFL data make clear that there is potential concern in regard to

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speaking development (here limited to a US context) (cf. Winke, Gass, & Heinrich, 2019; Rubio et al., 2018). However, such data do not allow us to pinpoint what it is specifically about L2 learners’ speaking that is not developing. To discuss further, we begin by considering possibly the most intuitive link to L2 speaking, pronunciation.

11.4  Global Perception of L2 Speech The above analysis emphasizes holistic speaking gains, as measured by Language Testing International raters, who have been specifically trained to ensure reliable and unbiased assessments across speakers. However, empirical research into L2 speech production has also frequently employed listeners, a population more variable in membership, and usually employed to provide a more global assessment of speech production (Yan & Ginther, 2018). Within such studies, researchers’ interest is focused primarily on how naïve listeners (i.e., without formal training) perceive the speech of L2 users (e.g., Derwing & Munro, 1997; Munro & Derwing, 1999), and which linguistic measures of speech influence this perception (e.g., Crowther et al., 2015; Trofimovich & Isaacs, 2012; Varonis & Gass, 1982). Such research has emphasized three key constructs, here defined following Derwing and Munro (2015, p. 5): a. accentedness—how distinguishable an L2 learners’ speech pattern is from that of a member of the target speech community, b. comprehensibility—how easy or difficult to understand a listener finds an L2 speaker’s utterance to be, c. intelligibility—how accurately a listener understands an L2 speaker’s intended message. Importantly, it has been argued that perceived accentedness is partially independent from the two measures of understanding, comprehensibility and intelligibility (Derwing & Munro, 2015). In essence, while low comprehensible or intelligible speakers will nearly always possess a heavy accent, simply possessing a heavy accent is not an automatic predictor of low comprehensibility or intelligibility. As such, there has been a strong belief in L2 pronunciation scholarship that pedagogical approaches towards developing L2 speech should place a greater emphasis on the ability to produce understandable before native-like speech, referred to by Levis (2005) as the Intelligibility and Nativeness principles, respectively. Although studies in this vein have placed a primary emphasis on L2 English, recent years have seen an increased focus on additional languages, including Dutch (Caspers, 2010), French (Bergeron & Trofimovich, 2017), German (O’Brien, 2014), Japanese (Saito & Akiyama, 2017), Korean (Isbell, Park, & Lee, 2019), and Spanish (Nagle, 2018).

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11.4.1  Linguistic Dimensions of L2 Speaking L2 pronunciation scholarship has identified a wide range of linguistic dimensions associated with listeners’ perception of L2 speech. While accentedness is intuitively linked to phonological measures, comprehensibility is generally more diverse, encompassing phonology, fluency, and lexicogrammar measures (e.g., Crowther et al., 2015; Trofimovich & Isaacs, 2012). An emphasis here is placed on comprehensibility (ease of understanding) over intelligibility (accuracy), as the scalar approach of the former is more in line with how “speaking” is operationalized in high stakes assessment rubrics (Isaacs & Trofimovich, 2012). It should be noted, however, that it does not inform us on how accurate understanding was, which is often measured at the segment, word, and phrasal levels through techniques such as orthographic transcription, truth-value judgments, and forced-choice tasks (Thomson, 2018). Many of the studies described above are of a one-shot nature and fail to tell us much with regard to development. However, some insight can be gleaned from the works of Derwing, Munro, Thomson, and colleagues, who have published some of the few pronunciation studies using longitudinal data. Focusing on the pronunciation gains of first language (L1) Mandarin and L1 Slavic learners of English in Canada, the authors have looked at accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency development ranging from ten months to seven years (e.g., Derwing & Munro, 2013; Derwing, Munro, & Thomson, 2007; Derwing et al., 2009; Derwing, Thomson, & Munro, 2006; Munro, Derwing, & Thomson, 2015). Derwing and Munro (2013) looked at gains in perceived accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency over the entire seven-year period, which covered time spent in ESL classes and beyond. For their Slavic learners, Derwing and Munro observed continued development in comprehensibility and fluency over the seven years, but not for accentedness, which appeared to level off after two years. However, for the Mandarin learners, who began as markedly worse than the Slavic learners, no perceptual gains were found across the three global measures during the seven-year period. In discussing their findings, Derwing and Munro highlight “the complex interplay of first language, the extent of linguistic interactions in the L2, and overall WTC [willingness to communicate]” (p. 177), all topics of focus later in this chapter.

11.5  Measures of Fluency When considering Derwing and Munro (2013), it should be noted that “fluency” as a construct has been variable in its definition (Chambers, 1997). For example, Derwing and Munro (2015) define it as the ease of flow of L2 speech, typically in reference to the presence or absence of pauses and

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other dysfluency markers. Lennon (1990) discusses “broad” (global speaking ability) versus “narrow” (ease of delivery) fluency. The variability in how L2 scholars have defined and operationalized fluency makes it difficult to draw clear generalizations across studies and develop a theory of L2 fluency acquisition (Segalowitz, 2016). With an aim to explain rather than describe fluency, Segalowitz (2010) states that L2 fluency should focus on features of L2 performance that are reliable indicators of how efficiently a speaker is able to mobilize and temporally integrate, in a nearly simultaneously way, the underlying processes of planning and assembling an utterance in order to perform a communicatively acceptable speech act. (p. 165)

In addition to the importance of motivation and social context in developing L2 fluency, Segalowitz (2010) highlights the potential link between cognitive and utterance fluency. Cognitive fluency refers to learners’ processing efficiency, which includes “the speed and efficiency of semantic retrieval, the handling of the attention-focusing demands inherent in utterance construction, operations in working memory, among others” (Segalowitz, 2016, p. 82). Utterance fluency, in turn, refers to the temporal measures associated with spoken production, including speech rate and hesitation and pausing phenomena. Viewing Segalowitz’s framework for L2 fluency at its most basic, increased L2 speech production “sharpens the learner’s cognitive-perceptual systems so that these cognitive operations become rapid, efficient, and fluid, resulting in speech output that is fluent” (Segalowitz, 2016, p. 89). In other words, increased language use experience leads to more efficient processing, which in turn leads to more fluent output. Pedagogically, if we accept fluency development as a result of increased usage experience, then we should ideally provide learners with extensive speaking practice in the classroom (e.g., Derwing et al., 2009; Nation, 1989), which in turn will enable the generation and automatization of useful, reusable utterances (see Gatbonton & Segalowitz, 2005). While not a “theory” of fluency development, such a pedagogical approach aligns strongly with an Interaction Approach to L2 development, as described earlier in this chapter.

11.6  Communicative Competence An emphasis on communicative competence can be traced back nearly fifty years, where Hymes (1971, 1972) argued that speakers need not only be able to speak a language but be able to use this language appropriately within and across various social situations, taking into account different settings and interlocutors. Extending to L2 speaking development, Canale and Swain (1980) identified four types of competences:

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• Grammatical—knowledge of the rules of morphology, syntax, sentencegrammar semantics, and phonology, and lexical knowledge. • Sociolinguistic—appropriateness of utterances within specified communicative events. • Strategic—verbal and non-verbal strategies to compensate for breakdowns in communication. • Discourse—language across specific domains (added later in Canale, 1983, p. 9). Here we provide an emphasis on communicative competence as the writings of Hymes, Canale, and Swain were highly influential in the development of Communicative Language Teaching in North America and Europe during the 1970s and 1980s (see Duff, 2014, for an overview of the history of communicative language teaching). Communicative language teaching not only has strong ties to the Interaction Approach, it has also informed more contemporary L2 pedagogical methods, such as content- and taskbased instruction (see Nassaji & Kartchava and Long, Lee, & Hillman, in this volume, respectively). Since the works of Hymes, the term communicative competence has continued to evolve. Byram (1997) proposed intercultural communicative competence, with a pedagogical emphasis on raising L2 learners’ recognition of how different cultural contexts may impact how the language they produce is perceived and interpreted. Risager (2007) argued for a need to develop L2 speakers into multilingually and multiculturally aware global citizens, and Kumaravadivelu (2008) proposed L2 speakers learn from other cultures as opposed to about them. Drawing from these different views on communicative competence, the term interculturality has increased in usage (Baker, 2015; Dervin & Risager, 2015). Though not all of the above directly addresses “speaking”, each can potentially shape an interactive event, which in turn shapes the input, output, and feedback one receives or produces. Considering the importance that the Interaction Approach prescribes to each, we cannot look past the role of linguistic and cultural diversity in language use (e.g., Baker, 2015; De Costa, 2012, 2014).

11.7  Individual Differences There are a range of individual-specific variables that may influence the extent and rate in which learners develop their ability to speak in their L2. While there is not space in one chapter to address all potential considerations, below we present five of the variables that have received strong empirical focus. We present them in alphabetical order to avoid placing priority on any one measure, as all have been argued to impact L2 speech development to different extents.

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11.7.1 Age In this section, we consider age as a factor in predicting language proficiency. Most of the literature related to age has been situated within what is known as the Critical Period or Sensitive Period. The main theoretical notion is that after a certain age, native-like L2 proficiency is not possible. Arguments have appeared on both sides of this debate. As a case in point, Gregg (1996) made an unequivocal statement that “truly nativelike competence in an L2 is never attained” (p. 52). Brain maturation is often used as an explanation for this phenomenon. However, others have focused on exceptions to the idea that late onset cannot result in native-like proficiency in an L2. Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam (2009), in a detailed study of L2 learners of Swedish, investigated this issue by first identifying a group of individuals who appeared to be native-like Swedish speakers by means of self-identification as well as perception by others. This was followed by an “in-depth scrutiny of actual, linguistic nativelikeness” (p. 260). This scrutiny encompasses a wide range of areas including phonetics, perception embedded in white noise and babble noise, written and auditory judgments, inferencing, and formulaic language. 195 participants were divided into two groups: (1) those who began their Swedish learning before age 12 (n = 107) and those who began at age 12 or later (n = 88). The average age of the former group, at the time of testing was 28–29 years and the average age for the older onset age group was 41–42 years. Other important variables, such as length of residence, were controlled. Based on self and listener ratings, most (156 of 195) did pass for native speakers. However, following a detailed linguistic scrutiny of native-likeness of forty-one participants (thirty-one in the early age group; ten in the late age group), only a small number of the early age learners and none of the late learners could be classified as native-like. One important takeaway from this study, given our focus on oral skills, is that the late learner who most resembled a native speaker (seven of ten measures of proficiency) deviated from native-speaker norms on the phonetic aspects of production and perception, suggesting that native-like pronunciation is, indeed, virtually impossible. Piske, MacKay, and Flege (2001) investigated Italian (L1)-English (L2) speakers who differed on their self-reported use of Italian. Some were early learners (learned English as children) and others were late learners (learned English as adolescents). Within these two broad categories were low-use participants and high-use participants. Gender was also a variable although it turned out not to be a predictor of accent. Three sentences were read by each of the participants and each sentence was then rated on a nine-point scale ranging from no foreign accent to very strong foreign accent. The results supported previous studies in that age of learning had an effect on pronunciation, but what was particularly interesting was the

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finding that amount of L1 use (in this case Italian) impacted both early and late learners equally, suggesting this important factor independent of age of learning. Those who used Italian often tended to have stronger accents in English. Muñoz (2014) considered long-term effects of onset of L2 learning on oral performance (Spanish speakers learning English). The study also investigated the not unrelated issue of input, which is carefully described through instructional input (number of curricular and extracurricular hours and number of years and study abroad [amount of time spent in an immersion environment]). Her oral production measures included speech rate, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and accuracy. Performance was more closely associated with input characteristics than with starting age. She supports DeKeyser (2000), who argues that children use implicit learning mechanisms which require more input than may be available in an instructional setting. Older learners are advantaged in a school setting where more explicit learning takes place. In other words, starting age is not particularly relevant given the different learning mechanisms used by children versus adolescents. What has greater predictability for oral production is cumulative exposure and quality of contact with native speakers (for a more detailed discussion of age-related factors, see Muñoz, this volume). The role of age in L2 speaking development is likely to remain an important topic of inquiry, as demonstrated in recent publications such as Saito et al. (2018), who consider the effect of age of arrival and length of residence on low-, mid-, and high-level L2 fluency performance.

11.7.2  Ethnic Group Affiliation The strength of pride and loyalty towards one’s ethnic group has been shown to both positively and negatively affect L2 development. Drawing from the at times tense multicultural and multilingual context in Québec, Canada, Gatbonton and colleagues have considered the relationship between ethnic group affiliation and L2 proficiency (Gatbonton & Trofimovich, 2008) and ethnic group affiliation and pronunciation accuracy (Gatbonton, Trofimovich, & Magid, 2005; Gatbonton, Trofimovich, & Segalowitz, 2011). Specifically, they considered the English proficiency of French-dominant bilinguals. Highlighting the multidimensional nature of ethnic group affiliation, Gatbonton and Trofimovich (2008) indicated that English learners with strong ethnic group identification and a more positive orientation towards the L2 group demonstrated higher L2 proficiency, while those with strong support for their ethnic group’s sociopolitical aspirations tended to demonstrate lower L2 proficiency. This negative association between political ethnic group affiliation and L2 proficiency carried

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directly into pronunciation accuracy (Gatbonton, Trofimovich, & Magid, 2005; Gatbonton, Trofimovich, & Segalowitz, 2011). A key mediating factor of these relationships was self-reported L2 use. Though they were unable to empirically pursue this finding further, Gatbonton and colleagues hypothesize that greater ethnic group affiliation (specifically in regard to political beliefs) likely led to reduced L2 contact and usage, which in turn led to “poorer development of psycholinguistic perception and production processes underlying L2 oral proficiency” (Gatbonton, Trofimovich, & Segalowitz, 2011, p. 199). The above studies provide just one example of how learner identity may impact L2 development. And, in essence, it refers us back to quantity and quality of language contact. Those looking for more information on this topic are referred to Darvin and Norton (this volume), who discuss how identity interacts with L2 acquisition.

11.7.3  First Language The strength of impact that a learner’s L1 has on their L2 development has been a highly discussed topic in L2 research (see Foley & Flynn, 2013, for a more general review of L1 effects in L2 development). Though also highlighting considerations beyond L1 influence, Eckman (2004) states “L1 influence has always been, and still is, a factor in explaining L2 pronunciation” (p. 543). For example, a key area of empirical interest has been the acquisition of English /r/ and /l/ by L1 Japanese learners (e.g., Aoyama et al., 2004; Saito & Lyster, 2012). For such learners, for whom these two phonemes are non-contrastive in their native language, the ability to discriminate both perceptually and productively has proven problematic. Such findings have provided support for the belief that before L2 learners can produce two distinct sounds, they must be able to perceive them as distinct (although see Gass, 1984, for a study in which production preceded perception). While we do not have space to provide an in-depth review of the sources of perceptual difficulties, one key consideration, which ties back to our previous discussion on age, is that our phonemic inventory is often set by the time we are one year old, and, as such, our ability to differentiate between non-native phonemic contrasts decreases (e.g., Kuhl, 2004; Werker & Tees, 2005; also, see Patricia Kuhl’s 2011 Ted Talk “The Linguistic Genius of Babies” for a more visual demonstration of this effect). Two key models of pronunciation, Best’s Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM; e.g., Best, 1993, 1994) and Flege’s Skill Learning Model (SLM; e.g., Flege, 1995, 1999), attempt to account for the difficulties L2 learners face in phonemic acquisition. Both models are based in listener perception, an area of research surprisingly more frequent in psycholinguistics than it is in L2 acquisition (Derwing & Munro, 2015). In PAM, adult L2 learners perceive foreign sounds in relationship to their own phonemic inventory.

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In essence, they attempt to assimilate these new sounds into an already existing category. For example, Best and Tyler (2007) note how L1 English learners of French are likely to recognize French /r/ and English /r/ as phonological equivalents, despite different phonetic realizations. In SLM, it is hypothesized that new sounds that are more perceptually similar to existing sounds in the L1 will be more difficult to acquire than new sounds that are perceptually different. Guided by the SLM assumption that speech production eventually falls in line with speech perception (e.g., Thomson, Neary, & Derwing, 2009), there has been an increase in approaches towards addressing L2 speakers’ perception of foreign sounds (e.g., Hardison, 2005; Okuno & Hardison, 2016; Thomson, 2011, 2012). Also, please see Sakai and Moorman (2018) for a twenty-five-year meta-analytic review of the effectiveness of perception training on L2 phoneme production. While the above models focus on phonemic acquisition, evidence also exists for L1 influence in suprasegmental acquisition. For example, Trofimovich and Isaacs (2012) ran correlations between listener ratings of the accentedness and comprehensibility of L1 French speakers of English and nineteen different linguistic measures of speech. For both accentedness and comprehensibility, strong correlations (r > .70) were found for word stress and rhythm (even stronger than for individual sounds). The authors linked this strong association to the fact that word stress is non-contrastive in French and rhythm generally lacks the alterations found in English. The authors state that ‘unpredictable’ stress placement (word stress) and alternations in stress (rhythm) in English would pose a major learning challenge for L1 French speakers, regardless of proficiency level, and would be a salient factor influencing listeners’ perception of both accent and comprehensibility.  (p. 914)

Alluding to the number of L2 English speakers with word stress and rhythm difficulties (from a variety of L1 backgrounds), they emphasize that a high global importance be placed on these two measures. Interested readers might consider recent publications such as Tao and Taft (2017), who compared the effect of home language exposure on L2 perception and production, or Munro (2018), who reviews the potential flaws of utilizing a contrastive approach towards predicting L2 pronunciation difficulties.

11.7.4  Study Abroad Many studies have emphasized the benefits of study abroad and, in particular, the impact that studying abroad can have on learner proficiency gains, often focusing on oral proficiency. In fact, the 2017 American Academy of Arts and Sciences report on language learning in the United

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States included policy statements among which was the goal to increase access to study abroad. They explicitly highlighted the benefits for “students to travel, experience other cultures, and immerse themselves in languages as they are used in everyday interactions and across all segments of society” (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2017, p. 27.) When attempting to understand the value of study abroad, one must remember that an understanding of language gains (speaking and other skills) must take into account learner internal variables as well as contextual variables, including length of stay and living contexts (see Sanz & MoralesFront, 2018, for  extensive coverage of study abroad-related issues). One also has to consider speaking in relation to other skills. For example, Davidson (2010) found that speaking gains in a study abroad context could be predicted on the basis of pre-departure listening scores. Davidson and Shaw (2019) further demonstrate through a large database of learners in study abroad contexts that gains in speaking proficiency vary depending on the starting point, with gains being greater at lower levels than at higher levels. Despite the obvious benefits that accrue from studying abroad (see Jackson and Schwieter, this volume, for a detailed discussion of terminology and differences in study abroad programmes), location of study is not the only answer to increased proficiency. For example, Freed, Segalowitz, and Dewey (2004) found greater benefits for the amount of production (see earlier section on output) in which learners engaged, rather than the venue where learning takes place. Importantly, a study abroad venue provides opportunities for production that are not available in a foreign language context. In general, however, results are mixed. Magnan & Back (2007) focused on semester-long study abroad programmes in France. They found that language gains did occur; students either maintained the same level of proficiency or exhibited gains as measured through oral proficiency interview (OPI) scores. However, commonly-held beliefs about living contexts and the use of authentic media as factors that differentiated learners was not maintained (see Winke & Gass, 2018a for an example of the relevance of authentic materials in reaching advanced levels of proficiency). In a more fine-grained analysis that included detailed language contact information, Hardison (2014b) examined changes in a number of areas following a study abroad experience. In addition to areas not directly related to speaking, she considered changes in oral production, namely, pronunciation, fluency, and accentedness, as determined by raters of speech samples. She further incorporated into her study results from surveys measuring motivation, affect, and self-assessment of oral competence. Finally, she gathered information on the amount and type of language use. A general finding was that study abroad did result in changes

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in all oral skills as well as positive changes in socio-affective measures. Interesting, although not surprising was a pre-study abroad predictor of affect. Those who showed greater positive affect spent more time interacting with native speakers while abroad and had increased positive affect following their study abroad. However, despite this, the study did not find a significant relationship between contact and oral skill improvement. In a study that only focused on pronunciation, Muñoz and Llanes (2014) compared adults and children in two contexts: study abroad (three months) and at home. There were four groups of participants, all Catalan-Spanish learners of English, twenty-eight children (ages 10–11), of whom thirteen had studied abroad, and nineteen adults, fifteen of whom had studied abroad. Recordings were made (pre-study and post-study abroad for those in the study abroad group and at the same interval for the at home group). Listeners rated the samples on a 1–7 Likert scale indicating the perceived degree of foreign accent. Their findings suggest that the learning environment is a greater predictor than age for pronunciation improvement. The child participants showed greater improvement than adults although the difference was not significant. The greater improvement is likely to be not unrelated to the fact that the children interacted more with native speakers than the adults did. They made the important observation that the short amount of time may be insufficient for a stronger pronunciation impact to be noticeable. Segalowitz and Freed (2004), in their comparison of students (English learners of Spanish in Spain) in a study abroad context and at home, found benefits for students in a study abroad context based on speech-specific measures (e.g., temporal and hesitation) as well as holistic measures (ACTFL OPI). But, as they pointed out, learning is complex and there is no single indicator of success. One cannot begin to understand speaking gains without understanding cognitive abilities and the amount of language contact. Perhaps most important is the proficiency level at which one begins study abroad, as the Davidson (2010) and Davidson and Shaw (2019) studies mentioned earlier noted. Individual variables cannot be overemphasized, and, like all facets of language learning, the path to success is not linear. These findings are further supported by a study by Leonard and Shea (2017) dealing with English speakers learning Spanish (Argentina). Unlike the Segalowitz and Freed study, theirs was not a comparison study. Their measures of success were based on complexity, accuracy, and fluency. Again, individual variation was noted, with linguistic knowledge prior to study abroad a predictor of gains, as was their pre-departure processing speed, measured by a picture-naming task and a sentence-picture verification task. With ongoing increases in global mobility, interest in study abroad research is unlikely to wane. Aside from Leonard and Shea (2017) and Davidson and Shaw (2019), discussed above, other recent publications of

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note include those by Segalowitz, French, and Guay (2018), who investigate fluency gains during short-term immersion, and Zaykovskaya, Rawal, and De Costa (2017), who present a case study highlighting how learner beliefs and attitudes can impact opportunities for communication during study abroad.

11.7.5  Willingness to Communicate In previous sections we have discussed contact with the L2 community and the advantage that some learners take of this opportunity (see for example the discussion on language use by Piske, MacKay, & Flege (2001), as well as the discussion on the value of output earlier in this chapter). As LeVelle and Levis (2014) note, “social involvement may be an important strategy for those who want to improve their pronunciation” (p. 103). This builds on the argument by MacIntyre et al. (1998), who define this construct as “a readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons, using a L2” (p. 547). As Moyer (2014) points out, younger learners are less constrained and are more willing to engage with speakers of the target language than are older learners, who, she speculates, may be more self-conscious and less willing to take risks. In work by Winke and Gass (2018b) on returning study abroad students, students expressed this concept directly. Students reported that they “had a ton more confidence”, and, as a result, they were “more willing to speak in class” (p. 538). More willingness to speak in class is likely to lead to more output, so it is not unexpected that recent publications, such as Khajavy, MacIntyre, and Barabadi (2017) and Peng, Zhang, and Chen (2017), have emphasized how willingness to communicate may be or can be pedagogically addressed. We have described many individual characteristics of language learners. Over the years, many have been seen individually as having a direct relationship to language learning, but as we have shown in this section, there is a complex relationship between many (if not all) as predictors of global aspects of oral production and/or specific areas of production related to pronunciation and/or fluency.

11.8  Pedagogical Intervention A final, important consideration is the role of the classroom in developing L2 speaking. To begin, explicit pronunciation instruction is generally seen as effective (e.g., Lee, Jang, & Plonsky, 2015; Saito, 2012). Previous pronunciation instruction studies have targeted both global measures (accentedness, comprehensibility, intelligibility) as well as specific linguistic measures (e.g., segmental accuracy, word stress accuracy, speech rhythm). While both empirical- (Lee, Jang, & Plonsky, 2015) and classroom- (Foote,

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Holtby, & Derwing, 2011; Foote et al., 2016; Hardison, 2014a) orientated studies have indicated a pronunciation instruction emphasis on segments (i.e., individual sounds), studies emphasizing understandable speech have argued for a shared-emphasis on segmental and suprasegmental (word stress, intonation, rhythm) features (e.g., Crowther et al., 2015; Trofimovich & Isaacs, 2012). Several example intervention studies of note include Derwing, Munro, and Wiebe (1998) and Nagle (2018). Focusing on L2 English, Derwing, Munro, and Wiebe compared the effects of two treatment approaches (segmental, global) to that of a control group on a sentence read-aloud task and a narrative task (target language was English). The segmental group spent twenty minutes a day on the production of individual sounds, while the global group received twenty minutes on “features such as speaking rate, intonation, rhythm, projection, word stress, and sentence stress” (p. 399). Each group’s performance on the three tasks (before and after treatment) was then rated by forty-eight native-English speakers for accentedness and comprehensibility on nine-point Likert scales. While all three groups showed improvement in accentedness (i.e., perceived nativelikeness) during the sentence read-aloud task, only the two treatment groups showed improvement in comprehensibility (i.e., ease of understanding). More importantly, when it came to the narrative task, which required the participants to describe a picture narrative, only the global group showed improvement from pre- to post-treatment, and only for comprehensibility. Focused on L2 Spanish learners in a communicative-based university-level classroom in the US, Nagle (2018) tracked accentedness and comprehensibility over a year-long period, with an additional predictor variable being motivation. Though classroom instructors indicated limited attention to pronunciation in their lesson, learners demonstrated general improvement in their accentedness and comprehensibility. Interestingly, Nagle found no relationship between motivation measures (specifically Dörnyei’s [2009] L2 Motivational Self System) and increases in comprehensibility, although learners who tended to demonstrate increased effort throughout the year did increase in perceived accentedness. While such findings would provide support for communicative language teaching in regard to increasing the comprehensibility of learners’ speech, Nagle cautions that further research on the relationship between L2 speaking skills and motivation is needed.

11.9 Conclusion At the outset we quoted Fulcher (2014), who defined L2 speaking as “the verbal use of language to communicate with others” (p. 23). Throughout this chapter we have highlighted a range of considerations when attending to

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L2 speaking development, including a review of phonology-, fluency-, and sociolinguistic-based variables. What is clear is that the difficulty in defining L2 speaking as a construct is in line with the complex nature of the variables that inform L2 speaking development. A consistent theme, however, is that actual L2 production (i.e., output) appears vital to speaking development. Beyond the importance of the Interaction Approach, evidence of this exists when we consider our discussion of individual differences such as age, ethnic group affiliation, study abroad, and willingness to communicate (and even pedagogy if we take Nagle, 2018, into account). As complex a relationship as the variables associated with L2 speaking development may have, ultimately it would appear that the basis for such development is in the opportunity for continued language production. As such, this may also help to explain the lower ACTFL performance highlighted at the outset of our chapter, where for all learners, studying in a foreign language context was the norm, even though some may have had some limited experience abroad. Moving forward, we suggest several necessary empirical considerations in addressing L2 speaking development. Much research highlighted above places English as the target of acquisition. While this is understandable due to the significant international position that English now holds (e.g., Low & Pakir, 2018), we must also recognize the increased presence of languages such as Chinese (e.g., Chan, 2018; Sharma, 2018) in our global landscape. Recognizing the complex nature of L2 speaking development, understanding how this development may differ across target languages is key. Directly related to non-English target languages is the need to consider non-L1 English speaking learners. For example, while highly informative, the ACTFL data presented at the outset of this chapter is primarily focused on L1 English learners of foreign languages. Such findings do not allow us to distinguish between challenges specific to this population versus those from different L1 populations (Long & Geeslin, 2017). Finally, we echo Derwing and Munro’s (2013) call for more longitudinal research, focused on not only common measures of L2 pronunciation, but also fluency, communicative competence, and pedagogical considerations as well.

References Abrahamsson, N., & Hyltenstam, K. (2009). Age of onset and nativelikeness in a second language: Listener perception versus linguistic scrutiny. Language Learning, 59, 249–306. ACTFL. (2012). ACTFL proficiency guidelines. Alexandria, VA: ACTFL. Retrieved from https://www.actfl.org/publications/guidelines-and-manuals/actflproficiency-guidelines-2012.

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American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017). America’s languages: Investing in language education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved from https://www.amacad.org/content/ Research/researchproject.aspx?i=21896. Aoyama, K., Flege, J. E., Guion, S. G., Akahane-Yamada, R., & Yamada, T. (2004). Perceived phonetic dissimilarity and L2 speech learning: The case of Japanese /r/ and English /l/ and /r/. Journal of Phonetics, 32(2), 233–250. Baker, W. (2015). Culture and identity through English as a lingua franca. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Bergeron, A., & Trofimovich, P. (2017). Linguistic dimensions of accentedness and comprehensibility: Exploring task and listener effects in second language French. Foreign Language Annals, 50(3), 547–566. Best, C. T. (1993). Emergence of language-specific constraints in perception of non-native speech: A window on early phonological development. In B. de Boysson-Bardies, S. de Schonen, P. W. Jusczyk, P. McNeilage, & J. Morton (eds.), Developmental neurocognition: Speech and face processing in the first year of life (pp. 289–304). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Best, C. T. (1994). The emergence of native-language phonological influences in infants: A Perceptual Assimilation Model. In J. C. Goodman & H. C. Nusbaum (eds.), The development of speech perception: The transition from speech sounds to spoken words (pp. 167–224). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Best, C. T., & Tyler, M. D. (2007). Nonnative and second-language speech perception: Commonalities and complementarities. In O.-S. Bohn & M. J. Munro (eds.), Language experience in second language speech learning (pp. 13–34). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Canale, M. (1983). From communicative competence to communicative language pedagogy. In J. Richards & R. Schmidt (eds.), Language and communication (pp. 2–27). London: Longman. Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical basis of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics, 1, 1–47. Caspers, J. (2010). The influence of erroneous stress position and segmental errors on intelligibility, comprehensibility and foreign accent in Dutch as a second language. Linguistics in the Netherlands, 27(1), 17–29. Chambers, F. (1997). What do we mean by fluency? System, 25, 535–544. Chan, J. Y. H. (2018). Attitudes and identities in learning English and Chinese as a lingua franca: A bilingual learners’ perspective. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 39(9), 759–775. Crowther, D., Trofimovich, P., Isaacs, T., & Saito, K. (2015). Does a speaking task affect second language comprehensibility? The Modern Language Journal, 99, 80–95.

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Flege, J. E. (1995). Second language speech learning: Theory, findings, and problems. In W. Strange (ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research (pp. 233–276). Timonium, MD: York Press. Flege, J. E. (1999). Age of learning and second language speech. In D. Birdsong (ed.), Second language acquisition and the Critical Period Hypothesis (pp. 101–131). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Foley, C., & Flynn, S. (2013). The role of native language. In J. Herschenson & M. Young-Scholten (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 97–113). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foote, J. A., Holtby, A. K., & Derwing, T. M. (2011). Survey of the teaching of pronunciation in adult ESL programs in Canada, 2010. TESL Canada Journal, 29(1), 1–22. Foote, J. A., Trofimovich, P., Collins, L., & Urzúa, F. S. (2016). Pronunciation teaching practices in communicative second language classes. The Language Learning Journal, 44(2), 181–196. Freed, B., Segalowitz, N., & Dewey, D. (2004). Context of learning and second language fluency in French: Comparing regular classroom, study abroad, and intensive domestic immersion programs. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 26, 275–301. Fulcher, G. (2014). Testing second language speaking. New York: Routledge. Gass, S. (1984). Development of speech perception and speech production abilities in adult second language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 5(1), 51–74. Gass, S., & Mackey, A. (2006). Input, interaction and output: An overview. AILA Review, 19, 3–17. Gass, S., & Mackey, A. (2007). Input, interaction and output in second language acquisition. In J. Williams and B. VanPatten (eds.), Theories in second language acquisition (pp. 175–199). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gatbonton, E., & Segalowitz, N. (2005). Rethinking communicative language teaching: A focus on access to fluency. Canadian Modern Language Review, 61(3), 325–353. Gatbonton, E., & Trofimovich, P. (2008). The ethnic group affiliation and L2 proficiency link: Empirical evidence. Language Awareness, 17(3), 229–248. Gatbonton, E., Trofimovich, P., & Magid, M. (2005). Learners’ ethnic group affiliation and L2 pronunciation accuracy: A sociolinguistic investigation. TESOL Quarterly, 39(3), 489–511. Gatbonton, E., Trofimovich, P., & Segalowitz, N. (2011). Ethnic group affiliation and patterns of development of a phonological variable. The Modern Language Journal, 95(2), 188–204. Gregg, K. (1996). The logical and developmental problems of second language acquisition. In W. C. Ritchie & T. K. Bhatia (eds). Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 49–81). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

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Hardison, D. M. (2005). Second-language spoken word identification: Effects of perceptual training, visual cues, and phonetic environment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26(4), 579–596. Hardison, D. M. (2014a). Phonological literacy in L2 learning and teaching. In J. M. Levis & A. Moyer (eds.), Social dynamics in second language accent (pp. 195–218). Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter. Hardison, D. M. (2014b). Changes in second-language learners’ oral skills and socio-affective profiles following study abroad: A mixed-methods approach. Canadian Modern Language Review, 70(4), 415–444. Hymes, D. (1971). On communicative competence. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hymes, D. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (eds.), Sociolinguistics (pp. 269–293). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Isaacs, T., & Trofimovich, P. (2012). Deconstructing comprehensibility: Identifying the linguistic influences on listeners’ L2 comprehensibility ratings. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 34, 475–505. Isbell, D., Park, O.-S., & Lee, K. (2019). Learning Korean pronunciation: Effects of instruction, proficiency, and L1. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, 5(1), 13–48. Khajavy, G. H., MacIntyre, P. D., & Barabadi, E. (2017). Role of the emotions and classroom environment in willingness to communicate: Applying doubly latent multilevel analysis in second language acquisition research. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(3), 605–624. Kuhl, P. K. (2004). Early language acquisition: Cracking the speech code. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 831–843. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2008). Cultural globalization and language education. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lee, J., Jang, J., & Plonsky, L. (2015). The effectiveness of second language pronunciation instruction: A meta-analysis. Applied Linguistics, 36, 345–366. Lennon, P. (1990). Investigating fluency in EFL: A quantitative approach. Language learning, 40(3), 387–417. Leonard, K. R., & Shea, C. E. (2017). L2 speaking development during study abroad: Fluency, accuracy, complexity, and underlying cognitive factors. The Modern Language Journal, 101(1), 179–193. LeVelle, J., & Levis, J. (2014). Understanding the impact of social factors in L2 pronunciation: Insights from learners. In J. Levis & A. Moyer (eds.), Social dynamics in second language accent (pp. 97–118). Boston, MA: DeGruyter Mouton. Levis, J. M. (2005). Changing contexts and shifting paradigms in pronunciation teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 39, 369–377. Loewen, S. (2003). Variation in the frequency and characteristics of incidental focus on form. Language Teaching Research, 7(3), 315–345.

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Long, A. Y., & Geeslin, K. (2018). Spanish second language acquisition across the globe: What future research on non-English-speaking learners will tell us, Hispania, 100(5), 205–210. Long, M. H. (1996). The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition. In W. Ritchie & T. Bhatia (eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 413–468). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Low, E. L., & Pakir, A. (2018) World Englishes: Rethinking paradigms. New York: Routledge. MacIntyre, J., Dörnyei, Z., Clément, R., & Noels, K. (1998). Conceptualizing willingness to communicate in a L2: A situational model of L2 confidence and affiliation. The Modern Language Journal, 82, 545–562. Mackey, A., Abbuhl, R., & Gass, S. (2012). Interactionist approach. In S. Gass & A. Mackey (eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 7–23). New York: Routledge. Mackey, A., Gass, S., & McDonough, K. (2000). How do learners perceive interactional feedback? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22(4), 417–497. Magnan, S. S., & Back, M. (2007). Social interaction and linguistic gain during study abroad. Foreign Language Annals, 40(1), 43–61. Moyer, A. (2014). What’s age got to do with it? Accounting for individual factors in second language accent. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 4, 443–464. Muñoz, C. (2014). Contrasting effects of starting age and input on the oral performance of foreign language learners. Applied Linguistics, 35(4), 463–482. Muñoz, C., & Llanes, Á. (2014). Study abroad and changes in degree of foreign accent in children and adults. The Modern Language Journal, 98(1), 432–449. Munro, M. J. (2018). How well can we predict second language learners’ pronunciation difficulties? CATESOL Journal, 30(1), 267–281. Munro, M. J., & Derwing, T. M. (1999). Foreign accent, comprehensibility, and intelligibility in the speech of second language learners. Language Learning, 49(S1), 285–310. Munro, M. J., Derwing, T. M., & Thomson, R. (2015). Setting segmental priorities for English learners: Evidence from a longitudinal study. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL), 53(1), 39–60. Nagle, C. (2018). Motivation, comprehensibility, and accentedness in L2 Spanish: Investigating motivation as a time-varying predictor of pronunciation development. The Modern Language Journal, 102(1), 199–217. Nation, P. (1989). Improving speaking fluency. System, 17(3), 377–384. O’Brien, M. G. (2014). L2 learners’ assessment of accentedness, fluency, and comprehensibility of native and nonnative German speech. Language Learning, 64(4), 715–748.

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Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In S. Gass & C. Madden (eds.), Input in second language acquisition (pp. 235–256). New York: Newbury House. Swain, M. (1995). Three functions of output in second language learning. In G. Cook & B. Seidlhofer (eds.), Principle and practice in applied linguistics: Studies in honor H. G. Widdowson (pp. 125–144). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swain, M. (2005). The Output Hypothesis: Theory and research. In E. Hinkle (ed.), Handbook of research in second language learning and teaching (pp. 471–484). New York: Routledge. Tao, L., & Taft, M. (2017). Effects of early home language environment on perception and production of speech. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(5), 1030–1044. Thomson, R. I. (2011). Computer assisted pronunciation training: Targeting second language vowel perception improves pronunciation. CALICO Journal, 28, 744–765. Thomson, R. I. (2012). Improving L2 listeners’ perception of English vowels: A computer-mediated approach. Language Learning, 62, 1231–1258. Thomson, R. I. (2018). Measurement of accentedness, intelligibility, and comprehensibility. In O. Kang & A. Ginther (eds.), Assessment in second language pronunciation (pp. 11–29). New York: Routledge. Thomson, R. I., Nearey, T. M., & Derwing, T. M. (2009). A modified statistical pattern recognition approach to measuring the crosslinguistic similarity of Mandarin and English vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126(3), 1447–1460. Trofimovich, P., & Isaacs, T. (2012). Disentangling accent from comprehensibility. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 905–916. Varonis, E. M., & Gass, S. M. (1982). The comprehensibility of nonnative speech. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 4, 114–136. Werker, J. F., & Tees, R. C. (2005). Speech perception as a window for understanding plasticity and commitment in language systems of the brain. Developmental Psychobiology, 46(3), 233–251. White, L. (1991). Adverb placement in second language acquisition: Some effects of positive and negative evidence in the classroom. Interlanguage Studies Bulletin, 7(2), 133–161. Winke, P., & Gass, S. (2018a). Individual differences in advanced proficiency. In P. Malovrh and A. Benati (eds). Handbook of Advanced Language Proficiency (pp. 157–178). New York: Routledge. Winke, P., & Gass, S. (2018b). When some study abroad: How returning students realign with the curriculum and impact learning. In C. Sanz & A. Morales-Front (eds.), Handbook of study abroad research and practice (pp. 527–543). New York: Routledge. Winke, P., Gass, S., & Heidrich, E. (2019). Modern-day foreign language majors: Their goals, attainment, and fit with a 21st century curriculum.

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12 Second Language Listening: Current Ideas, Current Issues John Field 12.1 Introduction This chapter starts (12.2) by mentioning the drawbacks of the approach conventionally adopted in second language (L2) listening instruction— in particular, its focus on the products of listening rather than the processes that contribute to it. It then offers an overview of our present understanding of what those processes are, drawing upon research findings in psycholinguistics, phonetics, and applied linguistics. section 12.3 examines what constitutes proficient listening and how the performance of an L2 listener diverges from it; and section 12.4 considers the perceptual problems caused by the nature of spoken input. Subsequent sections then cover various areas of research in L2 listening. Section 12.5 provides a brief summary of topics that have been of interest to researchers over the years; and section 12.6 reviews the large body of research into listening strategies. Section 12.7 then covers a number of interesting issues that have come to the fore in recent studies: multimodality; levels of listening vocabulary; cross-language phoneme perception; the use of a variety of accents; the validity of playing a recording twice; text authenticity; and listening anxiety. A final section (12.8) identifies one or two recurring themes that have arisen and considers how listening instruction is likely to develop in the future.

12.2  The Comprehension Approach The teaching of L2 listening for its own sake, rather than as an adjunct to the teaching of speaking, grammar, or pronunciation, began as recently as the late 1960s (Rivers, 1966; Morley, 2001). The approach adopted, based

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on answering comprehension questions, had its roots in the teaching and testing of reading. Later, with the advent of communicative approaches to language teaching in the late 1970s, preferences shifted away from formal questions and towards setting tasks (Ur, 1984, Chapter 5): completing simple grids, filling in simulated forms, or marking maps and plans. This had the advantage of reducing the reading and writing load in what is supposedly a listening exercise and aligning the exercise more closely to what takes place in real-world encounters. Nevertheless, there have long been methodological concerns about the Comprehension Approach. It can be viewed as teacher-centric (the instructor controlling both recording and questions) and as associating listening too closely with reading, despite obvious differences of input. It has been criticized (Brown, 1986) for testing the skill rather than teaching it, though some kind of probing would seem to be unavoidable, given that listening is an internalized process taking place in the mind of the listener. Perhaps the most important concern is that the approach represents “comprehension” narrowly in terms of correct answers to questions but does not provide a means for analysing and repairing what causes listening to go wrong. It focuses on the products of listening but does not shed light on the processes that give rise to those products. It provides practice but does not necessarily advance the listening competence of the learners. Brown (1986) argued that what practitioners need is a set of techniques that enable them to approach listening performance diagnostically. In a similar vein, Field (1998, 2008a) suggested that it is possible to retain the framework of the existing Comprehension Approach but to shift its focus. Instead of simply classifying responses as right or wrong, the teacher might ask learners to justify their answers, thus providing insights into what they think they have heard and where they have gone astray. The information can then lead to small-scale remedial exercises that practise the problems that have arisen. The approach was extended by Harding, Alderson, and Brunfaut (2015), who propose diagnostic tests that enable an informed instructor to identify individual listening difficulties so as to provide feedback on them. The function of teacher-as-advisor represents an attractive alternative to the conventional teacher-centred model. But a diagnostic approach cannot succeed unless practitioners have better information about (a) the precise nature of the skill that they are aiming to inculcate in learners; (b) the nature of the signal that listeners have to deal with and where problems are likely to arise in a second language context; and (c) how L2 listeners handle breakdowns of comprehension. Unsurprisingly, it is on these areas that much recent discussion of

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second language listening has focused. They form the substance of the three sections that follow.

12.3  Theoretical Background 12.3.1  Modelling Listening With a view to providing clearer goals for instructors, attention has turned to the demands that listening imposes on the listener. This originated in the late 1970s, with the notion of skills-based instruction. Established approaches to the teaching of all four language skills were challenged on the grounds that activities needed to reflect the cognitive realities of putting the skills to use. The view that emerged was componential: based on the assumption that the skills could be divided into constituent parts and that those processes could then be practised individually. This gave rise to an eclectic list of examples of what became known as “sub-skills” (Munby, 1978). The concept was applied creatively to the teaching of reading, where it led to a rethinking of priorities and task types (Grellet, 1981; Nuttall, 1996). However, it did not have the same impact on listening instruction, despite a promising initiative by Richards (1983), who provided detailed taxonomies of likely sub-skills in both general and academic contexts. Material writers were slow to devise new exercise types to practise these components of listening; it also proved difficult to grade them in relation to different proficiency levels. But perhaps the most important concern was that sub-skills were identified intuitively rather than on hard research evidence of how individuals actually listen. The work of phoneticians, speech scientists, and psycholinguists had already begun to shed light on the complex demands associated with turning a speech signal into words, clauses, and ideas; but these findings were slow to find their way into second language theory and practice. Responding to the need, Rost (1992, 2002) offered a detailed account of the processes involved in listening, citing current theory in psychology and discourse analysis. Also needed, however, was a model of how one component supports another. One such was found in a proposal by Anderson (2000), much quoted in L2 listening contexts. It represents listening as falling into three phases: perceptual processing (converting sounds into words); parsing (converting words into syntactic patterns); and, rather misleadingly, “utilization” (converting syntactic patterns into units of meaning). A more detailed model has since been proposed by two leading first language (L1) listening researchers, Cutler and Clifton (1999). The simplified

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Input decoding

Lexical search

Parsing

Meaning construction

Discourse construction Figure 12.1.  Simplified cognitive model of the listening process (Cutler & Clifton, 1999; Field, 2008a).1

version in Figure 12.1 offers a framework for understanding the various types of operation2 which L2 learners have to master. Note that a single meaning-level phase in Cutler and Clifton (1999) is here divided into two, to accommodate the important distinction made by discourse analysts (e.g., Brown & Yule, 1983) between a meaning-based level of operation and a discourse-based one. The downward arrows in the figure indicate a “bottom-up” progression from smaller to larger units of language and from linguistic information based upon strings of words to more abstract representations based upon meaning. However, the upward arrows remind us that this is not a purely linear progression. Listening is an interactive operation which draws upon multiple cues as to speech content; larger units sometimes operate in a top-down manner to assist the recognition of smaller ones. For example, knowledge of the spoken form of a whole word might influence what we think we hear at phoneme level. The relevance of a model of this kind to an L2 instructor or test designer is that it provides an empirically supported framework for the various levels of performance that a listener has to command. Each phase consists of a set of coordinated processes whose purposes can be specified. For example, lexical search necessarily entails: identifying possible word matches for a string of sounds; trading word matches against each other until a correct one has been chosen; accessing the sense or range of senses represented by that word; accessing information about the word’s syntactic properties and likely collocations; and checking the word in relation to surrounding co-text. These processes provide the basis for descriptors  The model proposed by Lynch (2009) draws upon Levelt (1993) but essentially features the same stages.

1

 The term “level” is generally used in the psycholinguistics literature. Here “operation” or “phase” are widely used to

2

avoid confusion with levels of proficiency. An operation is subserved by multiple processes.

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outlining what a listener is capable of at different levels of proficiency and the points at which understanding may break down. They also serve to identify a range of possible targets that can be practised individually by means of small-scale exercises (Field, 2008a). The first three operations are perceptual. Listeners have to decode the input—i.e., they have to match the acoustic sensations reaching their ears to the sounds of the target language (Fowler & Magnuson, 2012). Next, they have to identify oral word forms from clusters of these sounds. The currently most favoured account of lexical recognition (McQueen, 2007) is that possible word matches compete in the mind of the listener until one wins out as the closest fit to what is in the signal. Once identified, the form unlocks an entry in the listener’s mental vocabulary store and enables him/ her to access word meanings (Aitchison, 2008). Of course, it is not always as simple as that. A word form may unlock multiple senses (compare the word RUN in run a mile, run a business, run a bath, run an idea past somebody), and allowance has to be made for homophones like /raɪt/. Several possible interpretations of a word form may have to be held in reserve until the evolving co-text makes clear which one the speaker intended. At a third stage, known as parsing (Gompel & Pickering, 2007), a listener has to trace a syntactic pattern in a group of identified words. This entails building up a string of words one by one as they occur and then holding them in the mind until such time as the clause is complete. There are likely to be limitations on how many words an early-stage L2 listener can retain in this way because of the attention that needs to be allocated to recognizing newly incoming ones. A useful boundary signal may occur when the speaker pauses briefly to plan the subsequent clause. However, the identification of a syntactic pattern mainly takes place while the clause is still being uttered, using knowledge of frequent target-language structures. Some languages (e.g., English) adhere quite rigidly to a Subject–Verb–Object sequence, while with others (e.g., Italian), flexibility of word order has to be allowed (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989). Wrong assumptions can lead to a garden-path effect (Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995) where initial expectations have to be changed. Evidence suggests that, after forming an incorrect hypothesis of this kind, L2 listeners are more reluctant than L1 listeners to abandon it (Field, 2008b). All these perceptual operations are complicated by the time-constrained nature of listening, which differentiates it markedly from reading. The signal in listening is transitory, and has to be processed online, as it is received. Short of getting a speaker to repeat, a listener cannot check back that a word or a syntactic structure has been correctly identified. What is more, the pace at which listening takes place is determined by the speaker, whereas a reader can modify reading speed according to the

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difficulty of the content or the goals of the task. The result is that listening emerges as a much more tentative activity than reading, with even L1 listeners sometimes failing to identify a word until up to three words later (Grosjean, 1985). This is the kind of uncertainty that undermines the confidence of an L2 listener and creates listening anxiety. The output from the perceptual operations described is a piece of information that is no longer in the form of language but remains neutral in terms of the interpretations that the listener might come to place on it. The next two phases are therefore best described as conceptual. They relate the information to its immediate context and to the wider speech event in which it occurs. Firstly, the listener has to draw on external information (world knowledge, knowledge of the context, knowledge of the speaker, etc.) in order to gain a clearer idea of the relevance of the utterance that has just been heard. This may include (Brown, 1995): • recognizing the speaker’s attitude or intentions; • drawing inferences about a point that the speaker has implied but not explicitly expressed; • linking anaphors such as pronouns to the items or ideas to which they refer; • tracing a logical link between a new utterance and the one that preceded it. Finally, information derived from the current utterance has to be connected to what has been said so far, in order to construct a discourse representation of the overall direction of the conversation or talk. This might include (Gernsbacher, 1990): • • • •

distinguishing major points from minor ones; identifying the speaker’s main point or overall purpose; tracing logical links between different points that have been made; monitoring understanding to ensure that new points are consistent with what has been said before.

12.3.2  The L2 Listener Clearly, the procedure that has been outlined is applied less than perfectly by many L2 listeners. Instructors tend to assume that the main cause is gaps in knowledge, i.e., uncertain phonological values, inadequate vocabulary, or incomplete syntactic information. Problems at the conceptual level might reflect an incomplete understanding of pragmatics or cultural norms, which prevents the listener from interpreting the speaker’s intentions. While linguistic and cultural knowledge are necessary components of skilled L2 listening, they are by no means sufficient ones. Equally if

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not more important in current listener-based accounts is the part played by expertise. Expertise, as classically conceived (Ericsson & Smith, 1991; Feltovich, Prietula, & Ericsson, 2006; Johnson, 2005), entails the achievement of a high degree of automaticity when performing an operation, whether driving a car, opening a door, or making sense of a piece of speech. The way a competent listener maps from incoming speech to a word in their vocabulary store depends critically on how accessible the vocabulary information is and how automatically the connection is made between a group of sounds and a lexical entry. (For discussions of the contribution of automaticity to fluent language performance, see Segalowitz, 2010, pp. 78–104; Segalowitz, 2016.) Processing information automatically rather than in a controlled way results in speed and accuracy of performance, but its most critical contribution is to reduce the attention that an individual needs to give to basic operations. Attentional capacity in human beings is limited (Pashler & Johnson, 1998); so, if fundamental processes are handled automatically, it enables one to allocate more attention to larger-scale issues. The relevance to L2 listening will be obvious. Early stage L2 listeners find that they need to focus heavily on decoding, lexical search, and parsing, with the result that they have little or no capacity left for the types of conceptual operation associated with meaning and discourse construction. For example, they may report words that approximate phonologically to the target but ignore wider co-textual and contextual cues (Hansen & Jensen, 1994; Pemberton, 2003; Field, 2004). In a test situation with time to reflect on answers, they may fall back on general guesses based upon the topic, but such guesses may have little connection with board perceptual evidence. An imaginative, large-scale research project by Tsui and Fullilove (1998) illustrates this well. The researchers classified items in a listening test into two types: those that related to prior world or topic knowledge and those that did not. They discovered that high-scoring candidates performed much better than low-scoring ones on the second type and on questions that were global rather than local. In other words, proficient listeners were able to integrate perceptual and conceptual information in a way that less proficient ones were not. By contrast, the topic-based guesses made by weaker listeners were sometimes erroneous because they were not backed up by an understanding of the input. Through practice and experience (Anderson, 1983), learners achieve a degree of automaticity in handling perceptual processes; only then are they able to commit adequate attention to information at conceptual levels. Meanwhile, they may be heavily reliant upon the use of compensatory strategies (Cohen, 1998) to supply gaps in what they have been capable of decoding. There are implications here for L2 listening programmes.

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a. In the early stages of L2 acquisition, programmes need to focus quite intensively on perceptual processes, with a view to enhancing automaticity through practice (Hulstijn, 2003). They can reasonably require learners to report factual information and the main point of a recording, but should not venture into questions that require interpretation or the reporting of a discourse-level line of argument. b. Programmes should recognize that the early stages of acquiring L2 listening may be frustrating for learners; motivation can be sustained by equipping them with strategies that enable them to compensate for gaps in understanding. See section 12.6. Citing evidence from learner transcriptions, Field (2018) suggests that a breakthrough occurs about Level B1+ in the Common European Framework (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2018), when the majority of words in a recording are correctly identified and there is emerging evidence of automatic processing.

12.4  The Nature of Connected Speech 12.4.1  Variability of Form There was a tendency until recently to downplay the role of perceptual processes in L2 listening—possibly a reaction to early approaches to listening instruction based upon ear-training, minimal pairs, and dictation (Brown, 1990, pp. 144–146). A second factor was the long-standing fallacy that L2 listeners experiencing problems of word recognition could always fall back strategically on “context” to assist them. The argument does not bear scrutiny: without a bare minimum of accurately-decoded text, a listener has no context or co-text available upon which to draw (see Macaro, Graham, & Vanderplank, 2007, p. 171, for a similar comment). It also became recognized that many incorrect answers to comprehension questions originated, not in failures of general understanding, but in failures of recognition at word or clause level. The result was a revived interest in the nature of the speech signal and the challenges it poses (Lynch, 2006). The experience of an L2 listener was distinguished sharply from that of an L2 reader, not least because of the major differences between written and spoken input. There are no consistent gaps between words in listening as there are in reading. Reading possesses a standardized spelling system which generally provides a single form for each word; by contrast, word forms in listening are highly variable. And while words in reading vary only a little in prominence (e.g., through the use of italics), those in listening vary enormously in both emphasis and duration. The comments that follow explore in a summative way the implications of these differences

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of input. They draw upon examples from English; but L2 listening in any language presents similar obstacles to understanding (Sebastián-Gallés, 2008). For extended accounts of the phenomena described, see: Brown (1990); Brown & Kondo-Brown (2006); Field (2008a, Chapter 9); Shockey (2003).

12.4.1.1  The Elusive Phoneme Listening instructors sometimes forget that a phoneme is an abstract unit and one that does not have a neat one-to-one relationship with a particular combination of accoustic cues (Field, 2014). This is partly due to co-articulation: the effect upon a phoneme of those that precede or follow it within the same syllable. In the 1960s, researchers at the Haskins laboratories in the US were unable to find sets of acoustic features that served to uniquely identify certain English consonants (Nygaard & Pisoni, 1995, pp. 64–68). As for vowels, what distinguishes them perceptually is a combination of two frequency formants which differ according to the pitch of the speaker’s voice (Strange, 1999, pp. 153–160). It has been suggested (e.g., Pisoni & Luce, 1987, p. 26) that the phoneme might not itself constitute a unit of analysis within listening.3 Instead, listeners may well operate at the level of the syllable (Mattys & Melhorn, 2005), which is not only a more reliable unit but one whose likelihood of occurrence can be recognized. Alternatively, it may be that listeners map directly from a group of sounds to a whole word (Klatt, 1979).

12.4.1.2  Word Boundaries Speakers hesitate occasionally and pause briefly to plan their next utterance; but there are no systematic gaps between words in listening as there are in writing. It is the listener who has to decide where one word ends and the next begins, a process known as lexical segmentation (Cutler, 2012, pp. 117–189). It seems that, across languages, different cues are used in order to locate where word boundaries are most likely to fall (Cutler, 1997). They include lexical stress. This can provide a failsafe indicator in the case of languages like Finnish, Czech, or Polish, which have fixed stress on initial or final syllables. Or it can provide broad indications in the case of (say) English, where around ninety per cent of content words are either monosyllabic or characterized by an initial stressed syllable (Cutler, 1990). Other cues might be phonotactic constraints (e.g., an illegal cluster of consonants indicating the end of one word and the onset of the next; see McQueen, 1998), units such as the mora in Japanese (Cutler & Otake, 1994) or the presence of familiar prefixes and suffixes. Because segmentation cues are so language-specific, there is evidence that second language learners transfer their native techniques to L2 contexts (Cutler, 2012,  Our ability to identify phonemes in speech may be a product of literacy rather than a precursor (Morais et al., 1979).

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pp. 129–132). However that does not mean that they cannot be acquired, even through simple exposure to the target language (Field, 2001).

12.4.1.3  Word Variation Perhaps the greatest challenge faced by the L2 listener is the variation in the ways in which words are articulated in connected speech. This is partly a question of the personal style of the speaker and the type of speech event: Laver (1994), for example, identifies seven different versions of the word actually, ranging from most casual to most formal. But it is also systemic, reflecting the way in which speakers try to move with minimal effort from one articulatory position to another. The major types of phonetic change appear in the panel below. These are not markers of casual delivery, but are present in all natural connected speech: Resyllabification before a word initial vowel: went in → wen tin Liaison, introducing a consonant between vowels: to (w)eat, the (y)end Assimilation, anticipating the next articulatory position: tem people, hop bath Elision, especially within a complex consonant cluster: next spring → neck spring

A little-noticed elision effect is that word-final inflections in English are often absent. Brown (1990) reports that, even in samples of careful speech (speakers on BBC radio), more than fifty per cent of instances of /t/ and /d/ between consonants were omitted, even when they represented past simple and past participle markers. These variations often result in word-level forms that differ enormously from the citation forms an L2 listener will have encountered in a vocabulary class. Given this, how does a listener, whether in L1 or L2, succeed even in recognizing known words? A widely supported “exemplar” account would have it that a language user stores multiple variants of each word as heard in different voices and different contexts (Goldinger, 1998). Another explanation is that lexical recognition does not reach its final stage until there is sufficient co-text to enable a word to be confidently identified. As Shockey (2003) puts it: “perceivers of casual speech seem quite comfortable with building up an acoustic sketch as the utterance is produced, the details of which are filled in when enough information becomes available” (p. 103).

12.4.1.4  Perceptual Prominence The most reliable words for an L2 listener are those given prominence by means of tonic stress and more precise articulation. However, the listener also pays a price in that the surrounding words become correspondingly compressed (Cauldwell, 2013). Even function words already

Second Language Listening: Current Ideas, Current Issues

in weak form are reduced in duration, with the result that some of the most frequent words of the language can be among the most difficult to recognize. Field (2008c) reports much greater accuracy in L2 recognition of content words than of functors, partly because listener attention is focused upon the meaning-bearing items in an utterance, but also because of their relative salience. The identification of words within utterances becomes more accurate as L2 learners come to recognize many highly recurrent formulaic chunks of language in connected speech (Wray, 2002)—not simply multi-word items like in front of but also markers (in other words), functional formulae (never mind, if I were you), and syntactic patterns (should have done). This advance appears to occur around CEFR level B1+ (Field, 2018).

12.4.2  The Variable Speaker Another major variable that has to be dealt with is the voice of the speaker. When hearing a speaker for the first time, a listener has to go through a process of adjustment, known as normalization (Johnson, 2008). L1 listeners are capable of making rapid and highly automatic assessments of a voice’s pitch, the speed at which speech is being delivered, and the range of the pitch movements (Pisoni, 1997). This is necessary, as noted earlier, because the first of these enables us to distinguish vowels. The second may affect the recognition of consonants such as /b/ and /w/ (Miller, 1990). Some idea of the important role that normalization plays in speech events can be gathered from our extraordinary capacity to recognize a speaker’s voice when we hear it again, even by telephone. Clearly the process does not come as readily to listeners when the voices in question are using a second language, with its own distinctive pitch ranges and rhythms. In instruction, this validates the convention of a preliminary play of a recording or, at the very least, a short delay of ten to fifteen seconds before any information in the recording is targeted by a question. The need to normalize to voices is also, of course, greater when the input is in audio form, with no visual information to help differentiate speakers. Two voices in a dialogue do not pose a major challenge to an early-level learner, especially if the convention is observed of making one male and one female; but where there are three or more voices, the demands upon the listener are inevitably stepped up.

12.4.3  The Variable Input: Implications for Practice Given the perceptual difficulties experienced by the L2 listener, what steps can be taken to improve learner performance? One solution is to make use of some form of transcription task (Field, 2008a (Chapters

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9–10))—not the stilted dictation of yore, but an exercise supplementing a comprehension task in which examples of one or more of the features mentioned above are excised from the recording and learners are asked to transcribe them. In more progressive language schools, instructors have begun to develop archives of materials that consist either of excerpts with which previous learners have experienced difficulty or of samples of features such as lexical segmentation, assimilation, elision, or the chunking of words. A valuable precedent has been set by Cauldwell’s (2013) analyses of natural speech; and some materials writers now include post-comprehension exercises of this kind in their coursebooks. A problem with this approach (and indeed with class-based instruction generally) is that different listeners experience different problems, especially so far as perception is concerned. Listening thus lends itself particularly well to self-access work, where learners can listen again and again to any short sections of a text which they find hard to process. This is the direction that much listening instruction seems likely to take in the future. It might be in the form of downloadable listening homework or of practice sessions in a dedicated listening centre. Hulstijn (2003) reports on 123LISTEN, a programme which enables instructors to prepare self-teach listening materials based upon clips. In a groundbreaking computer-based initiative for French universities (http://innovalangues.fr), an autonomous learner will be able to time-mark sections of speech that are problematic, and then access samples of similar phonetic patterns for ear-training practice.

12.5  Issues in Second Language Listening Research There has been more research into second language listening over the past twenty years than is sometimes suggested, and it is hard to do justice to it in the space of a chapter of this length. The sections that follow must, of necessity, be selective. They provide an overview of what has been the largest area of study (the use of listening strategies), and then focus on seven topics which have previously been little represented in reviews such as this—either because they have come to the forefront recently or because they have tended to be neglected by commentators. They are chosen because they seem likely to stimulate discussion within the field in coming years. Before moving on to specifics, it may be useful to provide (Figure 12.2) a general outline of the aspects of L2 listening that have received the attention of researchers over the years. Historically, research questions have been very much concerned with difficulty—especially with the impact of

Second Language Listening: Current Ideas, Current Issues

Figure 12.2.  Topics favoured in L2 listening research.

materials and tasks on listener performance. What appears in Figure 12.2 is inevitably selective, but it draws upon previous reviews such as Rubin (1994) and Bloomfield et al. (2010), as well as the author’s own validation work on the testing of listening (Field, 2013, 2018). Italics mark topics that will be covered in the sections that follow.

12.6  Listening Strategies4 Of the four language skills, listening appears to be the most dependent upon strategy use because of the input difficulties discussed in section 12.4 and the consequent need for listeners to focus attention upon perceptual processes to the exclusion of wider meaning. Strategy training equips  The strategies considered here are solely compensatory strategies (Cohen’s (1998) strategies of use).

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listeners to extract more information from a listening passage than they would be able on the sole basis of recognized language. The result is to boost self-efficacy (Graham, 2011) at times when the acquisition of listening proficiency may seem a slow and uncertain process. At this point, attention should be drawn to a terminological problem in the way listening strategies are often represented. It is important to make a distinction between: • processes intrinsic to normal listening such as those profiled in section 12.3, which constitute what a language learner needs to acquire for long-term performance; • strategies, expedients used periodically when an individual’s listening competence cannot match the demands of a listening task.5 This might seem pedantic, and, to be sure, there are grey areas between the two. Expert listeners still need to use strategies occasionally (e.g., to identify words in noise), and some operations, like checking understanding, are part of normal listening as well as something that less-experienced listeners are advised to do. Nevertheless, there is an important pedagogical point at stake. Instructors need to be able to distinguish between activities which hopefully, long-term, will become fully integrated into the behaviour of a listener and highly automatic and others which are short-term expedients to overcome an inadequate grasp of the second language. Afflerbach, Pearson, and Paris (2008) make a similar point in relation to reading. There has been much research on listening strategies in recent years. However, as Macaro, Graham, and Vanderplank (2007) acknowledge in their perceptive review of the literature, it is sometimes difficult to draw generalizable conclusions. This they partly attribute to the rather fragmented nature of the field in terms of research goals, criteria applied, and populations studied. One might also add that researchers in this area are unfortunate in lacking a body of empirically based theory upon which to construct a general model; they often have to fall back on intuitive categories not unlike the original “sub-skills”. The ways in which these categories are connected may well be unclear. Early attempts to classify strategies more systematically in terms of their purpose (e.g., Faerch & Kasper, 1983; Rost, 1992; Dörnyei & Scott, 1997) do not seem to have led to any consensus. However, commentators usually observe Cohen’s (1998) distinction between “strategies of learning” and “strategies of use”, and there is widespread use of O’Malley and Chamot’s (1990) classification of three strategy types: metacognitive; cognitive; and social-affective. The difficulty in researching listening strategies also lies in the internalized nature of the skill, which severely restricts the types of research  See Field (2000) for an earlier discussion of this issue.

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methodology that can be used. Questionnaires are notoriously open to over-reporting, especially if a respondent views strategy use as the mark of a good learner.6 In addition, the questionnaires that have been designed (including those which provided evidence for Vandergrift et al.’s (2006) MALQ) reflect the problems of reliably and validly quantifying strategy use. What evidence do we have for the psychological reality of a given strategy and how context-dependent is it? How interdependent might some strategies be? Above all, is reported frequency or familiarity of strategy use necessarily an indicator of appropriate and effective use? An alternative research methodology often employed is retrospective verbal report. Here, there are also constraints: the reporting clearly cannot interrupt the listening task, and the time-lapse before it occurs has to be short to avoid memory effects. Despite these obstacles, a number of researchers (e.g., Goh, 1998; Graham, 2006; Field, 2012) have used recall to effect, and elicited detailed evidence of the strategies used by learners. There has been particular research interest in metacognition (extensively reviewed in Vandergrift & Goh, 2012). By contrast, cognitive and socio-affective strategies are under-represented in the literature, which seems unfortunate, given the needs of lower-proficiency learners.7 One reason for the preference may be that metacognitive activities involve intentionality and are therefore more accessible to report. However, a precautionary note needs to be sounded here: because they are more reportable, they are likely to feature disproportionately in any verbal reports or questionnaires aiming to quantify frequency of use. There is a tendency in the metacognitive literature (Teichert, 1996; Herron et al., 1998; Chung, 1999) to focus on one type of metacognitive strategy, namely, “advanced organizer” techniques that improve classroom performance (an example might be reflecting on a topic before listening to the recording). While strategies of this kind may be useful in teaching and testing contexts, they cannot be said to contribute greatly to real-world listening. Two general research questions have been widely investigated. The first seeks evidence of a relationship between level of strategy use and listening success. The cause-and-effect assumptions underlying this research are sometimes unclear. Does evidence of an association suggest that employing listening strategies enables better listening performance across listeners? Or does it indicate that higher-level listeners are more inclined to strategy use? However, this area of study has led to some interesting questions about additional variables that have to be considered when investigating the contribution of strategic competence to listening  See Vogely’s (1995) report of discrepancies between students’ perceptions of what makes a good listener and

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their actual behaviour.  Notable exceptions are Goh (2000) and Graham (2006).

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outcomes (Macaro, Graham, & Vanderplank, 2007). It has been suggested that researchers may also need to control for: (a) linguistic knowledge; (b) a facility for acquiring languages; and/or (c) L1 listening competence. For a study that focuses on the third of these, see Vandergrift (2006). An aspect of listener background surprisingly little investigated has been the extent to which strategy use varies according to individual temperament or whether it is culturally determined. It may well be that the educational formation of learners from certain parts of the world encourages speculative thinking, while the formation of others restrains them from making guesses until sufficient evidence is available (Braxton, 1999). A second major topic has been the effect of training upon strategy use or upon listening proficiency. Macaro, Graham, and Vanderplank (2007) report largely unclear results. This may partly be because many studies have employed a longitudinal methodology with control groups and preand post-testing—an approach that, in listening research, is vulnerable to variables such as participants’ degree of exposure to L2 sources during the trial period.8 That said, Rost and Ross (1991) demonstrated clear improvements in performance after first identifying the strategies used by higher-proficiency learners and then teaching them to lower-proficiency ones. Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari (2010) report improved post-test scores among lower-proficiency participants following training. Graham (2006) and Goh and Taib (2006) cite unambiguous quotes by individual young learners on the benefits of training. Arguably, much may depend upon the precise form that the instruction takes. O’Malley and Chamot (1990) identify two main types. A “direct” approach begins by raising strategy awareness. Strategies are presented individually and may even be named. They are then modelled and practised in controlled tasks. This has become a format for listening instruction in various parts of the world, particularly the US (Mendelsohn, 1994). A potential problem lies in separating out individual strategies: Vandergrift (2004) comments that “The apparent interconnectedness of strategy use may explain why individual strategies instruction has not been as successful as hoped” (p. 12). In an “indirect” approach, learners engage in conventional listening comprehension tasks before going on to discuss both the strategies they used and how effective they proved to be. This option is favoured by those who see compensatory strategy use as a problem– solution situation (Field, 2008a), in which the strategic response of the listener varies according to the nature of the problem and to some extent the temperament of the individual. Vandergrift (2004) recommends a mixed approach.  This is especially the case with learners living in an L2 environment.

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12.7  Some Other Current Issues in L2 Listening 12.7.1  Visual Input After an upsurge in the 1980s in the production of video-based language courses, publishers seem more reluctant these days to support their materials with visual content. However, improvements in the quality of digitized sound mean that instructors now have access to a large amount of promising authentic material via the internet. Hence the continuing research interest in the impact of video versus audio material upon the L2 listening experience. Intuitively, it would seem that video is more representative of realworld listening. It provides a visible context for the speech event; it enables speakers to be identified physically; and it gives access to the gestures and facial expressions of the speakers. The much-quoted McGurk effect (McGurk & McDonald, 1976) demonstrates that phonetic judgments are influenced by lip movements; there is even neurological evidence (Green, 1998) that visual information becomes integrated into the listening process at a very early stage. By contrast, audio material reflects only a small range of circumstances (phone conversations, radio broadcasts). Curiously, the evidence that visual information enhances L2 listening comprehension is more mixed than might be assumed. Sueyoshi and Hardison (2005) reported improved results from participants when they had sight of the speaker’s face and gestures. By contrast, Coniam (2001) found no difference between scores on a video version of a test as against an audio one; strikingly, eighty per cent of the video group reported that the visual support had not assisted their comprehension. Gruba (2004) also interviewed learners, this time after they had watched news clips, and concluded that visual information can bring benefits to higher proficiency listeners but potentially confuse weaker ones. Yet another result was reported by Suvorov (2009), who directly compared performance on audio recordings with performance on recordings supported by still pictures and by video. The scores for the video-assisted material were significantly lower than those for the other two conditions. Perhaps the best way of interpreting these conflicting findings is to envisage visual material as imposing increased cognitive demands upon the listener, who has to integrate an extra source of information into the mental model being constructed. This may be particularly difficult for earlystage listeners, given their need to focus much attention on perceptual processing (section 12.3.2). However, a recent study by Batty (2015), using Rasch modelling, failed to find an interaction between medium of presentation and proficiency level, or indeed between medium and text type (monologue versus conversation versus lecture).

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Two relatively unexplored areas of multimodality concern written stimuli. Firstly, if we are to fully represent the circumstances of academic listening, we need a better understanding of the way Powerpoint slides are processed by the listener and of how they shape the information that is derived. There is some tentative evidence of the interaction between slides and voice in an eye-tracking study by Suvorov (2015). A second topic is the part that subtitles might play in assisting self-access listening to video material. A preliminary study by Guichon and McLornan (2008) suggests that L2 subtitling is more beneficial than L1 because it causes less interference at a lexical level.

12.7.2 Vocabulary There has been recent interest amongst vocabulary scholars in whether successful performance in a listening task requires the same level of vocabulary knowledge as success in a similar reading task. This follows a pilot study by Milton and Hopkins (2006) which used a test of phonological word forms to track how the aural repertoire of a group of school learners of English developed across eight grade levels. At every level, knowledge of the phonological forms of the target words lagged behind the knowledge of orthographic forms—and indeed the gap between the two became greater as the learners grew older and more proficient. What was striking about this finding was that the learners were from a Greek school, where one might have anticipated problems with an unfamiliar alphabet to delay orthographic development. In the main study, Milton and Hopkins (2006) went on to test two large groups of Greek and Arabic speakers from a range of proficiency levels. At the very lowest levels, there was evidence that words were first acquired phonologically by the Arabic speakers; but from a lower-intermediate stage, orthographic forms began to predominate, and, at advanced level, they sometimes exceeded oral forms by a large margin. On the basis of this and other research findings, Milton (2009) suggests a target oral vocabulary of around 3000 to 3500 word families at CEFR B2 level and about 4500 at C2, as compared with suggestions elsewhere (Nation, 2001) that readers may require 6000 or more. Milton partly attributes these lower vocabulary needs to the different content of spoken and written texts. He suggests (p. 179) that, as proficiency improves, reading and writing depend increasingly upon a learner’s ability to handle large quantities of infrequent vocabulary, whereas listeners may reach a ceiling in their vocabulary knowledge, after which increases in it are not reflected correspondingly in their test performance. An additional interpretation may perhaps be found in the way in which learners store vocabulary. Literate individuals rely heavily on the

Second Language Listening: Current Ideas, Current Issues

written word to conserve information; they are thus much more adept at retaining written forms than spoken ones. What is more, those written forms are consistently reinforced during reading, whereas what learners encounter in listening is (see section 12.4) a highly variable version of the citation form they encounter in a vocabulary class. As already noted, the difficulty of recognizing words in connected speech also makes listening a more approximate operation than reading, one where strategy use may need to be relied upon to a greater extent. Indeed, one of the most widely used strategies for L2 listeners at all proficiency levels entails inferring the meanings of unknown or unrecognized words (Wesche & Paribakht, 2010), using a variety of cues. This may well make listeners more willing than readers to tolerate gaps in their vocabulary. Inevitably linked to this discussion is the notion of coverage, i.e., the percentage of known vocabulary that an L2 reader needs in a text to ensure “comfortable comprehension”. Applying findings from L2 reading, Nation (2001) suggests that listeners “need at least 95% coverage of the running words in the input to gain reasonable comprehension and to have reasonable success at guessing from context” (p. 114). However, the concept of “coverage” surely has to be a relative one: much depends upon the goals of the listener or reader, the discourse type (e.g., narrative versus discursive), and the information density of the text.9 Even without these provisos, van Zeeland and Schmitt (2013) reported accurate responses from both native and non-native listeners when a narrative text had ninety per cent coverage. They concluded that a vocabulary level of around 2000 word families would suffice for this kind of discourse, supporting Milton’s (2009) relatively low figure. Again, this may be evidence that the lexical content of listening and the more strategic approach of listeners mean that vocabulary needs are lower than in reading. As a final note, in their research into vocabulary knowledge and recognition in L2 listening, Milton and colleagues made use of a corpus of phonological word frequency (Milton, 2009). Surprisingly often, researchers have reported conclusions on listening vocabulary that are based upon orthographic corpora; this includes Staehr’s (2009) widely quoted account.

12.7.3  Cross-Language Phoneme Perception The extensive body of research into L1 and L2 phoneme perception has received only limited attention in the general L2 listening literature. As  Nearly fifty per cent of words in a corpus of speech samples analysed by McCarthy & Carter (1997) were function

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words. So the notion of ninety-five per cent coverage would appear to represent one unfamiliar content word in every ten.

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already noted (Section 12.4.1), there is a widely accepted view that the phoneme does not provide a reliable unit of analysis because it is so variable.10 Nevertheless, we still need to address the question of precisely how an L2 learner (or for that matter, an infant acquiring an L1) manages to convert recurring clusters of acoustic cues into the sound system of a language—even if that system is at first mainly perceived in terms of syllables and words and only later forms the basis for phoneme constructs of the ship/sheep kind. A solution that has been widely supported by L1 speech scientists draws on exemplar models of how language is acquired and used (Pisoni, 1997; Goldinger, 1997; Pierrehumbert, 2001; Bybee, 2001; Nygaard, 2008). The assumption is that speech encounters leave long-term memory traces in a listener’s mind. The ability to trace phoneme values and word forms in connected speech is linked to the ability to recognize familiar voices, and results from the listener constantly finding analogies between new input and what was heard previously. This might seem highly improbable, but it accords with a recent neurological finding that the human brain is far slower at computational operations than was once believed but is capable of storing massive amounts of information in an easily retrievable way (Dąbrowska, 2004). The exemplar principle goes a long way towards explaining how our awareness of word frequencies and of formulaic chunks is acquired (Bybee, 2010). If one accepts this version of events, there are important conclusions so far as the second language listener is concerned. The auditory acquisition of phoneme values seems to depend not upon repetition exercises but upon exposure over time to multiple variants of phonemes and words spoken in a range of different voices. Kuhl’s “Perceptual Magnet” account of how infants acquire L1 phonemes (Hawkins, 1999a, pp. 188–191) provides a useful way of envisaging what happens. It represents less typical exemplars of a phoneme (or indeed of a syllable or word) as becoming marginalized over time while those that share certain common features are increasingly grouped around a central value. Within the second language acquisition process, we also need to understand how the influence of L1 affects the perception of L2 phoneme values. Best’s (1995) Perceptual Assimilation Model aims to account for the way in which naïve listeners respond to L2 speech, while Flege’s (1995) Speech Learning Model is more concerned with L2 developmental patterns. However, they agree on general principles (Best & Tyler, 2007). Their research suggests that the way in which a listener becomes familiar 10

 Research in this area is generally neutral as to whether the phoneme is a primary unit of analysis, though Hawkins (1999b, p. 259) recognizes that “it is reasonable to suggest that words can be identified before their constituent phonemes.”

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with the phonemes of a second language is determined by whether a phoneme is perceived (a) as a good example of one in L1 (but is not necessarily so); (b) as a less satisfactory example; or (c) as markedly different to any in L1. It is not the third category that causes perceptual difficulties but the second and, above all, the first. These difficulties may impact word recognition and ultimately comprehension. Other researchers (e.g., Bohn, 1995) have adopted a finer-grained approach, investigating whether there are certain acoustic features (e.g., place of articulation in consonants) which assist L2 phoneme recognition more than others such as voicing. In another extended research programme (Piske, 2007), Flege and colleagues have investigated the impact upon L2 phoneme acquisition of external factors such as AOL (age at which learning began), length of residence, and language use. The findings are mixed. There is evidence that an early AOL does not necessarily lead to a native-like accent. Length of residence and language use appear to be interconnected: much depends upon the extent to which individuals continue to be exposed to L2 accented speech, thus reinforcing their own patterns of speech. This overview has necessarily been a brief one. For more detailed accounts, see Hawkins (1999b), Strange and Shafer (2008), and Nygaard (2008). Strange and Shafer (p. 163) mark out a direction for future research in proposing the use of sections of natural connected speech rather than the citation forms of words that have often been employed in these studies.

12.7.4 Accent There has been considerable research and discussion on the impact of accents, both those within the target language and L2 variants. Major et al. (2005) investigated how accents of different degrees of familiarity (standard taught forms, regional and international varieties of English) affected comprehension by both native and non-native listeners. The results indicated that the more familiar the accent, the better the level of understanding—but the effect was considerably greater in the case of the non-native group. A large-scale project by Ockey and French (2016) found that unfamiliar international accents (British and Australian) impacted adversely on the comprehension of candidates taking material based on the TOEFL listening test. It also demonstrated a correlation between accent familiarity and the score achieved. Floccia and colleagues (2006, 2009) investigated the effects of training. They monitored the recognition by native English listeners of regional and L2 accents, and concluded that extensive exposure was necessary to ensure full adaptation. An interesting study by Bradlow and Bent (2008),

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using L1 listeners and Chinese-accented varieties of English, suggested that listeners succeeded in generalizing their training to new voices when they were exposed to multiple speakers, but not when they were exposed to a single one. A similar result was reported by Clopper and Pisoni (2004) in relation to regional varieties of US English. These accounts would seem to accord with the exemplar model of phonological and word acquisition mentioned earlier. An issue that has aroused considerable interest is whether L2 listeners find others with their own language background easier to understand than native speakers: what Bent and Bradlow (2003) term “the inter-language speech intelligibility benefit”. Imai, Walley, and Flege (2005) concluded that, for lower proficiency learners, there was little or no difference. Similarly, Major et al. (2002) and Munro, Derwing, and Morton (2006) produced only limited evidence of benefit. One conclusion by the latter was that a great deal depended upon whether the groups they studied came from a second-language background (and were trained by L1-accented teachers) or from a foreign-language one. In short, familiarity with a particular variety counts for more than the speaker’s origin. If a learner is studying English, Spanish, Portuguese, or a number of other languages with distinctive international varieties, then (given our globalized media and systems of communication) it makes obvious sense to expose them to any of those varieties that represent relatively large populations. The question (little addressed in the literature) is when. In light of the exemplar model of speech perception presented in section 12.7.3, it would seem that exposure plays a critical role. A first priority is to lay down sufficient traces of a single variety before moving on to others, so as to provide the learner with a set of consistent phonemic and lexical points of reference. A useful point might be CEFR B1+ level, once a degree of automaticity in basic perceptual processes has been achieved (Field, 2018). But what about local and regional varieties of the L2? Here, discussion sometimes gets hijacked by the argument that focusing teaching on a single generalized variety entails assumptions of “prestige”. It is important to separate out local loyalties from the simple practical need to equip earlystage learners with a single variety which provides them with a set of perceptual points of reference. To be sure, regional varieties of the target language might be introduced if they represent substantial populations—but only at a later stage and, of course, the local variety should be taught from the outset in those parts of the world where English serves as the language of communication (Harding, 2011). There remains the vexed issue of the desirability of including L2 accents in listening materials and tests. The argument generally put forward in the case of English (Jenkins, 2002) is that, these days, more spoken exchanges take place between two L2 speakers than between an L1

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and an L2 speaker, a point well made by commentators such as Crystal (2003). The principle of representing international communication in this way appears uncontroversial—until one considers the practicalities. Communication is a two-way operation; one has to consider not simply the productive characteristics of the speaker but also how the receptive characteristics of the listener influence understanding (Flege, 1995). This entails a vast number of possible speaker L1–listener L1 combinations. Another obstacle is that targets such as “Chinese accented speech” or “Portuguese accented speech” represent large generalizations, failing to distinguish between the different effects upon L2 of Mandarin versus Cantonese and Brazilian Portuguese versus European. A further factor is that the form of speech produced by an L2 speaker is also determined by the variety that he/she was originally taught; in the case of English, this could be American, British, or Australian/New Zealand. This may sound theoretical, but it becomes a major concern when various L2 varieties (or indeed relatively minor L1 varieties) to which candidates may never have been exposed are employed in international tests of L2 listening. As has been pointed out (Taylor, 2006; Geranpayeh & Taylor, 2008), the risks of test bias are considerable, favouring those who may, by pure chance, have encountered some of these varieties, and disfavouring others who do not have the financial means to study or to travel abroad. The issue of accent in listening tests was addressed in a sensitive study by Harding (2011). While his findings were not conclusive, he raises the possibility of a weak ELF (English as a lingua franca) approach using only L2 speakers who are identified as “intelligible” (but how to ensure that they are equally intelligible to a wide range of listeners with different L1s?11). He also recognizes the need for a “Local Englishes” approach in domains where English is widely used as a medium of communication.

12.7.5  Double Play It would seem intuitively obvious that comprehension improves if a learner is permitted two or more plays of the recording. Findings by Cervantes and Gainer (1992) suggest that learners benefit from a second hearing, regardless of their level of proficiency. However, Chang and Read (2006) report a different result, with higher-level learners benefiting much more than lower-level ones, perhaps because the latter lacked adequate perceptual skills.

11

 Jenkins’s (2002) “Lingua Franca Core” does not provide an answer. Contrary to what is sometimes suggested, it is not a fail-safe guide to features of L2 English speech that ensure maximum intelligibility worldwide. It is improbable that such a generalization could ever be reliably achieved, given the multitude of possible speaker–listener L1 pairings. In fact, the original proposal for the Core was based upon a very small sample of speaker–listener dyads with no controls for the L1s of those represented.

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The question of whether to play a recording twice is especially an issue for testers, as it is a well-established convention in many listening tests. The main supporting argument is that, when using audio material, it compensates for not having access to paralinguistic signals or sight of the physical context of the speech event. It also gives listeners the opportunity to normalize to an unfamiliar speaker’s voice (section 12.4.2). In addition, with small-scale or computer-delivered tests, it enables the test questions to be delivered between the two plays (Sherman, 1997), thus considerably reducing the opportunity for test takers to use test-wise strategies based upon the wording of written items. However, the practice has been questioned on the grounds that, in a real-world situation, a listener is unable to hear a piece of spoken input more than once. Admittedly, that assertion is not entirely true these days: there are usually playback facilities for radio and TV programmes, university lectures, etc.; and in an interactive context, one can always ask the speaker for clarification. However, opponents also claim that the double-play convention unnaturally reduces the difficulty of a test; some major tests (particularly tests of academic listening such as TOEFL or IELTS) therefore restrict candidates to a single play. The lack of research on the effects of double-play in test conditions is surprising, especially after Henning (1990) suggested that scores from a single play discriminated better. However, a major study was recently undertaken by Ruhm et al. (2016) involving over 1250 low-level Austrian school learners. The recordings used were relatively short clips. Results on the shorter ones (twenty-five seconds or less) generally showed an improvement on the second play; scores on the longer ones (over sixty seconds) sometimes increased and sometimes even went down. The other recent study (Field, 2015) used two former IELTS recordings to investigate the impact of double play upon score bands and upon the cognitive behaviour of adult test takers. It found that double-play raised scores, but by a smaller amount than expected. Replaying the recordings did not appear to disproportionately favour test takers at any of the three proficiency levels tested; if anything, it marked out the differentials between score bands more sharply. In protocols following the task, a majority of test takers reported that they used the first play to orient themselves to the listening passage and the second to confirm their answers to questions. In other words, during at least one play, they were engaging in a type of listening that approximated more closely to real world behaviour than item-driven tasks usually permit. Several participants reported that hearing the recording twice had the effect of reducing listening anxiety (section 12.7.7). A more adventurous solution to the issue of whether to permit a double play or not is to allow the individual test taker to choose. This is obviously

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only possible in computer-delivered tests, where the timing of the listening session can be flexible. A concern here is that the effort of decision-making about whether to rewind or not may impose additional stress upon a candidate.

12.7.6 Authenticity Materials writers and test producers have four possible sources for the recordings they choose: they can script them; they can ask actors to improvise a situation in the studio; they can use recordings of real-life speech events; or they can make use of semi-scripted materials, where an authentic event is transcribed and rerecorded under studio conditions. Test producers in particular find the fourth option attractive as it avoids complications associated with reproduction rights. It also enables them to manipulate the original text by editing its language and even introducing multiple-choice distractors. In this context, the notion of what constitutes an “authentic” text is sometimes stretched to its limits. Salisbury (2005) reports surprisingly that of ten experienced item writers studied, only one regularly used oral material as his point of departure, with others generating text from written sources such as magazine interviews. There are implications here for the extent to which tests of L2 listening predict real-world behaviour. In a study by Wagner and Toth (2014), learners of Spanish scored significantly higher when exposed to a rescripted version of a natural text than when hearing the original version. The authentic option has increasingly become a possibility open to instructors, given the wide availability of both oral and visual materials on the internet. However, there has been relatively little research into the effects upon learner comprehension and motivation of using these sources. Herron and Seay (1991) reported improvements in learners’ listening skills as a result of supplementing conventional materials with authentic ones. Wu and Stansfield (2001) constructed tests based on improvised material, but compromised spontaneity by recording a target conversation multiple times “until it was determined to be wholly authentic” (p. 196). Gilmore (2011) reports on the positive effects of exposure to authentic listening materials upon Japanese learners’ communicative competence. Much of the work in this area has focused on formal differences between authentic and scripted speech. In an interesting study that compared material within a single genre, Gilmore (2004) identified a predictably higher prevalence of false starts, repetitions, overlaps, and back-channelling in authentic sources, and very large differences in relation to fillers and pauses (the latter were not subdivided by type of pause). Field (2013) reports that test writers at lower levels sometimes succeed better

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at emulating natural speech than those at higher levels, where there are pressures to increase the density of the information and the complexity of the links between it.

12.7.7  Listening Anxiety Perhaps partly because of the extensive use of comprehension questions, L2 listening places heavy processing demands upon learners. This has stimulated interest in the types of language learning anxiety (Horwitz, 2001) associated with them. A listening anxiety questionnaire designed by Kim (2000) has been widely used to establish the degree and causes of the phenomenon. A major factor appears to be the variable nature of the spoken input. Vogely (1999) found that around half the concerns reported by learners of Spanish at a US university related to this issue. A more recent study of trainee teachers by Bekleyen (2009) also records failure to recognize spoken words as a major challenge to confidence. Chang (2008) reports unsurprisingly that test situations add to the stress experienced in classroom settings, while an interesting study by Chang and Read (2008) identifies concrete ways of reducing anxiety in listening tests, including providing topical knowledge and replaying the recording. A second topic of interest is the possible relationship between anxiety and poor performance. The current consensus appears to be that the former causes the latter rather than vice versa (Kim, 2000; Zhang, 2013). A related question is whether anxiety results from a lack of strategic competence with which to resolve problems of comprehension.

12.8 Conclusion This review has covered a range of recent topics in L2 listening theory and research, chosen in part because they differ from those that have historically attracted attention. The purpose, particularly in section 12.7, was to show the diversity of current work in the field and to identify issues of likely interest to future investigators. A theme common to many of the studies mentioned is the need to achieve a deeper understanding of the mind of the L2 listener and the challenges he/she faces. This marks a shift in emphasis from past research, which quite often focused on how aspects of listening texts and tasks contributed to difficulty (Bloomfield et al., 2010). The theoretical background and much of the research quoted highlights the significant part played by the characteristics of connected speech. Instructors, researchers, and test designers cannot afford to lose sight of the transitory nature and the extreme variability of the medium by which

Second Language Listening: Current Ideas, Current Issues

information reaches the ears of learners. Many failures of “comprehension” by lower-proficiency listeners are actually failures of perceptual processing (Field, 2012). Even if those listeners were capable of conceptual processes such as inferring connections between pieces of information (and they may well be in L1), they cannot employ them if they have to focus heavy attention on decoding, nor can they if there is insufficient decoded material to provide a basis for constructing meaning. A theme that has occurred several times in this review is the role of exposure. While there is no full agreement on precisely how L2 listeners acquire phonological knowledge, the most persuasive account seems to be the “episodic” or “exemplar” one, based on the assumption that we store traces of speakers’ voices in our minds, from which, over time, we manage to extract generalized phoneme and word values. This accounts for phenomena such as phoneme recognition, accent familiarity, awareness of word frequency, voice normalization, and the acquisition of chunks. But it also conduces to a view of the L2 listener as an individual whose behaviour is shaped by the number and quality of his/her encounters with the target language. Amongst other concerns, it sounds a cautionary note about longitudinal studies of listening development that focus on learners who are exposed on a daily basis to L2 influences outside the classroom. How might this awareness of the listener as an individual affect approaches to instruction? A flaw of the Comprehension Approach mentioned at the outset is that it tends to treat learners as uniform in their behaviour, with the instructor or materials writer anticipating which parts of a passage will prove problematic. Three solutions have been touched upon briefly. One is to adopt a diagnostic approach that follows up wrong answers by replaying the relevant section and identifying across class members why the problem occurred. This can be followed by remedial tasks focusing on the feature that caused the difficulty. A second is to discuss and develop compensatory listening strategies, particularly at lower proficiency levels, in order to sustain learners’ motivation and self-efficacy by enabling them to handle gaps in understanding in realworld contexts. A third approach is to transfer part of the instructional programme to self-access activities—an option that has become possible thanks to the wide availability of downloadable material. Much future listening practice seems likely to relocate from the classroom to a listening centre or to the home, where learners can listen to recordings as many times as they need, picking up on features that they as individuals find difficult and benefiting post-practice from a downloadable script. In time, materials designers may be able to add online remedial tasks linked to specific difficulties of audition that are likely to occur.

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Johnson, K. (2005). The “general” study of expertise. In K. Johnson (ed.), Expertise in second language learning and teaching (pp. 11–33). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, K. (2008). Speaker normalisation in speech perception. In D. B. Pisoni & R. E. Remez (eds.), The handbook of speech perception (pp. 363–389), Oxford: Blackwell. Kim, S. Y. (2000). Foreign language listening anxiety: A study of Korean students learning English. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, TX. Klatt, D. H. (1979). Speech perception: A model of acoustic-phonetic analysis and lexical access. Journal of Phonetics, 7, 279–312. Laver, J. (1994). Principles of phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levelt, W. J. M. (1993). The architecture of normal spoken language use. In G. Blanken, J. Dittman, H. Grimm, J. Marshall, & C.-W. Wallesch (eds.), Linguistic disorders and pathologies (pp. 1–15). Berlin: De Gruyter. Lynch, T. (2006). Academic listening: Marrying top and bottom. In A. Martinez-Flor & E. Uso-Juan (eds.), Current trends in learning and teaching the four skills within a communicative framework (pp. 91–110). Amsterdam: Mouton. Lynch, T. (2009). Teaching second language listening. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macaro, E., Graham, S., & Vanderplank, R. (2007). A review of listening strategies: Focus on sources of knowledge and on success. In A. D. Cohen & E. Macaro (eds.), Language learner strategies (pp. 165–185). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Major, R. C., Fitzmaurice, S. F., Bunta, F., & Balasubramian, C. (2002). The effects of nonnative accents on listening comprehension: Implications for ESL assessment. TESOL Quarterly, 36(2), 173–190. Major, R. C., Fitzmaurice, S. F., Bunta, F., & Balasubramian, C. (2005). Testing the effects of regional, ethnic and international dialects of English on listening comprehension. Language Learning, 55(1), 37–69. Mattys, S. L., & Melhorn, J.F. (2005). How do syllables contribute to the perception of spoken English? Insight from the migration paradigm. Language and Speech, 48, 223–253. McCarthy, M., & Carter, R. (1997). Written and spoken vocabulary. In N. Schmitt & M. McCarthy (eds.), Vocabulary: Description, acquisition and pedagogy (pp. 20–39). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGurk, H., & McDonald, J. (1976). Hearing lips and seeing voices. Nature, 264, 746–748. McQueen, J. M. (1998). Segmentation of continuous speech using phonotactics. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 21–46. McQueen, J. M. (2007). Eight questions about spoken word recognition. In G. Gaskell (ed.), The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 37–54). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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13 Contemporary Perspectives on L2 Upper-Register Text Processing Elizabeth B. Bernhardt and Cici Malik Leffell 13.1 Introduction Second-language (L2) reading research is replete with intellectual tensions: reading is the second-language skill with the greatest durability and usability and yet it is the most under-researched of the second language areas. While rooms could be filled with volumes and articles on how oral language develops and how that knowledge can be brought into instruction, on input and output hypotheses about the active use of the oral portion of second-language acquisition, or on the importance of pragmatic functions of language and how learners acquire them, the same cannot be said of knowledge about how learners interact with written text. A further paradoxical element is introduced by the notion of linguistic environment. While the environment of oral language appears to be most salient, the environment of written language is both more substantial and more linguistically complex. Oral language forms are much more simple than written forms, and they are far more lexically constrained than written language. An additional tension is introduced by the actual function of written material in the modern world. Adults use literacy in the workplace, be it a classroom, laboratory, or retail store. Reading complicated written material, seeking, as Guthrie and Greaney (1991) note, “knowledge gain … personal empowerment … participation in society … or occupational effectiveness” (pp. 73–75) is of paramount importance to functioning in the modern world, whether from a piece of paper or from a screen. Yet, ironically, the field has made little progress in understanding this process from a second-language perspective. Finally, the field of second-language reading research has failed to confront difficulty levels of text. Difficulty resides not exclusively in linguistic forms, but in the conceptual level of the material often linked to the professional background of the reader.

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Difficult text is rarely generic, but rather nuanced and referential, connected to networks of information with which a second-language reader may or may not be familiar. The purpose of this paper is to bring awareness to very serious issues that need to be investigated and resolved in order to ensure more successful comprehension processes for advanced second-language readers. After defining advanced-register reading and arguing for a “state of the field” that synthesizes perspectives on various dimensions of second-language reading research and theory, the paper will concentrate on the research base focused on the comprehension of complicated, extended L2 discourse. It will mention the interactive compensatory framework as well as research methodologies that can provide insights into L2 upper-register text processing, and it will end with some guidance regarding research directions.

13.2  Defining Advanced Reading The issue of advanced register has indeed been of concern in first-language (L1) research with recent foci on literacy in the workplace and independent reading. A report centred on common goals for elementary and secondary school learners, Measures of Text Difficulty (Nelson et al., 2012), is helpful in probing advanced-register text. In its Appendix, the report synthesizes, first, quantitative measures of text complexity that include formulas examining word and sentence length as well as cohesion and word difficulty. While increasingly sophisticated as compared with traditional readability formulas, these measures nevertheless focus on concrete visible measures of text complexity. The report, second, synthesizes qualitative elements such as structure (graphics and other print features); whether the text uses “literal” language as opposed to “figurative, ironic” language; what background information the text presupposes; and whether the text is “literary” or “informational” (National Governors Association for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010, p. 5). In spite of the helpful nature of the synthesis, it is not totally germane to the topic at hand. That synthesis is focused on “texts representative of those required in typical first-year credit-bearing college courses and in workforce training programs” (National Governors Association for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010, p. 4). These types of texts are essentially instructional in nature, meant for learners. But what of learners who must learn to be independent and to handle large quantities of text for their professional lives in a second language? Two relevant sources are available. The first is offered as part of the North American codification of proficiency published by the Interagency

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Roundtable. That system focuses often on text types that define Advanced Professional Proficiency, but includes a number of reader-oriented descriptors. The system notes in particular that [T]he individual’s experience with the written language is extensive enough that he/she is able to relate inferences in the text to real-world knowledge and understand almost all sociolinguistic and cultural references [and] the intent of writers’ use of nuance and subtlety. (Interagency Language Roundtable, n.d., para. 13)

The descriptors also indicate that the advanced reader is able to handle the unpredictability often found in literary and journalistic essays and is able to “understand the full ramifications of texts as they are situated in the wider cultural, political, or social environment” (Interagency Language Roundtable, n.d., para. 13). A second relevant perspective is offered by Bernhardt (2011). She notes: complexity lies in the processing of intricate, complicated and often times obscure linguistic and cultural features accurately while trying to comprehend content and while remaining distant from it in order to assess the content’s value and accuracy. To expand on the point, learning to read in the upper registers of a second language entails being able to process the minutiae of word and grammatical nuance while constructing a message and simultaneously remaining aloof from that construction in order to assess its content and intention. (pp. 19–20)

To concretize the challenge, the following paragraph taken from a London Review of Books review might be helpful: Speer was lucky not just in his looks. His life was a succession of felicitous opportunities which came his way without obvious effort. Of course he strove to make his luck. But he had too great a sense of entitlement to allow himself to be seen to scramble for preferment. He gave the impression that he was the insouciant recipient of chance’s beneficence. He was, however, genuinely lucky to be rejected as a student by the great Expressionist Hans Poelzig. He was obliged to study, initially reluctantly, under the super-twee Heinrich Tessenow, whose precursively völkisch, Arts and Crafts saccharine he was indifferent to, even though it would become the almost invariable idiom of bucolic settlements, agrarian expansion and, on a larger scale, of the Ordensburgen and Napola—schools for the Nazi elite. Unastonishingly, Tessenow was keenly anti-modernist, going on Luddite. Speer was impressed. He acquired a cast of mind and a gamut of tastes which would soon allow him to ingratiate himself with Hitler, whose ranting in a Berlin beerhall prompted him to join the National Socialists in January 1931, two years before they seized power. During that period Speer became, faute de mieux, the impecunious party’s interior designer of choice. His initial willingness to work without a fee eased his way. (Meades, 2016, para. 3)

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The vocabulary level itself is daunting. Preferment, insouciant, super-twee, Luddite, faute de mieux, and impecunious are all words, according to MerriamWebster’s online dictionary, at the lower end of the 30,000 most common words in English. Syntax, too, is formidable, with a combination of extremely short sentences, He was impressed, to the extraordinarily long middle sentence regarding Speer’s teachers. Further, the level of German cultural knowledge, whether one immediately identifies Albert Speer as Speer, combined with a knowledge of art and architectural movements, lends a level of befuddling wonderment in trying to understand the brief passage if that information is missing. Finally, the challenge for the reader is to identify the paragraph as a character sketch within a 5,000word essay. How a second-language reader learns to perform tasks such as the above is unclear, and operationalizing all of the variables entailed in text complexity for research purposes is daunting. Quantitative measures such as word and sentence length remain important. Yet, unseen variables such as the academic, professional level of background knowledge of the reader, as well as subtlety and nuance within the text, are critical toward understanding what second language readers must cope with. Admittedly, the above text might provide an exaggeration for effect, but nevertheless it is critical to recognize that the task faced by second language readers when they are to use text in professional-level settings is something that deserves careful attention. Indeed, these are the challenges that all readers—native and non-native alike—face. The key difference is that non-native readers have potentially shallower linguistic and cultural resources. Programming texts so that learners feel simply confident and comfortable will not help the field approach a set of very serious issues.

13.3  The Research Landscape: 1991–2008 The last twenty-five years have seen the publication of a number of significant research reviews dedicated exclusively to the research in the study of second-language reading (Bernhardt, 1991; 2000; 2005; 2011). Consolidated in these essays and volumes are research findings that have remained relatively stable over the half-century as well as those that have highlighted newer emerging research areas. In 1991, more than 140 studies were considered that focused specifically on adult second-language reading. These studies were culled from Applied Linguistics; Canadian Modern Language Review; English Language Teaching Journal; Foreign Language Annals; French Review; Hispania; International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL); Language Learning;

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Language Testing; The Modern Language Journal; Reading in a Foreign Language; RELC Journal; System; Studies in Second Language Acquisition; TESOL Quarterly; Die Unterrichtspraxis; Working Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching; and On TESOL, and from a number of L1-oriented journals such as Reading Research Quarterly and Journal of Literacy Behavior. Those studies focused on the interest areas of word recognition; background knowledge; text structure, including authentic text modification; oral and aural dimensions of reading, including reading aloud; syntax and morphology; crosslingual or L1–L2 relationships; metacognition and affect; testing reading comprehension; and instruction. The largest portion of the studies emphasized cultural background knowledge, a key element in 1980s L1 research (Pearson et al., 1984). Another significant portion explored the vagaries of different assessment mechanisms—key elements in a new and burgeoning research area. A third examined crosslingual dimensions of the second language reading process. At the time, the specification of research variables, as well as descriptions of subject groups, literacy levels, materials used, and proficiency level in the second language were found wanting. The database was heavily influenced by first language models and theories which perforce did not consider two languages in simultaneous operation. In a retrospective and then prospective analysis, Bernhardt (2000) reviewed the decade of 1990–2000 and documented that “a number of areas remained consistent instances of research interest: affective factors, text structure, syntactic features, and word knowledge and instruction” (p. 798). A new research area, the relationship of reading to other modalities such as writing and listening, appeared. While affective factors became focused on the use of literary text and attitudes of learners toward such texts, text structure and its modification often led to research findings that shortened, abridged texts caused readers greater comprehension difficulties rather than fewer. Syntactic features examined phenomena such as reference and anaphoric resolution. Word knowledge research examined how and when learners choose to use dictionaries and whether particular kinds of dictionary displays were efficacious. Instruction focused often on the use of sustained free reading of authentic texts. The issue of language of assessment remained. Important studies clarified that reader performance was different based on the language in which comprehension questions were posed. A significant addition to the research area was a substantial emphasis on the L1–L2 relationship, which tried to resolve the question of whether a specific level of grammatical knowledge would be necessary before comprehension could begin. Articulated by Alderson and Urquhart (1984) as the language-versus-reading problem, a set of studies enabled two conclusions: that indeed language knowledge was a larger element than literacy knowledge and that these two features were intertwined

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and interdependent (Bernhardt & Kamil, 1995). While one was larger (language proficiency), neither (L2 proficiency nor L1 literacy) was more important than the other; they co-exist. This review led to an expanded view of second-language reading and dimensions of second-language reading research that critically included the contribution of L1 literacy to any second-language literacy performance. In spite of moving the field forward with this definitive insight, the underspecification of variables in second-language reading research studies remained, continuing into the early 1990s. At that time, Bernhardt (2005) posited a theoretical model that emphasized the developmental impact of L1 literacy and L2 language knowledge on the reading comprehension process. A further review followed that employed the same methodology for culling articles as the 1991 and 2000 reviews. Bernhardt (2011) expanded the number of journals reviewed to include Research and Reading Instruction; ADFL Bulletin; CALICO Journal; Journal of Research in Reading; Reading and Writing; Second Language Research; Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy; Reading in a Foreign Language; and The Reading Matrix. This process yielded a pool of 250+ research studies. Critically, seated in the 2005 model, the review included an analysis of the potential acknowledgement of the influence of L1 literacy and L2 language knowledge in the database, conceptualized as the interactive or compensatory model of L2 Reading. Superseding psycholinguistic models of the reading process, this model entailed processing in multiple dimensions, not hierarchical in nature. Most of the topics of concern in the prior twenty years remained of interest. Background knowledge; technology use; how good and poor readers employ reading strategies; and assessment were also explored. Intrapersonal variables as well as transfer or L1–L2 relationships were included. Word recognition and phonological processing also remained of research interest, as did instruction, vocabulary gain from text, and dictionary use. Studies of morphosyntax as well as of genre and text features were also found within the database, but indicated minor if any impacts on comprehension.

13.4  The Research Landscape: 2008 and Beyond Using a methodology similar to those in previous reviews, that is, searching through the 2008 to 2016 volumes of the above-mentioned journals (including also The International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature) for studies that examine readers of high school age and beyond, articles were first collated and then categorized by main theme or thrust, by the number of subjects and educational level, and by the first and second languages of interest. This process yielded a total of 332 research studies forming the current L2 reading landscape. In brief, the present

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landscape illustrates a similar research interest in topics that have been widely covered in the research literature over the years: a consistent interest in L1 and L2 relationships; in metacognition; in strategies and affective features of second language reading; and in vocabulary knowledge. Structural features of text, instruction, and technology also grew in interest. Some of the research areas explored across the decades still nominally exist, such as word recognition, background knowledge, and assessment. A key difference is the explosion of interest in extensive reading. To try to answer the question of the present review regarding complicated, extended L2 discourse, the 332 studies were queried for any findings that reported on reading comprehension of complicated, upper-register text. Sixty-one (18%) of the articles involved what could be considered advanced-level text but only eighteen (5% of the total) investigated reading comprehension of such texts. The largest group of studies encountered investigates metacognitive aspects of second language reading, and the vast majority of these focus on reading strategies. Only ten of the fifty-one total studies on metacognition feature participants who were presented with authentic texts aimed at adult readers or with what may be considered upper-register texts. Cheng (2008) had one doctoral candidate in electrical engineering (L1 Chinese) read authentic research articles and texts of other genres in English and observed that the student employed rhetorical and evaluative analysis to decipher genre. Wurr, Theurer, and Kim (2008/2009) presented three adult English language learners (ELLs) with readings from a student and popular anthology; they found retrospective miscue analysis to increase strategy awareness. Bell (2008a, 2008b, 2011) looked at framing by conducting three experiments on small groups of graduate student ELLs in Australia. She found that learners employ extratextual framing to adapt prior knowledge and reading behaviours to present context (2008a), that they undergo significant changes in the self-awareness and intertextual framing practices as they acclimate to a new culture (2008b), and that they employ intertextual framing skills to an increasing extent over the course of an academic year, which suggests greater metacognition (2011). The author used 750-word general interest pieces from a scientific magazine for all three of these studies. Urlaub (2013) found US university students of German to perceive strategy training as helpful for reading authentic literary texts, and Kasemsap and Lee (2015), in addition to using books intended for children, presented participants with excerpts from English language newspapers to help them conclude that language proficiency strongly predicts retrieval strategy use. Based on two English as a second language (ESL) undergraduates’ reading of “a model synthesis paper”, Zhao and Hirvela (2015) vouch that learners’ rhetorical reading strategy skills and their knowledge of synthesis and sources are important for synthesizing in L2. Of the ten articles on metacognition that use what

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could be considered more complicated, advanced texts, only two investigate reading comprehension of them. Horiba (2013) tested participants with upper-register texts; she performed two experiments involving persuasive essays (356–433 words) in the ki-sho-ten-ketsu style (p. 101) from a Japanese newspaper. Findings indicate that instructions may encourage strategic L2 processing and that goal type affects the extent to which L2 proficiency and comprehension abilities participate in processing. Karimi (2015) presented seventy-six ELLs (L1 Persian) with expository texts “ranging from semi-technical to general interest” (p. 43) in genre (between 788 and 1562 words) and concluded that strategy-based instruction positively impacts strategy use and multiple documents comprehension. Vocabulary is the principal interest of the second-largest group of studies. Of the forty-six studies on vocabulary, only nine feature what might be considered complicated, advanced-level text, and only two of these investigate comprehension of such texts. Min (2008) presented undergraduates with four articles on two themes and stresses the importance of focused vocabulary exercises. Prichard (2008) looks into various aspects of dictionary use with different sorts of L2 readers in mind. He gave participants two news pieces (of 382 and 1120 words each) and a book section of 420 words and found that dictionary use may speed up students’ improvements in comprehension and vocabulary acquisition, that certain L2 learners may profit from learning how to look up words in a targeted manner, and that others need instruction in basic reading strategies before benefiting from dictionary use or instruction. Peters et al. (2009) used an authentic newspaper article in their experiment with Dutch-speaking learners of German; they argue that giving students tasks that require them to look up and process new words is a way to enhance vocabulary acquisition through reading. After reading the first eight chapters of a nineteenth-century novel, the English majors in Daskalovska’s (2014) Macedonian study showed that vocabulary size does not affect rate of acquisition. Elgort and Warren (2014) presented adult ELLs with embedded pseudowords in a long informational text and learned that particular learner characteristics and aspects of the text in question combine to affect L2 vocabulary learning through reading. The thirty-three native English speakers and fifty-nine ELLs in Reynolds’ (2014) study read a novel to reveal that native speakers incidentally obtain vocabulary through reading fiction more effectively than L2 learners, and Ender’s (2016) subjects’ reading of a newspaper article and an excerpt from a 1947 French novel suggests that implicit cognitive processes may more greatly benefit vocabulary development than deliberate, explicit processing strategies. Of the nine total papers on vocabulary in second language reading that incorporate upper-register texts, only two investigate reading comprehension. Alessi and Dwyer (2008) presented seventy-six US university students

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of Spanish with an article from a Spanish-language news website, its 431 words divided among three pages, and drew conclusions on vocabulary support: namely, that vocabulary support is more beneficial when simultaneous to, not before, reading, and that focusing on vocabulary before reading increases reading speed while help with vocabulary during reading enhances comprehension. Schmitt, Jiang, and Grabe (2011), for their part, base their findings of how 661 ELLs (aged 16–33) read a 757-word passage from a textbook as well as a 582-word reading from an Englishlanguage magazine; they assert that the amount of known words in a given text correlates with reading comprehension. The third most researched second-language area in the most recent database is extensive reading. These forty articles, roughly twelve per cent of all studies queried, generally report on the ways in which the practice benefits language learners’ motivation and perceptions. The vast majority of studies on extensive reading involve subjects who read graded readers, textbook passages, or other simplified texts. Interestingly, when authentic texts are used, they are commonly at a level intended for children, teenagers, or young adults, even when the study participants are postsecondary learners. Only a handful of researchers present their participants with authentic texts aimed at adult readers: Bordonaro (2011) encouraged participants to access authentic periodical and literary texts online; Beglar and Hunt (2014) had participants read authentic novels in addition to graded readers and other simplified texts; Ghiabi (2014) asked participants to read a short novel; and Pereyra (2015) instructed students to peruse journals, magazines, and a novel as well as graded readers. Only two authors from this group looked at reading comprehension of authentic texts intended for adult readers: Beglar, Hunt, and Kite (2012) chose three novels in addition to works from a collection of simplified texts, and Fernandez de Morgado (2009) had students find their own scientific articles to create a reading library from which the class could select readings. Beglar, Hunt, and Kite (2012) found extensive reading to improve reading comprehension abilities, especially when learners read simplified texts, and Fernandez de Morgado’s study results indicate that extensive reading does not significantly impact reading comprehension but that students view the practice as beneficial. Studies on the relationship between L1 and L2 often focus on differences between native speakers and L2 learners. The majority of studies in the group either get their data from participants working with readings from standardized tests or set out research questions that require that their subjects process smaller units of text, such as characters, phonemes, words, or individual sentences. Only two researchers in the cross-lingual group pull data from learners working with advanced text, and both of them touch upon comprehension in their findings. Alptekin and Erçetin

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(2010) presented native Turkish speakers training to become English teachers with a 2270-word autobiographical short story and observed that task processing is more precise in L1 than in L2 but that storage capacities between the two are similar. They also note that working memory affects inferential but not literal comprehension. Mikulec (2015), working with two graduate students of applied linguistics who read a 650-word Bolivian folktale in Spanish (L2) and a 1400-word fairytale in English (L1), found that miscues occur between L1 and L2 when relating a recently read text, and concluded that miscues affect comprehension in L2 but not in L1. While a significant number of studies contribute to the second language reading database in instruction, none of them assessed reading comprehension of upper-register text and only five draw conclusions involving authentic advanced text aimed at adult readers. Students in Zyzik and Polio’s (2008) study presumably read complicated text, as the researchers gathered data from observing advanced university-level Spanish literature courses; they found that a pre-emptive focus on form was limited to vocabulary and that instructors preferred recasts for giving feedback. The thirty-three adult participants in Fredriks’ (2012) study were encouraged to select their own novels for reading over the length of their EFL course in Tajikistan. Fredriks (2012) found that reading these volumes and participating in critical literature circles led to increased reader confidence. de Saint Léger (2012) also noted a boost in learner confidence; subjects in her study were instructed on strategies to apply to their readings over the course of a semester, which included argumentative texts, a screenplay, and a short narrative. Based on thirty undergraduate EFL learners’ reading of 2000–2750-word passages taken from authentic texts, Charubusp and Chinwonno (2014) maintain that instruction focused on academic literacy may benefit low-proficiency L2 learners. And finally, based on his observations of a university-level Latin American literature course, Thoms (2014) vouches that teacher reformulations in the advanced literature classroom benefit L2 learning. Some of the scholarship on technology and second language reading comprehension focuses on technologically enhanced texts or hypermedia. Ten of the twenty-six total articles focused on technological aspects of second language reading make use of upper-register text, but only Riess Karnal and Vanmacher Pereira (2015) investigate reading comprehension of such text. After presenting university students with an abstract to read with or without access to Google translator and then performing think-alouds to evaluate their subjects’ understanding, the authors conclude that Google translate improves reading comprehension. As for the other nine that make use of advanced text, several report on the benefits of technologically enhanced reading; to do so, Lück (2008) presented participants with folktales and expository texts on politics and culture;

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Arnold (2009) encouraged learners to access a range of possibilities of authentic texts online; Wood (2011) used a newspaper article; PapadimaSophocleous (2015) employed “contextualized” authentic texts (one text every two weeks over a six-week period); and Yilmaz (2015) asked participants to read three short stories. In addition, Garrett-Rucks, Howles, and Lake (2015) found university students to prefer digital over print media for reading poems, novel and short story excerpts, and a newspaper interview, and Rott and Gavin (2015) observed that, when reading internet sources, stronger L2 learners employ more diverse reading strategies and pass over unknown words to a greater degree than their weaker counterparts. Finally, Collentine (2016) presented university-level Spanish learners with two authentic online news articles of approximately 600 words each to conclude that both prior reading levels and how learners read in a 3D world influence language output in synchronous task-based computer-mediated communication, and Pellicer-Sánchez (2016) vouches that vocabulary may be acquired incidentally from reading online and that time spent reading online is positively correlated with vocabulary acquisition; she bases this conclusion on participants’ reading of a 2300-word short story. Scholarship on text structure investigates reading comprehension of upper-level text more often than studies in the other research categories. Of the twenty-six papers within this theme, ten use advanced texts, and five of these examine comprehension of them. Participants in PellicerSánchez and Schmitt’s (2010) study read an authentic novel, and the researchers determined that meaning and spelling are easier for advanced L2 learners to acquire incidentally through reading than meaning and word type. Littlemore et al. (2011) gave foreign university students in the UK excerpts from academic lectures and determined that forty per cent of confusing yet known words or word combinations include metaphors. Tabata-Sandom (2013) presented university students with two authentic short stories and their graded renditions; she found that graded readers improve reading fluency and that lower-proficiency L2 readers view them more positively than their higher-proficiency peers. Uden, Schmitt, and Schmitt (2014) maintain that the jump from a graded to an authentic novel may not be as drastic as assumed and that graded reading transitions nicely to reading authentic novels but may reduce vocabulary exposure. Mozafari and Barjesteh (2016) assert that using critically oriented reading strategies is more effective than conventional reading for improving literary competence and that gender does not skew results; they base their findings off Persian English majors’ reading of a nineteenth-century novel. Brantmeier and colleagues use advanced texts to investigate the effects of embedded questions on reading comprehension: they used

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two condensed passages of 525 and 646 words from a university-level psychology textbook to determine that inserting questions into a text does not significantly influence L2 reading comprehension (Brantmeier, Callender, & McDaniel, 2011) and that “pause and consider” insertions do not influence comprehension while “pause and write” interjections have a negative impact (Brantmeier et al., 2012); based on ninety-seven college students’ reading of various 159- to 360-word passages selected or developed by the researchers, they further conclude that embedded questions do not benefit reading comprehension (Brantmeier, Hammadou Sullivan, & Strube, 2014). Ahmadian and Pashangzadeh (2013) argue that narrative literary texts can improve L2 learners’ reading comprehension. They used three narrative texts, including two short stories, and three non-narrative pieces, all ranging from 1350 to 1650 words, to reach their conclusion. Shardakova (2016) tested native Russian speakers and US learners of Russian on authentic, well-known short stories and news articles from popular Russian-language media outlets; she determined that native speakers and L2 learners comprehend humour differently, that comprehension efforts draw upon different types of knowledge, and that proficiency plays a larger part than anticipated. Intrapersonal factors, that is, learner perceptions and attitudes, motivation, anxiety, gender, confidence, and intelligence, are also found throughout the database. Yet only three studies that centre on intrapersonal issues employ advanced-level texts, and two of them make claims regarding reading comprehension. Lee (2009) found that topic interest and congruence impacted Korean ELLs’ recall of information from two argumentative texts on euthanasia obtained from idebate.org. Rai et al. (2011) found stress to interfere with working memory and inferential complexity and to impair reading comprehension in participants’ reading of twelve short stories in the L2, and Brantmeier, Callender, and McDaniel (2013) again used condensed passages from a psychology textbook to investigate the relationship between gender and embedded questions vis-à-vis reading comprehension. They observed that while females perform better than males on embedded “why” questions and males do better than females on “what” ones, there is no significant relationship between gender and performance when the question format is multiple-choice. In a final grouping, studies on morphology, orthography, and syntax failed to use advanced-level text, while the subject does appear within a handful of the assessment, modality, and background knowledge studies. In the assessment group, Clifford and Cox (2013) presented their subjects—182 NATO personnel who had learned English, 211 undergraduates studying Chinese, and 550 undergraduates studying Spanish—with three reading tests that had been “created for different projects” (p. 53) geared toward the intermediate, advanced, and superior ACTFL proficiency levels;

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they determined that reading difficulty is significantly different among the three levels. Three of the studies on modality make use of advanced texts. Urlaub (2011) presented three advanced language learners with various German literary texts and vouches that creative writing can be beneficial to L2 reading development. Brantmeier, Strube, and Yu (2014) used the same previously mentioned modified passages from a university-level psychology textbook (525 and 646 words) to conclude that pausal and idea units are closely related in written recalls. Kitajima (2016) had thirty-one US undergraduates read a newspaper article (340 characters), expository passages, and a letter (144–894 characters) in Japanese and found that advanced proficiency in oral-like text does not potentiate accurate syntactic parsing. Finally, two papers on background knowledge make claims about reading comprehension of upper-level texts. Based on reading comprehension test results of forty-four advanced English learners’ understanding of an authentic short story and a nativized version of it, Erten and Razi (2009) maintain that a nativized text leads to increased reading comprehension. Similarly, Uysal (2012) reports that cultural elements factor greatly into reading comprehension; subjects in the researcher’s study were four culturally Turkish and four culturally American adults associated with a US university who read a Turkish editorial translated into English.

13.5 Summary The research referenced in these pages on the use and reading of advanced-level texts in a second language is limited. It is limited by the texts used (mostly short, often edited text), by their nature (often narrative texts that do not target content), and by a lack of evidence about whether or not readers understand what they read (frequently assessed only through brief questions, if at all). These limitations are confounded by the fact that most of the research focuses on the reading of English as a foreign language, by a lack of clarity about the first languages of participants as well as their literacy levels, and by an almost exclusive emphasis on languages written in Roman orthography. Does this research assist the field in understanding how to help learners read advanced register, difficult text? Does the research consider the processes that a second-language reader must control in order to comprehend the sample text from the London Review of Books? Does the research reflect Guthrie and Greaney’s (1991) comment about advanced literacy processes for “knowledge gain … personal empowerment … participation in society … or occupational effectiveness” (pp. 73–75)? Does this research provide insight into instruction that enables readers to develop their own strategies to continue to

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read sophisticated text? By and large, the answers to these questions are “no” and “maybe”. To read upper-register text efficiently and effectively, readers must have significant vocabulary stores; must control a short-term memory capacity to resolve long stretches of discourse at the sentence level, the paragraph level, and beyond; must have the stamina to continue to read over long stretches; and must have significant cultural and topic knowledge found beyond the text to resolve meanings. The limited data cited in this paper provide some insight into how readers can indeed become advanced-level readers. The vocabulary studies provide information about how best to employ electronic means for helping readers to compensate for deficiencies. The extensive reading studies offer awareness into how affect plays a role in developing stamina and positive attitudes. Some of the studies focusing on metacognition and strategies offer hints at beginning to understand how readers learn to resolve complex grammatical features across stretches of discourse and how they learn to deploy sophisticated knowledge resources. Cross-lingual studies continue to underline the importance of the nature of the first and second language and their respective literacies in buttressing second-language reading. Work in pedagogical dimensions hints at structures for providing direct instruction. Studies focused on technology primarily examining hypermedia suggest some productive directions for second-language readers to become increasingly independent. Evidence provided by studies focused on text structure continue to offer ambiguous evidence about when, how, and whether to manipulate text. All of the studies reinforce the notion that second-language reading is not a univariate, linear process. It is indeed interactive and compensatory: levels interact with each other. These same levels may be available to buttress deficiencies. The field needs to consider research studies that embrace the complexity of the second-language reading process.

13.6  Directions for Research Given the bits of clarity that the present database in advanced-level second-language reading offers, it is important to introduce robust lines of research into this arena of second-language acquisition. A first, and critical, step is to begin to examine the processes used by experts as they encounter and develop understandings of advanced-level texts. Thinkalouds as well as retrospective interviews of persons who read second languages at professional levels might help to clarify goals as well as to categorize the strategies that such readers use. Such studies might provide answers to questions about when and how readers engage background

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scripts; how they deal with unknown, rare words; how much awareness they have of grammatical features of the language; and so forth. They would also help to clarify the nature of the advanced second-language reading process itself as well as to offer directions for classroom-based and self-instruction as well as in the design of hypermedia. Additionally, the analysis of expert readers may offer evidence of the development of stamina for reading long texts. A natural population of experts exists in foreign language literature departments. Not only do such experts read narratives, they also read expository text centred on cultural features of those narratives. Additionally, political scientists, anthropologists, archeologists, economists, and historians with area studies expertise would be fascinating subjects for think-aloud studies. Additional studies involving the effective use of technology to assist advanced readers both to learn and to better comprehend complicated text are also critical. Such studies should continue investigations of electronic assistance to resolve word meanings. For example, if words were automatically saved and turned into sophisticated flashcards including not only word meaning but etymological information and so forth, readers might be able to develop a convenient source and storehouse from which to practise words that they need to acquire. Electronic assistance might support individual readers in this highly individualistic process. Other studies could examine word valence—how does one learn that impecunious in the text above is being used in a sarcastic fashion? Studies that ask learners to rate words found in complicated text on scales such as positive to negative or socially appropriate to socially inappropriate would help the field to grasp the nature of advanced vocabulary use during reading. Computer assistance might enable readers to grasp the depth and breadth of their current vocabulary level and direct them toward further achievement. The research on extensive reading has been conducted almost exclusively on graded, lower-level, non-authentic text and rarely employs comprehension measures; it does, however, suggest important ways in which readers encounter second-language texts. Future research needs to pose questions on how to employ an extensive reading approach using adultlevel, upper-register texts and how to help readers develop the confidence the extensive reading approach appears to provide. A natural population to examine is upper-level undergraduate and graduate students who must learn to use a second language for research purposes. How can they become confident and not give up in their reading when texts become challenging? An extensive reading approach that is guided throughout by instruction may help readers become better comprehenders, or at least hearten them in what is an arduous process. An extensive reading approach may help the field to understand the ramifications of learning to

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integrate information across lines of text, using word- and sentence-level processing strategies, as well as resolving coreferences, anaphora, and so forth. In addition, guided extensive reading might assist in identifying relevant domain and cultural knowledge embedded in the text. “Decoding” a seven-line sentence with multiple dependent clauses in which advanced grammatical forms such as the subjunctive are embedded is challenging. Learners must practice how to keep long stretches of discourse in memory in order to resolve the intended meanings in which line seven, for example, may refer back to line two. Hence, the configuration of line two must remain in the shadows until ready for resolution lines later. How to help learners through these challenges within short-term memory is an area ripe for additional research both into cognitive processing and into pedagogical strategies. Another extremely problematic element in the reading of advanced level text is textual referencing. What words and sentences refer to external to the text is non-visible and yet a key characteristic of reading and understanding complicated text. To use the example of the Speer text, how does the reader who does or does not automatically recognize Speer, instantiating the concomitant Nazi/architecture/Nuremberg Trials network, learn to understand the text? Again, perhaps extensive reading models, guided by experts, can help the field discern important directions for readers and their teachers.

13.7 Conclusion Taking the long view, that is, since the 1980s, on the research area of second-language reading portrays a consistent interest in a number of key variables. But the research base also indicates that much of the interest needs to be re-directed away from individual variables and toward a more complex view of second language reading that entails multiple variables operating simultaneously. Indeed, the field has still not confronted the genuine impact of first-language literacy on the variables it is trying to explore. In addition, it has failed to acknowledge the complexities of the many different languages from an array of linguistic roots. Theory also remains wanting. In spite of some lengthy arguments around the interactive compensatory model and what it implies for second-language reading research, very few research studies have considered the principles entailed in that model. Further, an argument continues around the concept of threshold—even though compelling evidence exists indicating that first language literacy as well as background knowledge can override individual variables, rendering a linear, threshold view rather outmoded— arguing for a multivariate, multidimensional view. Finally, the field has yet to challenge its own raison d’être. What purpose does second-language

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reading research serve if it is not about helping readers to improve and grow in their abilities to comprehend and analyse authentic texts across multiple linguistic and literacy traditions?

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Mozafari, A., & Barjesteh, H. (2016). Enhancing literary competence through critically oriented reading strategies. International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, 5(7), 168–177. National Governors Association for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Supplemental information for Appendix A of the common core state standards for English language arts and literacy: New research on text complexity. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/assets/ E0813_Appendix_A_New_Research_on_Text_Complexity.pdf. Nelson, J., Perfetti, C., Liben, D., & Liben, M. (2012). Measures of text difficulty: Testing their predictive value for grade levels and student performance. Washington, DC: Council of Chief State School Officers. Papadima-Sophocleous, S. (2015). Integrating computer assisted language learning into out-of-class extended learning: The impact of iPod Touch-supported repeated reading on the oral reading fluency of English for specific academic purposes students. The Reading Matrix, 15(1), 188–205. Pearson, P. D., Barr, R., Kamil, M., & Mosenthal, P. (eds.) (1984). Handbook of reading research (Vol. 1). New York: Longman. Pellicer-Sánchez, A. (2016). Incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition from and while reading: An eye-tracking study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 38, 97–130. Pellicer-Sánchez, A., & Schmitt, N. (2010). Incidental vocabulary acquisition from an authentic novel: Do “things fall apart”? Reading in a Foreign Language, 22(1), 31–55. Pereyra, N. (2015). Extensive reading in enhancing lexical chunks acquisition. The Reading Matrix, 15(2), 218–234. Peters, E., Hulstijn, J. H., Sercu, L., & Lutjeharms, M. (2009). Learning L2 German vocabulary through reading: The effect of three enhancement techniques compared. Language Learning, 59(1), 113–151. Prichard, C. (2008). Evaluating L2 readers’ vocabulary strategies and dictionary use. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20(2), 216–231. Rai, M. K., Loschky, L. C., Harris, R. J., Peck, N. R., & Cook, L. G. (2011). Effects of stress and working memory capacity on foreign language readers’ inferential processing during comprehension. Language Learning, 61(1), 187–218. Reynolds, B. L. (2014). A mixed-methods approach to investigating firstand second-language incidental vocabulary acquisition through the reading of fiction. Reading Research Quarterly, 50(1), 111–127. Riess Karnal, A., & Vanmacher Pereira, V. (2015). Reading strategies in a L2: A study on machine translation. The Reading Matrix, 15(2), 69–79. Rott, S., & Gavin, B. (2015). Comprehending and learning from Internet sources: A conceptual replication study of Goldman, Braasch, Wiley, Greasser, and Brodowinska (2012). CALICO Journal, 32(2), 323–354.

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14 Language Learning Through Writing: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Evidence Rosa M. Manchón and Olena Vasylets

14.1 Introduction This chapter contributes a review of theoretical perspectives and selected empirical studies on how and why writing can be a site for language learning. This area of scholarly interest, a newcomer to language learning studies, has been characterized as “a well-defined space for a future research domain at the intersection between L2 [second language] writing and SLA” (second language acquisition; Manchón, 2011a, p. 62) whose key research preoccupation can be encapsulated in the following question: “Can the processes involved in writing—planning, composing, reflection, monitoring, retrieving knowledge, and processing feedback—promote L2 acquisition?” (Manchón & Williams, 2016, p. 569). Despite its short history, this research domain is gradually developing into a vibrant strand with a rich scholarly output that includes theoretical accounts of the language learning potential of L2 writing and written corrective feedback (WCF) processing, together with an expanding body of SLA-oriented empirical research. Notably, the growth of empirical work is such that narrative reviews and meta-analyses of it have already been produced (Bitchener & Storch, 2016; Johnson, 2017; Kang & Han, 2015, for representative examples). In addition, this research area has also increased its presence in collective works in SLA (the inclusion of this chapter in the present handbook attesting to it), L2 writing (see relevant chapters in Hyland & Shaw, 2016; Manchón & Matsuda, 2016), and applied linguistics at large (Manchón, 2013). The origin of these various theoretical and empirical preoccupations (which otherwise represent the systematization of the widely held belief

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L2 writing research: • Cognitively-oriented studies of writing processes • The EC debate

SLA empirical studies testing SLA-tenets/investigating SLAconcerns in the written mode SLA-oriented research on the LLP of L2 writing and WCF processing: • Theoretical positions • Empirical evidence

THEORIZING • Cognitive theoretical proposals • Socio-cultural theoretical proposals

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH • Writing and L2 development: Task-related studies • WCF and L2 development

Figure 14.1.  Overview of the origin and development of research on the language learning potential of writing and WCF.

on the value of writing for language learning among language teaching professionals) can be traced back to several research strands in both L2 writing and SLA studies, as shown in Figure 14.1. Thus, impetus for the study of the language learning potential of L2 writing was indirectly provided by the insights obtained in several areas of study that were centrally concerned with SLA preoccupations (not with L2 writing per se, an important point to be remembered), whose study was undertaken in the written modality, at times also comparing findings in the oral mode (Manchón, 2011a, for a review). From the L2 writing research angle, the impetus came from disciplinary debates and insights in two well established areas of study, namely, research on writing processes, on the one hand, and the “error correction debate”, on the other. The former provided robust empirical evidence of the intense linguistic processing that characterizes most forms of writing (see Cumming, 1989, 1990; Manchón, Roca de Larios & Murphy, 2009; Roca de Larios et al., 2008), which led to a research interest in ascertaining how and why such rich linguistic processing may be beneficial in terms of language development. Similarly, the error correction debate, primarily associated with the names of Truscott (e.g., 1996, 1999) and Ferris (e.g., 1999, 2004), also paved the way for the study of why and how the provision and processing of WCF could promote L2 acquisition. In essence, the error correction debate (or, rather, the opposing views on it) has not been so much a question of whether or not WCF results in improved performance in immediate revisions (the empirical evidence distinctively shows this to be the case) but, rather, whether or not WCF provision or processing leads to longer-term, more enduring learning effects. This explains why the debate has been more recently reinterpreted as a dichotomy between “feedback for accuracy” and “feedback for acquisition” (Manchón, 2011b), the latter being our focus of concern in this chapter.

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As shown in Figure 14.1, these diverse developments in SLA and L2 writing research eventually converged into the research domain analysed in this chapter, which is structured as follows. The next section synthesizes the rationale behind the purported potential of writing and WCF feedback processing for language development, and, on the basis of it, it identifies key theoretically motivated empirical questions in the domain. This is followed by a review of selected strands in SLA-oriented L2 writing studies that have addressed some of these empirical questions. In the concluding section, we suggest ways of advancing future research agendas.

14.2 The Language Learning Potential of Writing and Written Corrective Feedback Processing: Theoretical Perspectives and Key Empirical Questions Several SLA theories provide the theoretical underpinnings for the language learning potential of L2 writing and WCF processing, including those of a cognitive nature (mainly Skill Learning Theory, the Focus on Form research, the Noticing Hypothesis, and the Output Hypothesis), as well as sociocultural approaches to language learning and use (see discussion in Bitchener, 2012; Bitchener & Storch, 2016; Polio, 2012). Under the umbrella of these theoretical perspectives, the analysis of the language potential of writing and WCF processing revolves around two main questions: what is unique about and/or characteristic of writing and WCF that can lead to advancing language competences, on the one hand, and what kind of learning can be expected to derive from written output practice and WCF processing, on the other? Three unique characteristics of written language use and WCF are proposed as being beneficial for language learning (see Manchón & Williams, 2016, for a fuller analysis): (a) the greater availability of time in the writing condition (as opposed to the stricter time limitations associated with the online nature of spoken language use and from the processing of oral feedback in real time); (ii) the visibility and permanence of both the written text and the WCF on it (as opposed to evanescent nature of spoken language and oral feedback); and (iii) the problem-solving nature and resulting depth of processing characteristic of some forms of writing and of intentional use of WCF. The theoretical prediction is that the pace and permanence of writing and WCF processing make it possible for L2 writers to be more in control of their attentional resources, more prone to prioritize linguistic concerns, and, accordingly, more likely to both attend to incoming input (in the form of WCF) and to focus on language-related concerns during both their composing activity and their processing of the feedback received. These processes are also facilitated by

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another characteristic of the written text and the WCF on it: both are permanent and visible. The permanent, explicit character of WCF is thought to increase the likelihood of it being noticed by the L2 writer as well as the likelihood of the L2 writer’s engagement in metalinguistic reflection and analysis. Written texts are also permanent, and hence potentially useful for testing one’s own knowledge of the L2 given that L2 users can engage in the process of cognitive comparison. The visibility of the written text can also be an incentive for L2 users to set up higher and more complex goals for themselves and to produce what in the SLA literature has been referred to as “pushed output”, i.e., output that is not only accurate, but also precise, coherent, cohesive, and appropriate (Swain, 1995, 2005). This is so because “the cognitive window is open somewhat wider and learners have a richer opportunity to test their hypotheses when they write than when they speak” (Williams, 2012, p. 328). Pushed output is also associated with another characteristic of writing: the problem-solving nature of composing and of WCF processing. The basic argument (see Byrnes & Manchón, 2014a, 2014b; Manchón & Roca de Larios, 2007, for further elaborations) is that the deeper linguistic processing associated with the meaning-making activity that characterizes complex forms of writing will prompt L2 users to engage in crucial language learning processes, such as noticing or metalinguistic reflection and analysis of explicit knowledge. Guided and intentional WCF processing likewise encourages learners to engage in “cognitive comparison”: noticing what is new in the input obtained, and comparing what is noticed in the feedback received with one’s own representations of the L2. The written mode, therefore, is posited to offer favourable conditions for uptake of the feedback received, provided the learner’s own agency and active involvement in the processing of it. Importantly, there have been several recent attempts to link these theoretical predictions to SLA models, as done, for instance, by Gilabert, Manchón, and Vasylets (2016) in their analysis of the potential mediation of mode within the framework of Leow’s (2015) model of SLA processes, and Bitchener’s (2016a; see also Bitchener and Storch, 2016) account of the language learning potential of WCF processing within the framework of Gass’ (1997) cognitive model of input processing, which has been further elaborated in his own attempt at model building (Bitchener, 2016b). These are important developments that attest to the vitality of theorizing initiatives in the domain. Alongside these theoretical developments, additional contributions to disciplinary conversations have delved into potential outcomes of writing and WCF processing in terms of language learning processes and products. For instance, Manchón and Williams (2016) address the question of the kind of knowledge learners would be able to exploit under the processing

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conditions mentioned above, suggesting that there are two possibilities. One is that the time nature of writing may facilitate access to explicit or analysed knowledge, and the permanent record left by writing may allow L2 users to compare that knowledge to their written output. The other option is that the additional time associated with the offline nature of most forms of writing may allow learners to access implicit or unanalysed knowledge for inspection and analysis. In either case, the result, the researchers argue, would be heightened attention to formal aspects of language during writing (which has been confirmed in studies of writing processes), and the key empirical question is whether or not this potential greater linguistic processing may result in better output. Relevant empirical evidence for these claims has been obtained in task-modality studies, which are reviewed in section 14.3.1. Another important question in recent disciplinary debates relates to what changes might be expected to take place in L2 users’ knowledge resources as a result of engaging in the learning processes facilitated by the various criterial characteristics of writing and WCF processing mentioned so far. The debate in this realm is very much related to central concerns in SLA research on the development of explicit and implicit knowledge and the long-standing debate on the interface issue. From the point of view of writing, Manchón and Williams (2016) suggest that two potentially conflicting possibilities exist. One is that writing can actually lead to a change in linguistic knowledge by encouraging learners to analyze their (possibly inaccurate) implicit L2 knowledge … or, more significantly, by encouraging them to draw repeatedly on explicit knowledge, thereby promoting the restructuring of their L2 knowledge (p. 569–570) in the opposite direction—from explicit to implicit.

The other possibility is that writing may “simply encourage retrieval of explicit, analyzed L2 knowledge, perhaps improving the accuracy of output, or causing L2 writers to automatize their explicit knowledge …, but leaving the developing L2 system qualitatively unchanged” (p. 570). From the perspective of WCF processing, Bitchener (2016a) also contemplates the possibility of (i) expanding explicit, declarative knowledge (facilitated by types of WCF that would foster noticing with understanding, as propounded by Schmidt [2001]), (ii) proceduralizing this declarative knowledge (facilitated by the practice in retrieving the new knowledge for use while writing), and even (iii) converting explicit to implicit knowledge. The various theoretical predictions mentioned so far have been examined in a substantial body of empirical research. We have selected two global strands that have perhaps developed the most: task-related studies (encompassing research on task complexity, task modality, and task repetition) and studies looking into the effects of (processing) different kinds of WCF and potential mediating variables.

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14.3 The Language Learning Potential of Writing and Written Corrective Feedback Processing: Empirical Evidence 14.3.1  Task Modality Studies Relevant insights on the potential contribution of writing to language development have been generated in empirical studies that have examined task modality effects. This body of work has provided empirical evidence for some of the theoretical predictions outlined in the previous section by comparing complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of performance in oral and written tasks (cf. Ellis & Yuan, 2005; Genc, 2012; Kormos, 2014; Vasylets, Gilabert, & Manchón, 2017; Yu, 2009; Zalbidea, 2017). It has been consistently found that written output is more complex, especially in the area of lexical complexity and, to a lesser extent, in terms of grammatical complexity (but see Yu, 2009; Zalbidea, 2017, for divergent findings for lexical and syntactic complexity, respectively). The observed higher complexity in writing might be interpreted as evidence of the theoretically predicted deeper linguistic processing characteristic of written task performance. Importantly, we mentioned earlier that complexity of output has also been considered to potentially lead to restructuring, which would entail “change and development in the interlanguage system” (Skehan & Foster, 1999, p. 97). Restructuring is viewed as a par excellence developmental process, which would be facilitated by the more relaxed processing conditions in the written environment. As pointed out by Skehan (1996), because of the pressures during online communication, there might not be enough time for restructuring to occur as processing resources may be devoted in full to achieving communicative intentions. Writing, in contrast, allows for a more relaxed and strategic production whose outcome may be the observed higher complexity of written discourse. Task-modality studies have also recurrently reported higher accuracy in writing (cf. Ellis & Yuan, 2005; Kormos, 2014; Zalbidea, 2017; but see Vasylets, Gilabert, & Manchón, 2017, for the similar levels of accuracy in the two modes), which can be an indicator of enhanced focus on form in the written mode. The observed trend towards accuracy and focus on form in writing is further evidenced by the findings obtained in studies comparing the effects of collaborative work in different modes (cf. Adams, 2006; Adams & Ross-Feldman, 2008; Azkarai & García Mayo, 2015; García Mayo & Azkarai, 2016; Niu, 2009; Ross-Feldman, 2007), with a special focus on the comparative analysis of the “Language Related Episodes” (LREs) that learners produce during task performance. The insights obtained in this body of work distinctively show that different modalities trigger different learning opportunities, with collaborative writing (as opposed to speaking) tasks

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consistently engendering more LREs and drawing learners’ attention to the formal aspects of language to a greater extent. For instance, Niu (2009) found important quantitative and qualitative differences between the LREs elicited by oral and written production tasks. The written task generated more LREs and it also induced learners to pay more attention to grammar as well as to discourse features, including sentence structure, text connection, sentence connection, and sentence length. Based on findings from studies in which the collaborative writing task entailed both written and oral production (as the members of the dyads had to talk to each other while working on their written draft), Niu emphasized the power of combining the two modes as this may promote more learner attention to language forms than the oral production mode alone. This purported enhancement of learning through modes combination resonates well with Gilabert, Manchón, and Vasylet’s (2016) claim that acquisition may proceed in the mingling and interweaving of modes, where, for example, new forms in written or aural input foster acquisitional processes, which are later supported by input–output–feedback cycles, which in turn result in written or oral products. (p. 129)

In sum, the empirical evidence from task-modality studies clearly supports the case for the language learning that may derive from L2 writing tasks (combined or not with oral production). It must be admitted, however, that task-modality studies are not exempt from various methodological problems, which mainly stem from the insufficiently critical implementation of the oral-task-biased constructs and experimental conditions when researching written production (see Byrnes & Manchón, 2014b). Caution is also required when generalizing findings from task-modality studies because, although the extant research has been conducted in a variety of contexts with participants from diverse L1 backgrounds, most of it has targeted one particular learner group, namely adult learners of English, most commonly at an intermediate L2 proficiency level.

14.3.2  Task Complexity Studies Task complexity is a relevant variable in discussions of the language learning potential of writing because findings in cognitively-oriented L2 writing research distinctively point to the connection between task complexity, problem solving, and depth of linguistic processing, which are crucial elements in theoretical discussions of how and why writing may lead to L2 development (see Manchón & Roca de Larios, 2007). In addition, it makes theoretical and pedagogical sense to look into task complexity and language learning through writing on account of task-based language teaching (TBLT)-oriented predictions on the manner in which task complexity (that refers to the intrinsic cognitive demands posed by a task on learners’

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memory, reasoning, and attentional capacity) may influence task performance and, as a result, language learning. It is further assumed that the adjusted manipulation of cognitive task complexity can induce learners to engage in more effective language processing and use, which may result in beneficial effects for L2 production and L2 development. Accordingly, task complexity is considered a major task feature in fostering language learning via task (oral or written) performance. Two accounts of the potential effects of task complexity on L2 performance and learning opportunities have been proposed, and both have generated an enormous amount of empirical research, although only some of it is relevant for our present purposes. We are referring to Skehan’s TradeOff Hypothesis (Skehan, 2009, 2014) and Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2001, 2011). Although the theoretical predictions advanced by the Skehan and Robinson models were recognizably elaborated with the oral mode in mind (see discussion in Kormos, 2014 and Tavakoli, 2014), there is a sizeable amount of studies that have applied these frameworks to written task performance (e.g., Frear & Bitchener, 2015; Kormos, 2011; Ong & Zhang, 2010; Ruiz-Funes, 2015). Importantly, however, several voices (e.g., Byrnes & Manchón, 2014b; Manchón, 2014a) have cautioned against the uncritical application of the oral-mode-tailored concepts and models to writing, calling for a reconceptualization and rethinking of such important constructs as task or task complexity when applied to written production. When assessing the application of the cognitive TBLT models to writing, one must bear in mind that written task performance (for instance in academic settings) represents a challenging problem-solving activity, which already poses a significant load on learners’ cognitive resources (Manchón, 2014a). Additionally, the idiosyncratic characteristics of writing, such as its slow pace or output visibility, which purportedly make the written mode a beneficial language-learning site (as discussed above), can also be responsible for creating an environment in which task complexity effects can be deployed to an even better extent as compared to the hard-pressed online oral performance. Along these lines, Johnson (2017) assumes that, as the written conditions allow for a sustained focus on both meaning and form, “the effect of cognitive task complexity manipulation may be more pronounced for L2 written production” (p. 15). In short, it seems that writing conditions and task complexity could work in tandem to enhance the potential of tasks for language learning. Results of task complexity studies in the written mode are nevertheless inconclusive. For example, an early study by Kuiken, Mos, and Vedder (2005) found that written performance during the more demanding task was more accurate, but no task complexity effects were observed for syntactic and lexical complexity. In contrast, Ishikawa (2007), who also manipulated resource-directing task demands, found significant positive

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effects for increased task demands on complexity, accuracy, and fluency of L2 production. Importantly, similar findings in relation to the resource-directing complexity effects on L2 writing were also reported in the recent meta-analysis by Johnson (2017), who concluded that though the results provide no clear support for or refutation of the Cognition Hypothesis and its application to L2 writing, they provide some suggestion that L2 writers may respond to cognitively more complex tasks not only by producing more complex, more accurate language, but also by producing language more fluently. (p. 35)

In sum, there seems to be evidence in support of the view that the written mode can potentially channel task complexity effects in a somewhat more productive way than the oral mode. Additionally, the purported decrease in fluency associated with increased task complexity (which is hypothesized to be accompanied by a parallel increase in accuracy and complexity of production) does not seem to apply to writing, given that writers show enhanced performance in these three dimensions at the same time (cf. Ishikawa, 2007; Johnson, 2017). These findings provide evidence, albeit tentative, that the language learning potential of L2 writing tasks could be enhanced even more through the adjusted manipulation of cognitive task complexity, inducing deeper levels of processing and more effective linguistic behaviours in complex writing tasks. Despite their relevance, these conclusions ought to be taken with caution for a number of reasons. First, research is limited, which explains why the available meta-analyses include a relatively small number of studies (N = 9 oral studies in Jackson & Suethanapornkul, 2013; and N = 20 writing studies in Johnson, 2017). Second, notable variation in key methodological dimensions characterizes extant research, particularly with respect to operational definitions of task complexity, participants characteristics (L1, level of L2 proficiency, writing expertise, etc.), study designs, experimental tasks used, and production measures employed. This observed variation can explain the mixed nature of the findings obtained and also complicates the comparison of the results across the studies. Despite these crucial methodological considerations (which should constitute central concerns in future research agendas), there seems to be convincing evidence that task complexity might have the potential to enhance language learning through writing. This position is further supported by the insights obtained in the handful of studies that have compared the effects of task complexity in oral versus written performance within one experimental design. Their findings range from the absence of the interaction of task complexity and mode (Kuiken & Vedder, 2011; Zalbidea, 2017) to the significant differences in the way in which task complexity affects oral versus written production (Kormos & Trebits,

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2012; Tavakoli, 2014; Vasylets, Gilabert, & Manchón, 2017). The overall picture of findings is again mixed, which can be attributed to the methodological considerations mentioned above. Tavakoli (2014), for example, found that increases in task demands enhanced the syntactic complexity in both oral and written production in the expected way although the effects were larger in speech than in writing. In contrast, Vasylets, Gilabert, and Manchón (2017) found that written production was more sensitive to increases in task demands, as the changes in the complex writing task were more numerous and showed a better fit to the predictions of the Cognition Hypothesis. Given the observed connection between task complexity and mode, an important empirical question is to ascertain which variable is the relevant one when it comes to assessing the value of writing tasks for language learning: how complex the task is or whether it is performed in speaking or writing. The accumulated empirical evidence can be interpreted as suggesting that task modality has a greater effect on L2 learners’ production than task complexity. In this respect, Zalbidea (2017) reported that “task modality played a more robust role than task complexity in promoting improved linguistic performance” (p. 348), an idea also echoed by Ellis and Yuan’s (2005) observation that “the extent to which these learners produced fluent, complex and accurate language depended principally on whether the task involved speaking or writing” (p. 189). This brings us back to the idea expressed by Kormos (2014) that mode by itself is a powerful task design feature, although many empirical questions still exist as to its potential for language learning.

14.3.3  Task Repetition Studies Task repetition is another task implementation variable that has generated a great deal of interest in TBLT-oriented empirical research (see Bygate, 2006, 2018; Ellis, 2012; Bygate & Samuda, 2008) and again a variable that is relevant in discussions of language learning through writing. The central tenet in the task repetition literature is that repeating a task facilitates prioritizing a focus on expressing the intended meaning (during the first iteration of the task) while at the same time fostering a focus on form processes (during the repetition of the task), thereby leading to improved performance and promoting optimal conditions for acquisition to take place. Accordingly, task repetition is thought to offer “a particularly useful context for learning” (Bygate, 2006, p. 172) because “it can help to give learners space to work on matching meanings to language, and to integrate attention to the more redundant features (especially grammatical and phonological) into their speech” (Bygate, 2006, p. 172). These assumptions have been put to the empirical test and the general consensus is that repeating oral tasks does foster

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attention to language and results in increased fluency, accuracy, and complexity of production (see Manchón, 2014b, for a review of this research). Manchón (2014a, b) has reflected on task repetition from the perspective of the language learning potential of writing and has emphasized that any learning effects of repeating a task in writing may be mediated by the temporal dimension of written communication, on the one hand, and the characteristic features of the provision and processing of feedback in the environment of writing, on the other. This, it is argued, results in unique qualities of task repetition in the domain of writing. Thus, the temporal dimension of writing is relevant in the assessment of potential effects of task repetition, which in the writing condition have been posited to go beyond enhanced focus on form (the main effect propounded for oral task repetition performance). In this sense, the availability of time that characterizes writing (as discussed in previous sections) may represent an ideal condition not only for heightened attention to language in the second iteration of the task, but also for deeper linguistic processing as a result of a gradual “complexification of goals” being pursued. It follows that the different processing temporal demands of speaking and writing are likely to result in different effects of task repetition. However, at the moment these are theoretical predictions in need of empirical validation, as done in some studies to be reviewed below. A second characteristic of writing that Manchón also poses as contributing to the distinctive nature of task repetition in writing is the availability of feedback as part of the task repetition cycle. This is so because the ultimate aim of providing WCF is to foster L2 writers’ engagement in a form of task repetition (the revision of a previously produced text) by paying attention to whichever dimensions of writing (ideational, textual, linguistic, etc.) was targeted in the feedback. Seen from this perspective, written task repetition is a form of “external” task repetition (using Bygate’s [2006] dual distinction between internal and external task repetition; see discussion in Manchón, 2014a, b). Two sets of empirical questions have already been addressed in the few empirical studies that have looked into task repetition through the lens of the language learning potential of writing. On the one hand, empirical evidence for the predicted effects of task repetition in writing have been sought (Nitta & Baba, 2014). On the other hand, an incipient line of research is looking into the comparison of task repetition in speaking and writing as well as into the manner in which repeating writing tasks with and without the availability of (different forms of) WCF can assist acquisition (e.g., Sánchez, Manchón, & Gilabert, 2017). Nitta and Baba (2014) analysed the long-term effects of task-type repetition. Framed in Dynamic Systems Theory, their study followed forty-six

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first-year Japanese university EFL students over a period of forty weeks. The participants wrote a composition on a chosen topic for ten minutes each week, which were analysed using five indices of fluency, lexis, and grammar. Their results showed that whereas mere task repetition had limited effects, task-type repetition did have a marked effect on the lexical and grammatical dimensions of the written texts produced. The researchers also observed a developmental trend in the effects of task-type repetition, moving from an original increase in fluency towards a gradual improvement in the domains of lexical and syntactic complexity over the whole duration of the study. This is an interesting finding on the dynamics of the outcomes of external task-type repetition and one worth exploring further in future studies. The study also provided empirical support to previous claims in the oral domain (Ellis, 2009) regarding the crucial role played by massed repetition in bringing about expected learning gains. Sánchez, Manchón, and Gilabert’s (2017) recent study is also focused on task repetition in the domain of writing, this time comparing task-modality effects of task repetition, on the one hand, and the effects of task repetition in writing with and without the availability of different forms of WCF (direct and indirect), on the other. The study was conducted with low-proficiency secondary school students, who were divided into five groups: an oral task repetition group; a written task repetition group; a written task repetition group who received direct feedback; a written task repetition group who received indirect feedback; and, finally, a written task repetition group who repeated the task after engaging in self-correction. The study partially confirmed previous findings on the effects of task repetition in the oral mode (although these were limited to increased fluency), in addition to shedding light on the purported distinctive nature of task repetition in writing. More precisely, the researchers found that, in the case of low proficiency learners, the oral and written modalities appear to be distinct sites for task repetition language learning effects: the participants in this study benefited from repeating the task in the oral mode in terms of increased fluency during the second iteration of the tasks, whereas no evident improvements were associated with repeating the task in writing. The differences in performance found between the two modalities were explained as a function of the effects of time-on-task in the allocation of attentional resources: given that during writing learners have more time available to pay attention to the many aspects of the task, for low-proficiency learners, having the opportunity to repeat the task did not result in improved language performance as they were able to make full use of their L2 resources during the first iteration of the task. What is more, a decline in performance in the second iteration of the task in the no written corrective condition was observed, which can be taken as pointing to the availability of WCF as the key variable in bringing about

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language learning effects of task repetition in writing, at least with low proficiency students. The study is perhaps more valuable for the questions that it raises than for the answers it provides, and, in any case, it points to the relevance of adopting a critical stance towards generalizing observed learning effects of task repetition in the oral domain to the written mode.

14.3.4 WCF Studies: Effects on Learning and Mediating Variables As mentioned in the introductory section, the research interest in how and, if so, why WCF may lead to language development should be linked to a long-term debate in L2 writing studies on the effect of error correction, and its more recent reformulation as a dichotomy between “feedback for accuracy” and “feedback for acquisition” (Manchón, 2011b). There is general agreement that WCF does result in greater “grammatical” accuracy in immediate revisions, and it is also widely agreed that diverse sets of variables mediate potential effects. In this respect, Kang and Han’s (2015) recent meta-analysis distinctively shows that WCF (direct and indirect, focused and unfocused) leads to improved accuracy, although the observed effects are low to moderate. A different matter altogether is whether these effects are long lasting because, as rightly noted by Truscott (2007), the incorporation of corrections in the immediate revision of a previously produced text cannot be equated with the autonomous production of corrected L2 forms, which would be indicative of L2 development. Figure 14.2 is an attempt to synthesize main directions in the available research. Three different trends can be discerned. Trend 1 (the one that has attracted the most attention) has looked into the effects of WCF on revised texts, these being immediate revisions for the most part. Research in Trend 2 (so far only isolated initiatives) has analysed the manner in which different types of WCF foster depth of processing, a very relevant research preoccupation given that depth of processing is thought to constitute a key variable in bringing about language learning via writing and WCF processing. Finally, and again representing an emerging line Trend 1: Effects of uptake on immediate revisions (CAF; analysis of errors)

WR1

WCF

WR2

Trend 3: Depth of processing and effects on immediate revisions (as a function of types of WCF)

Processing

Trend 2: Depth of processing

Figure 14.2.  Main directions of research on the language learning potential of WCF.

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of research, Trend 3 corresponds to some initiatives concerned with the correlation between depth of processing and the nature of the revisions undertaken. In what follows we synthesize research conducted within Trend 1. A pre-test–treatment–post-test (at times followed by a delayed post-test) design has been the norm in the research strand that has looked into the effects of WCF on revisions. Thus, the standard design in this body of work is a three-stage procedure whereby participants are asked to produce a text (in individual or collaborative writing conditions) in stage 1, they are then provided with (various forms of) feedback in stage 2 (at times contrasted with a no feedback condition), and they are subsequently asked to revise their original texts in stage 3. Methodological procedures are diverse and include having the same participants writing under two feedback conditions, measuring the effect of the same feedback type in the writing of two groups of participants who differed with respect to some relevant independent variables, or making use of (quasi-)experimental (counter-balanced) designs in order to test the effects of different feedback conditions. Measures of learning have included both performance on language tests (pre- and post-treatment), features of the texts produced before and after the experimental intervention—including both quantitative and qualitative analyses of errors and holistic analytic measures of text features (Trends 1 and 3)—and noticing processes while processing feedback (Trend 2). It is important to mention that, for the most part, these measures of learning have targeted short-term learning (or “uptake”), rather than long-term learning (or “retention”), a limitation of research that needs to be addressed in future work. In any case, there have also been isolated initiatives that have tried to go beyond one-shot studies in an attempt to look into the effect of WCF throughout time and within a curricular framework, hence looking into the learning potential of WCF as part of the language learner’s global language learning experience (as done in Amelohina, Manchón, & Nicolás-Conesa, 2017). Another important development is represented by some recent studies that are notable attempts to look for empirical evidence on such crucial issues as, for instance, the use or development of explicit or implicit knowledge through feedback processing (cf. Shintani & Ellis, 2013). Many empirical efforts have been devoted to elucidating the learner-related, feedback-related, and language-related (i.e., kind of errors) variables that may mediate learning benefits associated with WCF processing (not always in conjunction, an important issue to be borne in mind, as noted below). Feedback-related variables include (i) type of WCF, namely direct/ indirect or focused/unfocused feedback with or without metalinguistic explanations (e.g., Bitchener, 2008; Bitchener & Knoch, 2008, 2010; Rummel, 2014; Shintani & Ellis, 2013; Shintani, Ellis, & Suzuki, 2014; Van

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Beuningen, De Jong, & Kuiken, 2008, 2012) and (ii) timing of the feedback provided, in terms of both whether feedback is provided on one or several occasions (see Kang & Han, 2015, for review) and, as investigated more recently, when in the writing process WCF is received, namely while writing—immediate, synchronous WCF—or after writing—delayed, asynchronous WCF (e.g., Lavolette, Polio, & Kahng, 2015; Shintani & Aubrey, 2016). Many contradictory findings exist even in studies on the same issue by the same research team, as is the case of studies comparing direct WCF and metalinguistic explanations by Shintani and colleagues: whereas Shintani and Ellis (2013) found an advantage for metalinguistic explanations, the results in Shintani, Ellis, and Suzuki (2014) showed an advantage for direct WCF. Task-related variables investigated so far include type of texts written and task conditions, i.e., whether task completion and WCF processing took place in individual or in collaborative writing conditions (see Bitchener & Storch, 2016, for a comprehensive review of research). Regarding text types and genres, in their meta-analysis of twenty-one studies published between 1980 and 2013, Kang and Han (2015) conclude that the greater effects were observed in studies using composition writing tasks (which were the majority in their corpus: fifteen out of twenty-one studies reviewed) followed by letter writing and journal writing. The learner-related variables that have been found to mediate the efficacy of WCF include L2 proficiency (with a general tendency for greater positive effects as proficiency increases; see review in Kang & Han, 2015); grammatical sensitivity together with knowledge of metalanguage (Sheen, 2007, 2010; Stefanou & Révész, 2015); inductive language learning capacity (Sheen, 2007); and motivation and strategic behaviour (Li, 2017). Issues related to the learner’s current or past language learning and teaching experience have also entered the scene (Amelohina, Manchón, & NicolásConesa, 2017; Rummel, 2014). This research has produced a wealth of empirical findings and, what is more important, has clearly showed the way to proceed in an attempt to advance research agendas. Two important moves in this direction are worth mentioning. On the one hand, Bitchener (2016a) recommends paying attention to the interaction of variables in explaining potential effects of WCF, which requires going beyond what he considers to be somewhat the “simplistic nature of the questions” (p. 128) guiding a substantial part of the extant WCF studies. He considers that the mere question of “whether one feedback option is more effective than another” is simplistic because we need to consider “the potentially moderating effect that other variables may have on the two options” (p. 128) and, importantly, the effects of the interaction of variables. On the other hand, it has also been suggested (Manchón, 2017) that future research agendas into the effects of WCF ought

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to go beyond investigating such effects in decontextualized, laboratorytype, research-oriented environments and, instead, embed research in a real instructional, curricular perspective whereby feedback provision and processing are an integral part of the entire L2 learner’s language learning experience. This, Manchón (2017) suggests, is a theoretically- and pedagogically-relevant direction for future research in the field.

14.4 Conclusion The theory and research reviewed in this chapter distinctively points to L2 writing as a favourable environment for language development from the dual perspective of the affordances of writing itself and the affordances of processing and making use of WCF. Missing in current research agendas, however, is the analysis of reading–writing connections (see Hirvela & Belcher, 2016) in an attempt to ascertain the role of reading in bringing about learning through writing. This should be an area worth exploring in future research. The insights obtained thus far shed light mainly on short-term learning effects, especially effects on learning products, i.e., the characteristics of the texts written as a function of task-related variables, or the nature of immediate revisions after receiving and processing WCF as a function of feedback-related, task-related, and learner-related variables. Therefore, any advancement in future research agendas is crucially dependent on whether or not a longer-term acquisitional perspective is adopted and, importantly, on whether or not further efforts are put into the very processing dimension of writing and use of WCF. As noted in the previous section, given the purported crucial relevance that the study of the interaction of variables may play in bringing about learning through writing and feedback processing, a further task for future research is to improve research designs, which entails in part going beyond single univariate quantitative designs. We are also convinced that we shall advance in our understanding of why and how writing can be a site for language learning if future research is characterized by mixed designs whereby quantitative data on products and processes is supplemented with in-depth, qualitative analysis of the processing dimension of writing and WCF processing. A final conclusion to be drawn relates to future SLA studies more generally. The evidence provided in this chapter calls for making L2 writing much more central in future SLA research agendas. Writing can indeed be a site for language learning, and hence our theories of how and why L2 learning happens and proceeds would be somehow incomplete if our global understanding of the phenomenon rests solely or primarily on the consideration of learning that derives from input processing and oral communication.

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We finish with Lourdes Ortega’s optimistic view of the future, which was included in one of the earliest collective reflections on the language learning potential of L2 writing. In her own words: there is reason for proactive optimism that the present momentum will be sustainable. Some readers in both fields [SLA and L2 writing] may even see reason for hope that it will eventually contribute to change in the landscape of both fields, by leaving a trail of valuable intellectual bridges among the relevant L2 writing and SLA research communities.  (Ortega, 2012, p. 413).

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Skehan, P., & Foster, P. (1999). The influence of task structure and processing conditions on narrative retellings. Language Learning, 49(1), 93–120. Stefanou, C., & Révész, A. (2015). Direct written corrective feedback, learner differences, and the acquisition of second language article use for generic and specific plural reference. The Modern Language Journal, 99(2), 263–282. Swain, M. (1995). Three functions of output in second language learning. In G. Cook & B. Seidhofer (eds.), For H. G. Widdowson: Principles and practice in the study of language. A Festschrift on the occasion of his 60th birthday (pp. 125–144). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swain, M. (2005). The Output Hypothesis: Theory and research. In E. Hinkel (ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (pp. 471–483). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Tavakoli, P. (2014). Storyline complexity and syntactic complexity in writing and speaking tasks. In H. Byrnes & R. M. Manchón (eds.), Taskbased language learning—Insights from and for L2 writing (pp. 217–236). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Truscott, J. (1996). The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes. Language Learning, 46(2), 327–369. Truscott, J. (1999). The case for “The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes”: A response to Ferris. Journal of Second Language Writing, 8(2), 111–122. Truscott, J. (2007). The effect of error correction on learners’ ability to write accurately. Journal of Second Language Writing, 16, 255–272. Van Beuningen, C. G., De Jong, N. H., & Kuiken, F. (2008). The effect of direct and indirect corrective feedback on L2 learners’ written accuracy. ITL: International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 156, 279–296. Van Beuningen, C. G., De Jong, N. H., & Kuiken, F. (2012). Evidence on the effectiveness of comprehensive error correction in second language writing. Language Learning, 62(1), 1–41. Vasylets, O., Gilabert, R., & Manchón, R. M. (2017). The effects of mode and task complexity on second language production. Language Learning, 67(2), 394–430. Williams, J. (2012). The potential role(s) of writing in second language development. Journal of Second Language Writing, 21, 321–331. Yu, G. (2009). Lexical diversity in writing and speaking task performances. Applied Linguistics, 31, 236–259. Zalbidea, J. (2017). “One task fits all”? The roles of task complexity, modality, and working memory capacity in L2 performance. The Modern Language Journal, 101(2), 335–352.

15 Working Memory in L2 Learning and Processing Zhisheng (Edward) Wen and Shaofeng Li

15.1 Introduction Working memory (WM) can be thought of as the limited memory capacity that allows us to hold a very small amount of information (e.g., the sev­ eral digits of our telephone numbers) in our mind and to simultaneously manipulate this information for completing some cognitive tasks in our daily life (Baddeley, 1986; Cowan, 1988). Since the inception of the sem­ inal WM model by the British psychologists Baddeley and Hitch (1974), the concept has received considerable enthusiasm from multiple subfields of cognitive sciences, spanning from such disciplines as psychology, linguis­ tics, neuroscience, biology, and computer science, to anthropology and philosophy (Miller, 2003; Carruthers, 2013; 2015). Concerted efforts are being poured in continuously from diverse research camps, which sub­ sequently give rise to the propagation of a dozen theoretical models of WM (Miyake & Shah, 1999), notwithstanding lingering debates and con­ troversies over the nature and structure of this key construct of human cognition (e.g., Baddeley, 2012; 2017; Cowan, 2014; 2017). Amid these waves of research endeavours, a noticeable movement has recently gained increasing credence, particularly among researchers who are more concerned with the applications of the WM concept in more practical areas of human cognition. One emerging trend is the attempt to integrate and incorporate multiple perspectives of WM models in cogni­ tive science towards a more reconciled and comprehensive understand­ ing of the nature, structure, and functions of WM, so as to interpret its important implications for such specific areas as cognitive development and academic learning (Dehn, 2008). For example, Fenesi et al. (2015) have recently integrated three currently dominant models of WM in cognitive psychology, namely, Baddeley’s (1986; 2003; 2012) multiple-component

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model, Cowan’s (1999; 2005) embedded-processes model, and Engle and Kane’s (2004) executive control model, with a view to reconceptualizing the WM construct and re-evaluating its implications for various academic learning domains of language comprehension and production, mathe­ matics, and multimedia learning. Following a similar approach, in this chapter we aim to develop an inte­ grative perspective on the relationship between WM and second language acquisition (SLA). Within language, one key domain of human cognition, WM plays a pivotal role in many essential aspects (Gathercole, 2007; Baddeley, 2017). Previously, considerable research has demonstrated that individual differences in WM fairly accurately predict the process and products of a whole range of native language learning domains and activities (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993; Baddeley, 2003; Cowan, 2011) as well as second language (L2) acquisition and processing (Wen, Mota, & McNeil, 2013, 2015; Linck et al., 2014; Grundy & Timmer, 2017; Li, in press). Remarkably, despite recognition of the close relationship between WM and language, not to mention the growing body of empirical stud­ ies conducted (separately) in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and applied linguistics, the exact links between WM and language still remain very much unspecified. This problem is particularly acute in the field of SLA, in which WM is presumably playing a bigger if not equal role (Wen, 2012; 2016). Overall, research in both fields should benefit from a viable framework for implementing WM in second language research. As such, the present chapter serves to fill up this niche. Specifically, we aim to summarize and further expand on insights from previous works (e.g., Wen, 2015; 2016; Li, in press) to offer an integrative perspective on WM and SLA. Towards this end, we begin with a theoretical overview of the general characterizations of the WM construct regarding its nature and structure. Following this theoretical overview, we move to further synthesize results and findings of empirical studies that have investigated distinctive effects of phonological WM and executive WM on specific L2 domains and skills. We conclude the chapter by highlighting the theo­ retical and methodological ramifications of this integrative account and its possible implications for the interdisciplinary research agenda of WM and SLA.

15.2 The Nature and Structure of WM: Three Characterizations As mentioned in the above section, scholars on the applied side of WM are increasingly calling for a unified understanding of the construct so that such an important concept reaches its full potential for implementation

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in more practical areas of human cognition. Indeed, notwithstanding lingering controversies and debates, three general characterizations can be derived from multiple perspectives on WM regarding its nature and structure (e.g., Miyake & Shah, 1999; Baddeley, 2012; Cowan, 2014; 2017). These include, namely, conceiving WM as (a) a limited capacity of human cognition, (b) a fractionated construct subsuming multiple components and functions, and (c) an activated portion of long-term memory (LTM). Each of these will be further elaborated below, as well as their possible implications for language learning and processing in general.

15.2.1  The Limited Capacity of WM The first and the most important design feature of WM that can be teased out from multiple perspectives in cognitive sciences relates to its core nature of being a limited capacity of human cognition (Carruthers, 2013; 2015). This signature feature of WM is generally reflected in the immedi­ ately accessible cognitive resources that are available for holding a certain amount of information (e.g., modality-specific information of phonolog­ ical-, visual-, spatial-nature, etc.) during the process of executing cogni­ tive activities. More specifically, such a limited capacity translates into a fundamental (memory) constraint impacting on a wide range of human cognitive activities in two ostensible fashions. First of all, WM constrains the limited units of information that can be held temporarily for manipulation in our heads in the service of task exe­ cution (or to use the term by Cowan, 2005, to “focus attention” upon). This limited mental capacity of WM is best captured by the most well-known concept of the “magical number seven plus or minus two” units of informa­ tion that is often attributed to its precursor of short-term memory (Miller, 1956). More recently, though, Cowan (1988, 2001; 2005) contends by cit­ ing both anecdotal facts and empirical evidence that the capacity of WM is unlikely to surpass “four plus or minus one” chunks of information. Be it either way (seven or four), the holding power of information in WM is severely restricted (well, within the range of four to seven!). Given this lim­ ited capacity and its consequential bottleneck effects that are permeating so many facets of our daily life (e.g., doing arithmetic, language compre­ hension, decision-making and planning, etc.), the concept of “WM limits” itself has been rendered as the “centered cognition” in the truest philosoph­ ical sense (Klingberg, 2008; Carruthers, 2015). Another aspect of the limited capacity of WM lies in the transient duration of the simultaneous storage and processing of information in our head when carrying out a certain cognitive task. That is to say, the information being held usually remains accessible to our (immediate) consciousness only for just a few seconds or so (between five and twenty;

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Waugh & Norman, 1965), and it will then gradually fade away unless rehearsed timely and repeatedly. That being said, the direct cause of this fleeting nature of WM is still a debatable issue among the different WM theorists (Conway et al., 2007; cf. the “Now or Never” Bottleneck Effect by Christiansen & Chater, 2016). For example, there is first of all the pro­ posal of the memory decay hypothesis held by such cognitive psychologists as Barrouillet and Camos (2012; 2015) in their time-based resource-sharing (TBRS) view of WM, which ascribes this to the fading of memory traces for later recall. Then, in contrast, there is also the interference view held by Oberauer and Lewandowsky (2013, 2014, 2016), who argue that such loss of information mainly arises from the interference resulting from distraction. Putting aside these debates over the exact amount of its holding power and the exact sources causing its limitation, most (if not all) WM models and theorists are subscribing to this signature feature of WM (Klingberg, 2008; Carruthers, 2013; 2015). More relevantly for language, a significant proportion of (if not all) aspects of language acquisition and processing activities are subject to this WM constraint. For example, WM is postu­ lated to underlie not just phonological representations (e.g., Pierce et al., 2017), but to also shape a wide range of grammatical phenomena such as the typology of word order (Hawkins, 2004), the minimization of depend­ ent distance (Gibson, 1998; Futrell, Mahowald, & Gibson, 2015; Liu, Xu, & Liang, 2017), the interpretation of pronouns, and the permissible cases of contraction (O’Grady, 2017).

15.2.2  WM Components and Functions The second important feature of WM that can be identified from nomo­ thetic theories in contemporary cognitive sciences relates to its overall design and structure. For a long time, Baddeley’s (2003, 2012; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) structural view of WM has dominated applications of this con­ cept in both theoretical and practical areas of human cognition (D’Esposito & Postle, 2015). In terms of WM structure then, in the classic standard model, Baddeley (2012, 2015; 2017) and colleagues have postulated four key components. These are: (a) the phonological short-term memory (or phonological loop in the original tripartite model) which handles soundbased linguistic materials; (b) the visuo-spatial sketchpad that deals with visual and spatial information; (c) an episodic buffer that serves to inte­ grate episodic information from all modality sources and connects closely with LTM; and finally (d) an executive component (executive WM) that is equivalent to the “central executive” component postulated in the classic model by Baddeley, which encapsulates the various executive operations and functions responsible for supervising and coordinating of attention allocated to the three modality-based buffer systems.

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Among these four putative components of WM, two of them have been researched quite thoroughly in relation to language acquisition and processing (Baddeley, 2003, 2015, 2017). On the one hand, considerable research has been conducted by the British and/or European WM camps (e.g., initiated by Baddeley and colleagues), which points to a close link between phonological WM (usually measured by a simple and storageonly version of memory span task, such as the digit span or the non­ word repetition span tasks) and significant aspects of language learning domains and activities (e.g., Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993; Baddeley, 2003). In particular, empirical evidence is converging on the instrumental role of phonological WM in acquiring novel phonological forms that are part and parcel of vocabulary acquisition and development (Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998). Notwithstanding, an alternative interpretation of WM effects on lan­ guage is emerging and gaining more credence, namely, the attentionoriented and executive control views of WM, as advocated by most North America-based cognitive psychologists such as Daneman and Carpenter, King and Just, Cowan, Engle, and Kane, among many others. The change in WM conception is accompanied by a shift in research paradigms on lan­ guage-focused inquiries. Instead of looking into the individual contribu­ tions of each component of WM, a growing body of studies are conducted in North America that tap into the individual differences of WM and their consequence for language processing activities such as reading compre­ hension and production. Within these North America-based WM research camps, two research paradigms are becoming quite well-established. On the one hand, Daneman and Carpenter (1980) have devised the more complex version of memory span task that taps into both storage and processing aspects of WM, i.e., the reading span task (1980) that consists of reading aloud an growing set of sentences and recall of the final words. Later, Waters and Caplan (1996) further refined this version, modifying the scoring proce­ dures by taking into account the recall, the reaction time, and the accu­ racy. An alternative complex version of memory span task was designed by Engle, Cantor, and Carullo (1992) which consists of operation and final word recall (i.e., the operation span task). In terms of overall results, this growing body of empirical studies has pointed to the significant role of the executive aspect of WM (i.e., executive WM) in a whole range of secondary and post-interpretive processes during language comprehension and pro­ duction (Daneman & Merikle, 1996; Waters & Caplan, 1996; Cowan, 2011). Putting aside the differences in research focus, the two research tradi­ tions, with these WM camps on either side of the Atlantic (Andrade, 2001), are producing empirical evidence converging on the two distinct compo­ nents of WM regarding their distinctive effects on language acquisition

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and processing. For the European (particularly the British) camp, research points to the close link between phonological WM and vocabulary learn­ ing and development, while for the North American camp, a strong link is thus forged between executive and control aspects of WM in relation to the processing activities of language comprehension and production. Combined, these two research traditions are lending theoretical and methodological support to the integrative perspective that we are propos­ ing in the next section.

15.2.3  The Interactions Between WM and LTM The third and final characterization of the WM construct that can be derived readily from nomothetic theories of WM concerns its relation­ ship with long-term memory (LTM). LTM distinguishes itself from WM in that it is of potentially unlimited capacity and stores all the knowledge permanently. In terms of contents in LTM, it can be postulated to con­ sist of two categories (following Ullman, 2001; 2016), which include (1) a declarative memory component that subserves fact-based knowledge (i.e., knowledge of “what”, such as lexical knowledge); and (2) a procedural memory component, that subserves skill-based or rule-based knowledge (i.e., knowledge of “how”, such as grammatical rules). Regarding the interactions between WM and LTM then, WM, as conceptualized in Baddeley’s (2012) standard model, serves as a gateway to the LTM knowl­ edge base. In other words, a bi-directional (i.e., two-way) flow of informa­ tion is envisaged to be taking place between multiple WM components (which tends to be domain specific, especially those of a phonological and visuo-spatial nature) and the LTM warehouse. In contrast, there is also the alternative view adopted by most North America-based cog­ nitive psychologists who conceive WM as the activated portion of LTM (e.g., in Cowan’s, 1999; 2005, embedded processes model). In this second and now more dominant view, the boundary between WM and LTM is becoming blurred (e.g., Hasson, Chen, & Honey, 2015; Jones & Macken, 2015). Increasingly, such a view is more compatible with evidence from modern cognitive sciences, and particularly cognitive neuroscience (Conway, Moore, & Kane, 2009; D’Esposito & Postle, 2015; Constantinidis & Klingberg, 2017).

15.2.4 Summing-Up To sum up this section, when the differences in epistemic stance and research focus among the multiple theoretical perspectives in cognitive psychology are sorted out and further reconciled, a more balanced con­ ception of WM can be derived. To recapitulate, WM is best characterized

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as the primary memory (as opposed to its sibling of secondary memory, aka LTM; James, 1890; Waugh & Norman, 1965) that consists of multiple com­ ponents and executive mechanisms or functions (accommodating both the structural view of Baddeley and colleagues as well as the functional view of North America-based researchers), with WM being an integral part of LTM. As we shall argue later, by drawing on insights from these multiple WM research camps (across the Atlantic), a more balanced account of the WM construct should be in place that will in turn help facilitate its implementation in more practical research, such as second language learning and processing, a topic that shall figure in the next section.

15.3 Empirical Studies of WM and SLA: A Synthesis of Results and Findings Whereas the above section deals with the theoretical aspects of WM, this section synthesizes the findings of the research on the associations between WM and the process and product aspects of L2 learning. We start with an overview of the research by reporting the findings of two recent meta-analyses and then review the findings on the associations between WM and specific aspects of SLA. In this chapter, we mainly focus our review on the related research on vocabulary, grammar, reading, and speaking and leave out writing and listening due to the lack of research on the role of WM in affecting the learning of these two language skills. As discussed in the above section, given the theoretical distinction between phonological WM and executive WM (EWM), and researchers’ interest in the differential effects of these two WM components on various aspects of SLA, we will discuss the results separately where it is necessary. Furthermore, we distinguish two types of research based on their research design: predictive and experimental. In predictive research, no instructional treatment is implemented, and the interest is in investigat­ ing WM as a determinant of learning success. Typically, the researcher obtains two sets of scores—one for WM and one for language proficiency— and conducts analyses of a correlational nature to determine the pre­ dictive power of WM for learning outcomes. In experimental research, by contrast, the researcher explores the effects of WM under carefully manipulated treatment conditions. We argue that experimental WM stud­ ies, especially those investigating whether WM plays different roles under different learning conditions, are of more theoretical and pedagogical sig­ nificance. Results of this kind are more revealing about the mechanisms through which WM influences the process and outcome of L2 learning.

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Therefore, they are likely to provide more valuable implications for ways to adjust instruction to cater to learners’ individual differences in WM.

15.3.1  Overall Effects of WM on SLA Recently, two meta-analyses have been conducted on the associations between WM and aspects of L2 learning and processing. One, which is conducted by Linck et al. (2014), aggregated 748 correlation coefficients reported in 79 studies. The meta-analysis showed an overall weak cor­ relation between all measures of WM and language proficiency, r = .25; executive WM was found to be more predictive of learning than pho­ nological WM, r = .27 and .17, respectively; and verbal measures (i.e., language-related) demonstrated stronger predictive power than nonver­ bal measures, r = .26 versus r = .18. However, the meta-analysts took a coarse-grained approach without distinguishing predictive and experi­ mental studies, and they investigated whether different components of WM had differential effects on specific aspects of learning such as vocab­ ulary or reading comprehension. Also, the meta-analysis did not seem to exercise strict quality control, and it left out some relevant studies. Notwithstanding, the results were based on a large number of studies and are indicative of the overall effects of WM on SLA. The overall weak predictive power of WM is confirmed by Li’s (in press) meta-analysis of the research on the associations between two cognitive aptitudes—WM and language aptitude—and the process and product aspects of second language interaction. The process aspects of interaction refer to what happens during interaction or features that may be condu­ cive to learning, such as the noticing of corrective feedback and modified output; the product of interaction refers to the effects of instructional treatments measured through pre-tests and post-tests. The meta-analysis showed that the predictive power of WM for the process dimensions of interaction was variable and inconsistent and that its correlations with the effects of corrective feedback were weak: r = .23 for immediate effects, and r = .08 for delayed effects. Conversely, language aptitude was found to be a much stronger predictor of treatment effects: r = .42 for immediate effects and r = .32 for delayed effects. Based on the results of this and Linck et al.’s (2014) meta-analyses, Li argues that as a domain-general cognitive device implicated in almost all areas of academic learning, WM does not appear to be as important as language aptitude, a domain-specific construct that is exclusive to language learning. In addition, Li also coded the different types of instructional treatments as explicit and implicit and found that both WM and language aptitude were more strongly correlated with the effects of explicit treatments than implicit treatments. These results sug­ gest that both cognitive factors are essential for conscious learning.

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15.3.2  WM on L2 Vocabulary and Grammar Learning 15.3.2.1 Vocabulary The studies on vocabulary can be divided into two broad types: those examining vocabulary size as the outcome variable (predictive research) and those investigating treatment effects on learning rate (experimen­ tal research). Within each category, the research can be further divided according to whether the predictor variable is phonological short-term memory (PSTM) or executive WM. Phonological short-term memory has been found to be a predictor of vocabulary size, and the finding was obtained for both adults (Hummel, 2009) and young children (Farnia & Geva, 2011; Masoura & Gathercole, 2005). Executive WM, however, has been found to be a weak and unstable predictor of vocabulary size (D’Angiulli, Siegel, & Serra, 2004; Engel de Abreu & Gathercole, 2012; Jean & Geva, 2009). Experimental studies typically include one or more treatment sessions where learners were engaged in so-called “paired associate” tasks in which learners were presented with L2 words and their first language (L1) translations. This research shows that phonolog­ ical short-term memory was important for learning new vocabulary at initial stages of learning (Atkins & Baddeley, 1998; Martin & Ellis, 2012; Speciale, Ellis, & Bywater, 2004). However, at more advanced stages, where learners had an extensive learning experience, phonological short-term memory stopped being a significant predictor, and previous vocabulary knowledge emerged as a more important factor (Cheung, 1996; French & O’Brien, 2008; Masoura & Gathercole, 2005). Executive WM was also found to be predictive of learning rate in studies where learners had no background in the target language (Kempe, Brooks, & Kharkhurin, 2010; Martin & Ellis, 2012), but because of the lack of relevant research, it remains unknown whether it is less predictive of vocabulary learning at more advanced stages of learning—as has been found for phonological short-term memory. We would like to highlight the fact that in almost all experimental stud­ ies on the role of WM in vocabulary learning, treatment tasks take the form of discrete mechanical practice where learners were asked to memo­ rize target words and their meanings. This type of instruction emphasizes rote learning, which is characteristic of traditional audiolingual classes. It deviates from the currently popular meaning-oriented approach where linguistic forms are learned and practised through meaning-primary com­ prehension and production tasks. There is, therefore, an urgent need for investigating how WM fares in such tasks. Such tasks are of particular relevance to executive WM, which is posited to be important for the learn­ ing that happens in real-time tasks where learners need to engage in the constant shift between form and meaning.

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15.3.2.2 Grammar Predictive research has show that phonological short-term memory and executive WM were both correlated with grammar learning (Engel de Abreu & Gathercole, 2012; Hummel, 2009), even after partialling out the influence of learners’ previous grammar knowledge (French & O’Brien, 2008). However, Serafini and Sanz (2016) reported that WM was more relevant for initial grammar learning, and as learners moved to more advanced levels, its effects weakened—a pattern similar to vocabulary learning. In this study, L2 Spanish learners at beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels were tested on ten grammatical features at three time points during and after a semester of instruction. It was found that pho­ nological short-term memory and executive WM were only predictive of the beginners’ and intermediate learners’, but not the advanced learners’, grammar knowledge. While the predictive studies simply showed significant correlations between the predictor and criterion variables, experimental studies revealed whether the effects of WM had to do with the characteristics of the instructional treatments. Two experimental studies where learners had no previous knowledge about the target language showed that both types of WM were predictive of the effects of instructional treatments involving discrete item-based learning (Kempe, Brooks, & Kharkhurin, 2010; Martin & Ellis, 2012). In both studies, the instruction was computer­ ized and learning happened inductively by understanding input materials and receiving feedback containing the correct linguistic models. It would seem that WM is relevant when learners are involved in the active process­ ing of input materials and when they have a heavy processing load during real-time learning tasks. However, the above two studies only examined one learning condition, and studies investigating the differential roles of WM in multiple learning conditions allow us to have a clearer picture about what instructional characteristics may contribute to the presence and absence of WM’s impact. In this regard, the studies on corrective feed­ back are revealing. The feedback studies investigated the interaction between WM and the effectiveness of different types of corrective feedback, which refers to responses to learners’ erroneous utterances. Goo (2012) found that exec­ utive WM was only predictive of the effects of recasts (the reformulation of a wrong utterance with the meaning intact), but not those of metalin­ guistic feedback (i.e., rule explanation), on the learning of a complicated linguistic target—the English that-trace filter. Li (2013a, b) reported that when learners received metalinguistic correction (rule explanation + cor­ rect form), executive WM had a positive effect on the learning of Chinese classifiers but a negative effect on the perfective –le. WM was not associ­ ated with the effects of recasts for either linguistic target. Yilmaz (2013)

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reported that executive WM was unrelated to the effects of recasts but was predictive of the effects of explicit correction, which informed the learner of the problematic nature of an utterance followed by the provision of the correct form. What do these seemingly conflicting results suggest? One notion the researchers resorted to when interpreting the absence or presence of the effects of WM is noticing. Goo argued that WM was correlated with the effects of recasts because recasts were implicit and WM was essential for the noticing of the corrective force of such feedback. Metalinguistic feed­ back was explicit, which made noticing unimportant, and this, in turn, made WM irrelevant in this learning condition. Both Li and Yilmaz inter­ preted their results as suggesting that the effects of WM were only evident under explicit learning conditions. In other words, the effects of WM are observable only when learners notice the corrective intention of feedback. However, the arguments are unconvincing if we consider the fact that in these studies the treatments contained intensive feedback targeting a single linguistic target throughout, which made recasts very salient, even though it was intended to be implicit. We interpret the results differently. First, we argue that the role of WM is attributable to the onerous process­ ing burden imposed on the learner. In Goo’s recast condition and Yilmaz’s explicit correction, learners received the correction of their wrong utter­ ances repeatedly, which required them to deploy their WM resources to constantly store and process the received information to induce the underlying linguistic regularities. In Li’s study, the learning of Chinese classifiers was more item-based than rule-based, and repeated metalin­ guistic correction of the wrong use of different classifiers posed great chal­ lenges on learners’ WM. Second, noticing may indeed serve as a trigger for WM effects, but there needs to be a distinction between different levels of noticing. Noticing at the level of detection, or simply noticing the pres­ ence of the linguistic target as in the recast conditions of Li’s and Yilmaz’s studies, may not have imposed participatory demands and therefore did not tax WM. Noticing at the level of processing, as in Yilmaz’s explicit correction and Li’s metalinguistic correction, obligated learners to analyse the received input using their WM resources. Third, the metalinguistic feedback in Goo’s and Li’s studies consisted of rule explanations about complicated linguistic structures; the feedback may not have imposed a burden on WM resources and may have implicated language analytic abil­ ity instead, as Li (2013a) showed. WM, therefore, may not be important for the learning of metalinguistic knowledge—a claim that has been borne out by further empirical evidence. For example, Martin and Ellis (2012) found that although phonological short-term memory was predictive of grammar learning tested through translation tasks, it was not predictive of learners’ ability to describe

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grammar rules after receiving the treatment that encouraged inductive learning. Roehr and Gánem-Gutiérrez (2009) found that executive WM was not a significant predictor of L2 metalinguistic knowledge, and that the two constructs also clustered around different factors. Therefore, we can conclude, albeit tentatively, that WM, be it phonological or executive WM, is important for grammar learning, but may not be important for the learning of metalinguistic knowledge. A related issue is whether WM facilitates the acquisition of explicit or implicit knowledge. Ellis (2005) defined explicit knowledge as (1) primar­ ily knowledge of which learners are aware and (2) secondarily knowledge that learners can verbalize, that is metalinguistic knowledge or, rather, metalanguage. The former is measurable through tasks that allow learn­ ers to access their conscious knowledge, such as grammaticality judgment, while the latter is gauged through tasks tapping into their knowledge about rules and terms about language per se. We have pointed out that WM may not be relevant for the acquisition of metalanguage. The ques­ tion that remains is whether it leads to conscious knowledge. Implicit knowledge, Ellis stated, refers to knowledge which learners are not aware of and cannot verbalize; it is the knowledge accessible in spontaneous language production. Implicit knowledge has been measured through elicited imitation or oral production tasks. One problem that prevents us from reaching firm conclusions about whether WM facilitates explicit or implicit knowledge is the failure in many studies to distinguish the two knowledge types in the measurement of treatment effects. Based on limited evidence, it appears that the effects of executive WM were evident on tests of explicit (Goo, 2012; Li, 2013a) as well as implicit knowledge (Kim, Payant, & Pearson, 2015; Li, 2013a; Li, Ellis, & Zhu, in press). Révész (2012) reported that phonological short-term memory was only correlated with learners’ scores on an oral test but not on a written test, while the opposite was true for executive WM. Révész pointed out that this may suggest that phonological short-term memory was impor­ tant for the acquisition of implicit knowledge while executive WM was facilitative of explicit knowledge. Obviously, Révész’ speculation needs further verification. Our view is that the knowledge learned through WM, whether it is phonological short-term memory or executive WM, is per­ haps partly explicit and partly implicit, although phonological short-term memory is more likely to lead to implicit knowledge because it taps the ability to internalize linguistic input as unanalysed chunks. Thus far, we have shown that the influence of WM surfaces when the treatment levies processing pressure on the learner. Is there evidence showing that the role of WM is wiped out by means of alleviating learn­ ers’ processing burden? The findings of several recent studies suggest a positive answer to this question. Suzuki and DeKeyser (2017) found that

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executive WM was correlated with the effects of massed instruction where the treatment was intensive, rather than the effects of spaced instruction where the treatment was spread out. Sanz et al. (2016) conducted two experiments that differed in one aspect—whether grammar instruction was provided prior to practise activities—and found that executive WM was a significant predictor when there was no prior grammar instruction. The researchers argued that providing prior grammar instruction lessened learners’ cognitive burden and levelled out the effects of WM. This spec­ ulation was further confirmed by Li, Ellis, & Zhu. (in press), who reported that executive WM was not a significant predictor of the effects of the treatment comprised of pre-task instruction followed by communicative tasks, nor was it predictive of the treatment where learners received cor­ rective feedback after the learners completed the communicative tasks. However, it was a significant predictor of the effects of the treatment con­ dition where the learners received corrective feedback during their task performance.

15.3.3  WM on L2 Skills Learning 15.3.3.1 Reading We would like to start this section by reporting the results of Daneman and Merikle’s (1996) meta-analysis of the research into the associations between WM and reading comprehension in L1, learning. The metaanalysis showed that both executive WM and phonological WM were sig­ nificantly predictive of reading comprehension, but the former showed stronger predictive power. The finding is not surprising given that exec­ utive WM involves not only information storage but also information processing, which is critical for reading comprehension. In L2 research, a similar pattern has been observed. It has been found that executive WM, but not phonological WM, was predictive of reading comprehension (Geva & Ryan, 1993; Harrington & Sawyer, 1992). Further evidence for the importance of the executive component of WM in reading comprehension comes from Alptekin and Erçetin (2009), who distinguished literal and inferential reading, with the former refer­ ring to questions whose answers are transparent and could be easily located in the reading text and the latter to questions whose answers must be inferred. The researchers found executive WM was only corre­ lated with inferential reading, but not literal reading. In a similar vein, Andersson (2010) investigated the effects of the central executive or attention control (aka, executive WM) and phonological WM on dialogue comprehension—a simple task—and story comprehension—a complex task. It was found that only executive WM was a significant predictor of the complex task. Another theme that has emerged is that for L2, but not

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L1, WM measures were correlated with L2 reading (Alptekin & Erçetin, 2010; Miyake & Friedman, 1998; Geva & Ryan, 1993), suggesting the impact of L2 knowledge in the mediating role of WM. Furthermore, simi­ lar to the pattern found in grammar and vocabulary, there is evidence for the possibility that WM is more important for reading comprehension at initial rather than advanced stages of L2 learning (Walter, 2004). Overall the research on reading is predominantly predictive, exploring whether WM is correlated with reading comprehension. There is a lack of experimental research investigating whether and how WM is related to the effects of reading treatments on the development of reading comprehension and L2 knowledge. One study that exemplifies how this line of research can be conducted is by Leeser (2007). It examined the effects of topic familiarly and WM on meaning comprehension and noticing of a grammar feature. Leeser identified a very interesting interaction between the independent and dependent variables. The study showed that topic familiarity had a positive influence on both comprehension of the con­ tent and learners’ noticing of the linguistic target. However, the impact of WM on comprehension and form-related outcomes depended on topic familiarity. Specifically, it was found that, for meaning comprehension, WM was facilitative for familiar topics, but for form recognition, it had a favourable effect when the topics were unfamiliar. The author spec­ ulated that for comprehension, WM was relevant for familiar topics because it was a space where previous knowledge was integrated with current information of the ongoing text. However, when it comes to the processing of linguistic forms, high WM may have a harmful effect when the topic was familiar because additional cognitive resources resulting from learners’ previous knowledge about the topics may have interfered with linguistic processing. We are not certain about the plausibility of the researcher’s interpretations of the results, and we also doubt whether formrecognition (asking learners to spot forms they saw from the reading texts) is a reliable measure of learning. However, we deem the study an initiative demonstrating the fruitfulness of extending the scope of inquiry beyond comprehension and examining how reading treatments may interact with WM in affecting both comprehension ability and linguistic development.

15.3.3.2 Speaking In addition to the distinction between predictive and experimental research, the research on speaking can be further split into two sub-­ categories according to whether speech performance was assessed subjec­ tively or objectively. Subjective measures refer to raters’ impressionistic judgments, while objective measures refer to indexes of fluency (e.g., pause length), accuracy (e.g., the number of errors), and complexity (e.g., ratio of subordinate clauses), calculated based on the transcripts of

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learners’ speech samples. Predictive research showed that on subjective measures, positive correlations were found between executive WM and fluency (Fehringer & Fry, 2007) as well as overall performance (Kormos & Sáfár, 2008). Phonological WM was uncorrelated with rated accented­ ness (Hu et al., 2013) or comprehensibility (Venkatagiri & Levis, 2007). This finding suggests that the phonological component may be primarily a device for storing novel linguistic stimuli and that it may not be important for sound production or the phonological aspects of speech production (similar to the argument made by Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998). With regard to objective measures, O’Brien et al. (2006, 2007) reported that phonological WM was a significant predictor of the development of the fluency and accuracy aspects of L2 oral production. A few experimental studies have been conducted based on the theoret­ ical models of task-based learning (Robinson, 2011; Skehan, 2014), which claim that manipulating the procedural and conceptual aspects of tasks may impact task performance in different ways; Robinson called the two types of variables resource-dispersing and resource-directing variables, respec­ tively. Skehan argued that due to L2 learners’ limited cognitive resources, tasks should be implemented in a way that eases the burden on learners’ WM, such as by allowing learners to plan before performing an oral task. Robinson’s theory focuses more on task complexity, holding that complex tasks direct learners’ attention to complex linguistic forms. Robinson pre­ dicts that the effects of individual differences are more likely to appear when learners perform complex tasks than simple tasks. Several studies based on Skehan’s theory have investigated the medi­ ating effects of WM on speech performance in strategic and within-task planning conditions. In strategic planning, learners are allowed to plan the content and language prior to task performance, whereas in­­within-task planning learners are encouraged to plan during task p ­ erformance. The research shows that while executive WM was related to the effects of within-task planning, it was not related to the effects of strategic plan­ ning (Ahmadian, 2012; Li & Fu, 2017). Li and Fu speculated that this is because (1) the within-task planners were able to monitor their speech using their WM resources while the strategic planners were unable to monitor because they performed the task under time pressure, and (2) in the strategic planning condition, learners’ processing burden during task performance was eased in that much of the planning work was shifted from the during-task stage to the pre-task stage. However, in order to have a clear picture of how WM affects task performance, it needs to be investi­ gated in more task conditions such as a condition where neither strategic nor within-task planning is allowed and a condition where both strategic and within-task planning are allowed. Another resource-dispersing varia­ ble that has been investigated is task structure. Kormos and Trebits (2011)

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divided learners into two groups: one group was required to tell a narra­ tive based on pre-sequenced pictures, and the other had to make up a nar­ rative based on unrelated pictures. The study showed that executive WM was correlated with the performance of the structured task, but not of the unstructured task. The researchers speculated that this was because when performing the structured task, the learners had to find linguistic forms to match the prescribed content. In the unstructured task, however, the learners had the freedom to select the forms available in their linguistic repertoire and avoid those with which they were unfamiliar, thus alleviat­ ing the burden on WM. One study based on Robinson’s theoretical model examined whether the influence of WM varied as a function of task complexity, operational­ ized as presence or absence of reasoning demands (Crespo, 2011). Two ver­ sions of the same decision-making task were developed. In the complex task, the learners had to consider more factors and figure out the relation­ ships between more elements, and they had access to fewer resources. WM was tested in three ways: as executive WM, phonological WM, and attention control (the Central Executive). Only phonological WM showed a significant effect, under both task conditions. The study failed to con­ firm Robinson’s prediction that complex tasks are more likely to impli­ cate WM. As can be seen, there is a lack of research on the potentially com­ plex relationships between WM and the various resource-directing and resource-dispersing variables in affecting speech production. Also, although major theoretical models of task-based learning all posit an important role for WM, there is a lack of fine-grained theoretical elabora­ tion of how the different components of WM are related to the different aspects of speech production.

15.3.4 Summing-Up The above research synthesis has provided a clearer (though not yet com­ plete) picture of emerging patterns regarding the distinctive effects of the two WM components (i.e., phonological WM and executive WM) on specific SLA learning domains and activities. More specifically, regarding phonological WM, it has been generally found to be closely related to some acquisitional and developmental aspects of such mental representa­ tional domains as vocabulary learning (e.g., in acquiring new phonolog­ ical forms, in predicting vocabulary size, etc.), grammar learning (e.g., in learning of implicit or unanalysed chunk-based knowledge, particu­ larly among beginning and intermediate learners as opposed to advanced learners), and development of L2 fluency (by objective assessment). On

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the other hand, the executive WM component has been shown to be more relevant to a number of cognitively demanding processes mainly involved in L2 skill learning, including selective processes in reading and speaking as well as some L2 interactional processes in grammar learning (explicit learning, noticing of corrective feedback, etc.). Taken together, these results and findings from most of these current WM–SLA empirical studies lend support to the basic tenet and hypotheses of the Phonological/Executive (P/E) Model (Wen, 2016), which point to the dis­ tinct effects of phonological and executive WM on specific SLA domains and skills. Notwithstanding, the research synthesis conducted here also revealed the lack of studies looking into some potentially important areas of SLA where WM is likely to exert significant impacts. These include, for example, the acquisition and development of L2 formulaic sequences or chunks, both of which, as postulated by the P/E Model, are likely to implicate phonological WM among L2 learners of low proficiency, and executive WM among more advanced L2 learners (Ellis, 1996, 1997, 2012, 2017; Wen, 2016, 2017; also see Skrzypek, 2009, and Foster, Bolibaugh, & Kotula, 2014, for initial attempts). In terms of L2 skills learning, very few studies have probed into WM effects on listening and writing. Finally, in terms of research design, most of the empirical studies reviewed here are cross-sectional; there is an obvious lack of studies conducted by incorpo­ rating the longitudinal design that can track down the trajectory growth of the two WM components as participants’ L2 proficiency progresses. All these issues and many others should hold great promise for future investigations towards a more comprehensive picture of the WM–SLA nexus.

15.4  Conclusion and Implications for Future Research It should be apparent from the chapter by now that the initial motivation for developing an integrative framework for implementing WM in SLA is to work out the common grounds that are shared by both WM research in cognitive science on the one hand and language learning in applied linguistics on the other (Wen, 2016). Despite the considerable research on both sides, almost all of them have been done separately up until now. As a matter of fact, given the interdisciplinary nature of this line of inquiry, it should be beneficial if both fields can communicate with each other more effectively (Wen, Mota, & McNeil, 2015). We thus call for more concerted efforts from both sides towards this interdisciplinary research agenda for WM and SLA (Wen, 2016).

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In terms of theoretical implications, as we discussed in section 15.2, recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift from the “structural” view to the “functional” view of WM conception in current cognitive psy­ chology, particularly within cognitive neuroscience. However, while the multiple components of WM as conceived in Baddeley’s structural view are relatively stable, the exact nature and structure of cognitive mech­ anisms and executive functions associated with the two components respectively, or the WM construct as a whole, are still far from conclu­ sive. So, it is hoped that more efforts can be directed towards applying state-of-the-art technology (eye-tracking, event-related potentials, func­ tional magnetic resonance imaging, etc.) to pin down the core memory mechanisms and executive functions underlying the maintenance, access, and control of the two languages in the bilingual brain (Altarriba & Isurin, 2013). Such a lack of progress in theoretical advances also gives rise to two direct consequences for methodology. First of all, despite the shift in both the theoretical conception and research focus of WM, research into the assessment procedures of WM functions are even more seriously lagging behind. Besides, there is also the inherent problem with current WM span tasks, with their implicit assumption of a monolingual participant. Such an assumption actually runs anathema to the current social trend, which indicates that we are facing a growing number of bilinguals (as opposed to monolinguals). Therefore, future research should not only focus on the theoretical demarcation of WM functions but also develop reliable and valid WM span tasks that can tap into these fine-grained executive func­ tions during SLA. To end the chapter then, it can be concluded that an integrative perspective of WM and SLA has its theoretical foundation in, and derives strong empirical support from, the broad theoretical concep­ tualizations of the WM construct in contemporary cognitive sciences in alignment with the more specific WM-related explorations in both cognitive psychology and applied linguistics. Thus, it is hoped that com­ bining research insights from both fields to advocate this more principled approach to implementing WM in practical SLA research will have significant theoretical and methodological implications for future research and practice. Given that the interdisciplinary enterprise of WM and SLA is still at its infancy stage (Williams, 2015), there is still a wealth of issues and topics to be explored before we can have a complete pic­ ture of the fine-grained specifications of the intricate links constituting the “WM–SLA nexus” (Wen, 2012, 2016). Therefore, it constitutes our ongoing undertaking and our ultimate goal to integrate WM theories with SLA theories so as to advance developments in both fields towards synergy effects.

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16 Language Aptitudes in L2 Acquisition Gisela Granena

16.1 Introduction Some adults learn a second language (L2) more rapidly and/or to a higher level of proficiency than others. One of the factors that can explain such individual differences (IDs) in rate of acquisition and/or ultimate attainment is language aptitude, defined as a combination of cognitive and perceptual abilities that are advantageous in second language acquisition (SLA; Carroll, 1981; Doughty et al., 2010). This chapter provides a state-ofthe-field overview of language aptitude research in SLA. A blend of theory and empirical work on this area, the chapter offers an approach to understanding and measuring aptitude components and functions in L2 learning. Starting with a review of the past and present of the construct, with a special emphasis on recent advances, the chapter moves on to a discussion of its predictive validity in naturalistic and instructed SLA and ends with a look into the future by analysing the implications of aptitude research for L2 instruction.

16.2  The Construct of Language Aptitude Language aptitude is defined as a combination of cognitive and perceptual abilities that are advantageous in second language acquisition (SLA; Carroll, 1981; Doughty et al., 2010). Carroll (1993) referred to this combination of abilities as “aptitudes” (p. 675) and claimed that they were partly innate, fairly stable, and relatively enduring traits. This special talent for language can predict how fast an L2 is acquired (i.e., rate of attainment) and how successfully it is acquired (i.e., ultimate attainment). Although experts and laypeople alike would agree on the generic notion of aptitude

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as a special talent for language, the theoretical construct behind this popular notion has remained somewhat elusive in the SLA field. While there is agreement that language aptitude is a complex of cognitive abilities, some of which may be modified through training (e.g., Au et al., 2015; Jaeggi et al., 2011), it has been conceptualized in a variety of ways in SLA. The most influential aptitude model by far, and the one that has shaped the understanding of aptitude in SLA for decades, is Carroll’s (1962) four-factor model. Carroll identified four major aptitude subcomponents: phonetic coding ability (the ability to codify, assimilate, and recall phonetic material); rote memory (the ability to recall words in an unfamiliar language); grammatical sensitivity (the ability to identify the grammatical functions of words or phrases in sentences); and inductive language learning ability (the ability to figure out the rules of systematically vary­ ing language materials). Three of these four factors (phonetic coding, grammatical sensitivity, and rote memory) were included as part of the Modern Language Aptitude Test battery (MLAT; Carroll & Sapon, 1959), while inductive language learning ability was measured in the initial battery of tests, but was not included as part of the final five-test battery. Carroll’s conceptualization of aptitude included domain-specific abilities that rely on explicit cognitive processes. It explicitly links L2 learning rate to verbal, language-dependent cognitive abilities that depend on executive attentional resources. For example, phonetic coding is measured by asking participants to listen to sounds and learn the corresponding phonetic symbols, an ability that, like rote memory, engages explicit associative memory processes. Inductive learning ability, on the other hand, is measured as explicit induction by asking participants to figure out rules, and, like grammatical sensitivity, it relies on analytical ability, a point already made by Skehan (1989). College literature courses, knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary, and knowledge of Latin have been shown to correlate with scores on the MLAT tests (Markessinis, 1968). Although the MLAT is known to be a good predictor of course grades (Carroll & Sapon, 2002), especially in the context of the audiolingual teaching method, it was not designed to predict communicative success. In fact, Markessinis (1968) reported that “active performance” was “predictable by relatively lower scores on section III of the MLAT, time abroad, occasional or frequent home use of the foreign language; early language study; introductory and intermediate courses; poor rote memory” (p. 28). This suggests no relationship (or even a negative one) between MLAT scores and actual oral communicative competence. The MLAT was, in sum, designed to predict foreign language learning in initial intensive language courses that focused on language structure. Its predictive power is, however, less strong in non-intensive or more communicative types of instruction (Carroll, 1962, 1990; Robinson, 2007; Sáfár & Kormos, 2008).

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Since the creation of the MLAT in the 1950s, there have been significant developments in areas of cognitive psychology, such as working memory and implicit learning, as well as in language teaching methodology and in understanding how second languages are learned (Long & Doughty, 2009). The two latest aptitude test batteries in the SLA field (LLAMA and Hi-LAB), over half a century after the MLAT, incorporate some of these developments. The LLAMA (Meara, 2005) grew out of a series of projects carried out by students of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Wales, Swansea. It includes four user-friendly, computer-based tests: LLAMA B (a test of vocabulary learning); LLAMA D (a test of sound recognition); LLAMA E (a test of sound-symbol associations); and LLAMA F (a test of grammatical inferencing). The tests are largely based on the MLAT, but there are some differences between the two batteries. First, the LLAMA tests are language-independent, which makes them suitable for speakers of any first language (L1) with a Roman alphabet and which avoids potential confounds as a result of L1 knowledge or as a result of the use of longterm memory strategies to remember test stimuli. Second, the LLAMA includes a new test that was not present in the MLAT, LLAMA D. According to Meara (2005), this test measures the ability to recognize patterns in spoken language, helping learners recognize the small morphological variations that many languages use to mark grammatical features. The test is loosely based on Speciale, Ellis, and Bywater (2004), who looked at phonological sequence learning ability following the work on implicit induction of phonological sequences by Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996) and Saffran et al. (1999). The test requires listening to a string of ten sound sequences based on the names of objects in a British-Columbian Indian language. Sound sequences are played once, followed by a recognition test that requires discriminating between old and novel items. Granena (2013a) argued that although recognition typically involves episodic (explicit) memory, it could also be based on a feeling of familiarity in the case of LLAMA D and, as a result, draw on implicit memory instead. Dual-process theories (e.g., Jacoby, 1991; Yonelinas, 2001) divide episodic memory into recollection and familiarity, a distinction that is supported by neuro-anatomical research showing that these two processes have different neural bases (e.g., Skinner & Fernandes, 2007). Recollection is a slow, intentional retrieval process in which memories are retrieved together with rich contextual data. Familiarity, on the other hand, is a fast, unintentional retrieval process in which memories have no contextual data (recognition of a person without memory of their name or where you met them is the typical example of familiarity). The current version of LLAMA D lacks reaction time data that could be used to show increased fluency of reprocessing studied information. It does not include confidence ratings, either, that could show inversions of confidence and

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accuracy (lower confidence but high accuracy). However, Granena (2013a) found that LLAMA D consistently loaded on a different factor from LLAMA B, E, and F, but on the same factor as a probabilistic serial reaction time task measuring implicit learning ability. Based on these findings, Granena suggested that LLAMA D was tapping a cognitive ability relevant for implicit language learning and processing, whereas LLAMA B, E, and F were tapping abilities relevant for explicit language and processing, particularly explicit associative memory (LLAMA B and E) and explicit inductive learning (LLAMA E and F). The Hi-LAB (Linck et al., 2013), the most innovative aptitude battery to date, was specifically designed to predict high-level attainment in an L2. It includes eleven tests measuring cognitive and perceptual abilities grouped into six main categories: working memory; associative memory; long-term memory retrieval; implicit learning; processing speed; and auditory perceptual acuity. Unlike the MLAT, the Hi-LAB includes not only abilities specific to the verbal domain, such as perceptual acuity, but also domain-general abilities, such as working memory and general implicit learning. The construct of working memory, measured by six of the eleven tests in the battery, reflects current developments in the understanding of memory processes and its increasing importance as an essential component of L2 learning (e.g., Miyake & Friedman, 1998; Robinson, 1995, 2002; Sawyer & Ranta, 2001). It is subdivided into phonological short-term memory and executive functioning, which is in turn further subdivided into updating, inhibitory control, and task switching. But the most innovative feature of the Hi-LAB is the inclusion of two measures tapping implicit cognitive processes: the available long-term memory synonym test is a semantic priming test measuring the extent to which prior experience of stimuli in the input facilitates processing, while the serial reaction time task measures implicit inductive learning. A comparison of the first and the latest aptitude test batteries in SLA shows how the conceptualization of aptitude has evolved over the years. From a need to predict initial foreign language attainment in intensive instructed conditions as measured by course or exam grades, the field has moved to the need to predict, not only initial, but also high-level proficiency under a variety of learning conditions including naturalistic and study abroad contexts, as well as instructed contexts following task-based or other experiential approaches that emphasize interactive communication rather than the study of language structure. The change in the type of criterion variable, together with advances in cognitive psychology, have resulted in the refinement of old constructs, such as memory, and the inclusion of new constructs, such as implicit learning ability. Cognitive abilities specific to the verbal domain, such as grammatical sensitivity, are combined now with domain-general abilities. All these developments

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in aptitude theory and research have the potential to shape our understanding of SLA processes and of how an L2 is learned in different contexts (Skehan, 2015). The following two sections review research on the predictive validity of aptitude in naturalistic and instructed settings and discuss the implications of research findings for SLA theory.

16.3  Language Aptitude in Naturalistic SLA The general claim in naturalistic SLA has been that aptitude is related to variation in ultimate level of attainment (i.e., long-term differences in acquisition). Skehan (1989), in fact, argued that aptitude could be even more relevant in naturalistic than instructed learning contexts because of the greater amount of input that the learner has to process and the pressure to discover regularities and make generalizations merely from L2 exposure. However, to date, research on language aptitude has focused primarily on instructed SLA and learning rate, and very rarely on naturalistic SLA and ultimate attainment. Given that there is no empirical evidence concerning the extent to which we can generalize findings from one context to the other, both types of research are needed in order to fully assess the predictive power of aptitude in SLA. The few studies that have investigated aptitude in a naturalistic environment have been conducted in the context of tests of the existence of a critical period for language acquisition (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2008; DeKeyser, 2000; DeKeyser, Alfi-Shabtay, & Ravid, 2010; Granena & Long, 2013; Harley & Hart, 2002). According to the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH; Lenneberg, 1967), there are biological or maturational constraints on L2 learning, such that post-critical-period L2 learners cannot become native-like L2 speakers. Although no adult L2 learner has yet been shown to be entirely nativelike across language domains and tasks in a methodologically robust study (see Long, 2005, for a review), there is evidence that some adult learners can become “near-native-like” (Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, 2003) on a variety of linguistic phenomena (e.g., Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2009; Ioup et al., 1994; Novoa, Fein, & Obler, 1988). One of the factors considered capable of compensating for maturational constraints and explaining variability in ultimate L2 attainment is language aptitude. DeKeyser (2000) hypothesized that a high degree of language aptitude is a necessary condition for adult L2 learners to reach a level of ultimate attainment in morphosyntax comparable to that of child L2 learners, who attain native-like command regardless of their language aptitude. DeKeyser (2000) operationalized language aptitude as verbal analytic ability, an ability that is gained by linguistic experience in one’s native language, in foreign languages, or in linguistics.

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The rationale behind DeKeyser’s (2000) position was Bley-Vroman’s (1990) Fundamental Difference Hypothesis, according to which there is a qualitative difference between the learning mechanisms of child and adult L2 learners (but see Bley-Vroman, 2009, for the most recent formulation of the hypothesis). DeKeyser (2000) argued that, while early starters learn mostly implicitly, using domain-specific mechanisms, late starters learn mostly explicitly, using problem-solving or domain-general mechanisms, and, therefore, have to rely more on language aptitude. Since individual differences in language aptitude, according to DeKeyser’s operationalization, account for variation in explicit language learning, and explicit language learning accounts for variation in adult learners’ ultimate level of attainment, it follows that language aptitude should explain variation in adult learners’ ultimate attainment. DeKeyser’s (2000) findings supported his predictions, since his study showed a correlation between grammaticality judgment scores (GJTs) and aptitude scores only among late immersion learners who had arrived in the US at the age of sixteen or later. Other studies (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2008; DeKeyser, Alfi-Shabtay, & Ravid, 2010) found similar correlations between language aptitude scores and ultimate morphosyntactic attainment (but see Granena & Long, 2013, for opposite findings in the morphosyntactic domain). These studies, however, have in common an operationalization of language aptitude, following the MLAT, as a combination of explicit, attention-driven cognitive abilities, as well as the use of language tests or conditions of test administration that allow monitoring and controlled use of L2 knowledge. Therefore, the measures of language aptitude and ultimate attainment employed could have been measuring the same underlying abilities. This is, in fact, how Long (2007) and Paradis (2009) interpreted DeKeyser’s (2000) findings. Both suggested the possible role of participants’ metalinguistic abilities in affecting the results of the study. Long (2007) noted that aptitude tests and GJTs have in common the fact that they allow the use of metalinguistic abilities. Since, in part, they measure the same underlying abilities, “some positive association between the two sets of scores is to be expected” (p. 73). Similarly, Paradis (2009) pointed out that: Very few of the 57 adult Hungarian-speaking immigrants in DeKeyser’s (2000) study scored within the range of child immigrants on a grammaticality judgment task, and the few who did had high levels of analytic skills (suggesting that they probably used their metalinguistic know­ ledge). (p. 124)

In an attempt to address the main limitation of conventional language aptitude measures, heavily weighted in favour of explicit processes, and

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of previous language measures, biased towards explicit L2 knowledge, Granena (2012) distinguished between aptitudes for implicit and explicit learning and looked at the role of these two types of aptitude in early and late L2 learners using language measures of implicit and explicit knowledge. The study showed that explicit language aptitude was related to performance on L2 outcome measures that were untimed and that focused on language forms and language correctness, whereas implicit language aptitude was related to L2 learners’ sensitivity to violations of grammatical agreement in a word-monitoring task, an online task with a meaning focus. The most relevant finding in this regard was the fact that implicit language aptitude moderated not only early L2 learners’, but also adult learners’, sensitivity to gender, person, and number agreement. The fact that aptitude for implicit learning predicted sensitivity towards grammatical agreement violations in both early and late L2 learners suggests some degree of similarity between early and late learners’ language-learning mechanisms. Following DeKeyser’s (2000) hypothesis that relationships between individual differences in language aptitude and eventual learning outcomes potentially constitute evidence for differences in underlying learning processes, one could argue that those adults learning an L2 in a naturalistic (i.e., immersion) environment can also acquire certain features of the L2 implicitly, as indirectly indicated by the fact that those adults with higher implicit language aptitude showed greater sensitivity towards grammatical agreement violations. It should be noted that, despite any potential similarities between early and late L2 learners’ learning mechanisms, success rate (i.e., the ability to perform in near-native-like fashion) was still greater in the case of early L2 learners, suggesting that, if implicit language learning mechanisms remain partially available, they are less available to adult L2 learners or, alternatively, cognitive aptitudes cannot compensate for maturational effects equally effectively in adulthood as they can do in early childhood. The potential role of implicit learning in eventual L2 outcomes by adult learners in an immersion setting is consistent with claims that the capacity for implicit learning weakens, but does not disappear, by age twelve (Long, 2017, citing Hoyer & Lincourt, 1998, and Janacsek, Fiser, & Nemeth 2012). It is also consistent with the findings of experimental studies that have focused on adult learners’ implicit learning of semi-artificial grammars (Rebuschat, 2008; Rebuschat & Williams, 2006, 2009; Williams, 1999, 2005). These studies typically show sixty five per cent accuracy in implicit learning groups, versus chance performance in control groups. A challenge that any study claiming implicit learning processes has to face, however, is the fact that evidence is based on learning outcomes (i.e., acquired knowledge), and such outcomes can be the result of implicit learning,

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explicit learning, or a combination of both. Evidence of implicit learning can only be indirectly established by measuring the extent to which participants are aware of the acquired knowledge, in semi-artificial grammar learning studies, or by establishing a relationship between learning outcomes and cognitive aptitudes that are more relevant for either explicit or implicit learning, as suggested by DeKeyser (2000) and as investigated in the present study. Even the existence of verbalizable knowledge would not necessarily imply that learning did not happen implicitly, since implicitly acquired language knowledge (e.g., one’s native language) can become verbalizable to a lesser or greater extent. In spite of these challenges, naturalistic (i.e., immersion) L2 learning environments offer an optimal learning context to investigate relationships between implicit learning aptitude and L2 outcomes since they maximize the opportunities for implicit learning by providing massive input exposure in communicative situations. In this context, cognitive aptitudes for implicit learning should help L2 learners detect complex and noisy regularities. The existence of a relationship between aptitude for implicit learning and language attainment in adult L2 learners provides indirect evidence of the type of learning processes at work in adult L2 learning and, therefore, has major implications for SLA theory.

16.4  Language Aptitude in Instructed SLA In instructed SLA contexts, aptitude is considered a good predictor of rate, or speed, of L2 learning (Carroll, 1973). All other things being equal, a high-aptitude L2 learner will learn faster and enjoy higher overall foreign language achievement. Evidence for this claim can be found in both non-experimental and experimental research. Validation studies of the MLAT yielded correlations between aptitude and course or exam grades in the range of .4 to .6 (Carroll, 1966). In a survey study, Ehrman and Oxford (1995) reported a strong correlation (.51) between aptitude measures and overall learning success. Harley and Hart (1997) also found that aptitude was related to performance on a variety of L2 measures in an immersion programme. Similar results were reported by Sparks, Ganschow, and Patton (1995), in this case with high school foreign language learners. Laboratory research investigating the role of aptitude in a variety of pedagogical interventions has yielded similar findings, suggesting that aptitude positively affects language learning under a variety of conditions of exposure. De Graaff (1997) and Robinson (1997) both showed that differences in aptitude, as measured by subtests of the MLAT, resulted in learning differences in implicit and explicit learning conditions. De Graaff (1997) examined the interaction between presence or absence of explicit

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instruction and type of L2 target structure in a computer-controlled selfstudy course. In the study, aptitude affected performance equally under explicit and implicit instruction. However, as pointed out by Williams (1999), the extent to which both types of instruction led to different types of learning is not clear. Both groups knew that they were going to be tested and received both the correct answer and feedback concerning the correctness of their response. On the other hand, Robinson (1997) found that aptitude, operationalized as a combination of rote memory (as measured by MLAT V, paired associates) and grammatical sensitivity (as measured by MLAT IV, words-in-sentences), correlated with learning under intentional conditions that focused on form and that involved either rule search (“rule-search condition”) or rule presentation (“instructed condition”). In these conditions, both memory and grammatical sensitivity yielded significant correlations. Aptitude was also related to learning outcomes in a condition involving incidental learning and focus on form (“implicit condition”), in which participants had to remember sentences and answer questions regarding the presence and location of words in each sentence. In this condition, only grammatical sensitivity was significant. However, aptitude was unrelated to learning in the incidental meaning-focused exposure condition. This result was replicated by Robinson (2002), who interpreted the correlation between aptitude and learning in the implicit condition as showing that participants had consciously analysed, searched for, and found the rules underlying the sentences. The results of experimental studies such as De Graaff (1997) and Robinson (1997) suggest that, while language aptitude plays a clear role under explicit learning conditions (including conditions where learners adopt an explicit mode of learning), learning under implicit and incidental conditions is not clearly influenced by individual differences in language aptitude, including working memory (see Tagarelli, Borges-Mota, & Rebuschat, 2011). A similar conclusion can be reached from a review of more recent instructed SLA studies. These have largely focused on corrective feedback as an instructional intervention and on two cognitive factors: language analytic ability (Arroyo & Yilmaz, in press; Li, 2013; Sheen, 2007; Trofimovich, Ammar, & Gatbonton, 2007; Yilmaz, 2013) and working memory capacity (Goo, 2012, 2016; Li, 2013; Révész, 2012; Trofimovich, Ammar, & Gatbonton, 2007; Yilmaz, 2013). Other variables, such as attention control (Trofimovich, Ammar, & Gatbonton, 2007) and phonological short-term memory (Mackey et al., 2002; Révész, 2012) have received far less attention. Out of these studies, the ones that have looked at the role of analytic ability and/or working memory in both implicit and explicit feedback types as part of the same study have provided mixed findings. Li (2013) reported that analytic ability predicted learners’ pre-test-delayed post-test

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gain scores under the implicit feedback condition, whereas Sheen (2007) and Yilmaz (2013) reported no significant correlations under the implicit feedback condition. In the case of explicit feedback conditions, Sheen (2007) and Yilmaz (2013) showed a significant relationship between learning and analytic ability, whereas Li (2013) did not. Goo (2012, 2016), in addition to Li (2013) and Yilmaz (2013), investigated the differential relationship between working memory and learning outcomes under implicit and explicit feedback conditions. Li (2013) and Yilmaz (2013) found a significant relationship in the explicit condition, whereas Goo (2012, 2016) did not. As for implicit feedback, Goo (2012) reported a statistical link between working memory and outcomes under the recast condition, but such a link was not found by Goo (2016), Li (2013), or Yilmaz (2013). Despite the conflicting results, which could be due to a variety of methodological factors, findings show that there are more instructed SLA studies reporting a relationship between analytic ability or working memory and explicit learning conditions than between analytic ability or working memory and implicit learning conditions. The magnitude of the relationship is also greater in the case of explicit learning treatments. This pattern is consistent with the idea that the cognitive variables investigated as part of language aptitude to date are heavily weighted towards explicit cognitive processes that are more likely to influence learning outcomes under treatments with a focus on language forms. These are treatments where those learners with greater analytic, metalinguistic abilities will be more able to figure out rules and relations. There may be learners, however, that are better at picking up patterns without having to think about them consciously (for example, without thinking about the underlying rules) and at processing patterns more efficiently after experiencing them in the input. These are cognitive abilities for implicit learning that instructed SLA research should be investigating in order to provide a full picture of the role of aptitude in L2 instruction. One way to pursue this goal is by following the aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI) research paradigm (Cronbach & Snow, 1977), to which this chapter turns next.

16.5  The ATI Paradigm Aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI; Cronbach & Snow, 1977) is a research paradigm that examines how learning outcomes depend on the match or mismatch between learners’ specific aptitudes and the treatment they receive. A treatment matched with an individual’s aptitude(s) results in an optimal effect, whereas a treatment mismatched with an individual’s aptitude(s) can have a detrimental effect. An aptitude in this paradigm refers to “any characteristic of a person that forecasts his probability of success under

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a given treatment” (Cronbach & Snow, 1977, p. 6), while a treatment covers any manipulable situational variable. The scientific problem addressed is the location of interactions of individual differences among learners with instructional treatments. An interaction is present when a treatment has one effect on one type of person and a different effect on another. In the field of SLA, the ATI paradigm can be applied to investigate a variety of factors other than the differential effects of instructional treatments. DeKeyser (2012) identified six different types of relevant interactions: aptitudes x treatments; aptitudes x structures; age x treatments; age x structures; age x aptitudes; and structures x treatments. Three of these interactions include aptitudes, which could be investigated using a conceptualization of aptitudes for implicit and explicit learning that would have important implications for pedagogy, as well as for SLA theory. As DeKeyser (2012) put it, these interactions offer a window into the learning processes responsible for the outcomes observed. Research on interactions between age and aptitudes for explicit and implicit learning can throw light on any differences between the learning mechanisms (explicit or implicit) of early and late L2 learners. For example, DeKeyser (2000) argued that late L2 learners rely on explicit learning mechanisms because verbal analytic ability moderated L2 outcomes in that group. Research on interactions between aptitudes and structures can tell us whether different learning mechanisms (explicit or implicit) are involved in the acquisition of different language features or language domains. For example, Granena (2013b) found that aptitude for implicit learning was related to learners’ grammatical sensitivity to gender agreement errors in Spanish, but not to errors involving semantic relations. Finally, research on interactions between aptitudes and treatments can reveal information about the types of learning processes that are engaged by different types of instruction and that can be either facilitated or hampered by learners’ aptitudes. This is the type of research that best characterizes the ATI paradigm and its overall goal of adapting or tailoring instruction to learners’ features or profiles. The expectation behind adapting instruction in light of ATI is to reduce differences in learning outcomes, the most practical implication of ATI. According to Block (1971): (…) the relationship between individual differences and student learning suggests that the relationship may be largely an artifact of present instructional practices. The findings demonstrate that if no attempt is made to optimize the quality of each student’s classroom instruction, then individual differences in student entry resources (e.g., IQ, aptitudes, and previous learning) are reflected in their achievement. (p. 11)

In the field of education, adaptations have involved a wide range of learner factors, but in SLA, ATI research has been limited to working memory and

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to aptitude for explicit language learning as measured by tests such as the MLAT. In addition, the study designs employed have been very simple (see Vatz et al., 2013, for a discussion). Typically, a single aptitude has been measured (usually posthoc, after the treatment has been delivered), learners have been assigned at random to one of two treatments, and a single outcome has been measured. This design can be improved in a number of ways. First, two aptitudes could be selected, each of them expected to be relevant in one of the treatments and measured before the treatment is delivered. Alternatively, one aptitude could be measured if Highs are expected to do better in one treatment and Lows in the other. Second, treatments should be based on hypotheses about which characteristics of the learner interact with which features of the instructional treatment. Typically, Highs would be expected to make progress under a treatment that engages the abilities they have and Lows under a treatment that makes little demand on the abilities they lack. Third, learners would be randomly assigned to groups a priori, before the beginning of the experiment, following an extreme-groups design and stratified random assignment, in order to make random assignments within strata (High/Low), so that both types of learners receive both types of treatment. Finally, at least two outcomes should be measured, each of them expected to be relevant in one of the treatments. The extreme-groups design is considered advantageous because of its economy: individuals near the mean provide little information, while those in the tails make more representative cases. It is also advantageous when two aptitudes are examined, since it affords the creation of aptitude profiles. Take aptitude for explicit learning and aptitude for implicit learning. Profiles could be created with learners high in aptitude for explicit learning, but low in aptitude for implicit learning, and learners low in aptitude for explicit learning, but high in aptitude for implicit learning. Given that a learner with high explicit learning aptitude could also be high in implicit learning aptitude, creating profiles would increase the power of the study. In fact, smaller samples are acceptable in extremegroups designs for that reason. Alternatively, however, regression designs with continuous data (learners selected across the entire continuum of the aptitude) can be used instead of factorial designs and have been advocated by some due to their sensitivity (Bracht, 1970).

16.6 Conclusion The study of language aptitude has both scientific and educational significance. At a theoretical level, aptitude research can provide indirect evidence of the type of cognitive processes responsible for learning outcomes

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for different language features, in different age-of-onset groups, or under different instructional interventions. At a practical level, it can provide information on the most effective learning conditions, depending not only on aptitude profile, but also language feature and age group. The issue of what type of aptitude is relevant to the success of what type of L2 instruction is a highly promising research avenue, especially for adaptive online learning. This chapter has reviewed aptitude research in naturalistic and instructed L2 learning contexts. Although research findings converge in demonstrating the relevance of aptitude for the success of learning in both contexts, the type of aptitude investigated has largely involved explicit and attention-driven cognitive abilities, such as language analytic ability. Research to date has, therefore, only been able to provide a partial picture of the role of aptitude. Given the increasing recognition that individual differences in cognitive abilities involving implicit processes, such as priming and implicit induction, do exist (e.g., Kaufman et al., 2010; Woltz, 2003), there is a critical need to investigate the role of these cognitive factors in relation to the effectiveness of different instructional interventions and the learning outcomes of different age groups using ATI designs. The main avenues for future research in this area include: • Identifying and validating the different cognitive abilities that involve implicit processes and that are relevant for L2 learning. At least, one distinction emerges from the literature between implicit learning and implicit memory abilities. When researchers study implicit learning they typically focus on encoding, the first stage of memory where information is acquired and consolidated. Implicit memory, on the other hand, refers to the retrieval stage, the process of recalling stored information. Both implicit learning and implicit memory can be measured with different tasks, and the jury is still out on whether implicit learning is a single construct measured by several tasks or whether implicit learning involves several constructs. • Investigating the reliability of implicit learning or memory measures and determining appropriate reliability indices. These measures can show low reliability (around .50) and are typically less reliable than their explicit counterparts. For example, Reber, Walkenfeld, and Hernstadt’s (1991) work and Robinson’s (1996) replication study reported split-half reliabilities of .51 and .52, respectively, using the Spearman–Brown correction. Granena (2013b) and Kaufman et al. (2010) both reported reliabilities of .44. Although according to Reber, Walkenfeld, and Hernstadt (1991), “a Cronbach above .4 or .5 is taken as reasonable support for the internal reliability of a test” (p. 893), research should explore whether these are the best indices to use with implicit measures, or, if so,

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whether they should be interpreted in the same way as when they are applied to explicit learning measures. • Profiling L2 learners according to their cognitive strengths and weaknesses prior to instructional intervention. For example, in a sample of 100 near-native L2 learners of Spanish in a naturalistic learning context, Granena (2012) identified four profiles based on the distinction between explicit language aptitude (ELA) and implicit language aptitude (ILA): High ILA/High ELA; High ILA/Low ELA; Low ILA/High ELA; and Low ILA/Low ELA. In the adult learner group (n = 50), twenty-four per cent of the participants (n = 12) were high in implicit aptitude only. This percentage increased to thirty-six per cent if adults high in implicit aptitude and high in explicit aptitude were considered (n = 18). On the other hand, only fourteen per cent were high in explicit aptitude only (n = 7), and ten per cent were low in both types of aptitude (n = 5). It would be interesting for future research to investigate these different profiles in instructed language contexts and to tailor instructional interventions accordingly. • ATI designs. The ATI paradigm aims to examine how learning outcomes depend on a match or mismatch between learners’ specific cognitive individual differences and the treatments they receive. There is a need to investigate language aptitudes and aptitude profiles in relation to instructional treatments (including feedback, and both face-to-face and computer-mediated learning environments) using designs that measure aptitude prior to treatment delivery and that incorporate online and offline L2 measures. As our understanding of the role of aptitude in these contexts increases, designs should also increase in complexity and investigate three-way interactions (e.g., aptitude x treatment x structure), since the interaction between aptitude and treatment is likely to differ across levels of a third factor, such as type of language feature.

References Abrahamsson, N., & Hyltenstam, K. (2008). The robustness of aptitude effects in near-native second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30, 481–509. Abrahamsson, N., & Hyltenstam, K. (2009). Age of onset and nativelikeness in a second language: Listener perception versus linguistic scrutiny. Language Learning, 59, 249–306. Arroyo, D., & Yilmaz, Y. (in press). The role of language analytic ability in the effectiveness of different feedback timing conditions. In L. Gurzynski-Weiss (ed.), Expanding individual difference research in the Interaction Approach: Investigating learners, instructors, and other interlocutors. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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17 Language Learner Motivation: What Motivates Motivation Researchers? Stephen Ryan

17.1 Introduction Second language (L2) motivation as a field of research has expanded rapidly in recent years, attracting scholars from increasingly diverse educational contexts and theoretical perspectives. The move towards more learner-centred approaches in language education, together with an accompanying interest in the various contributions learners make to their own learning, pushed the study of motivation into a prominent position on the current research agenda. From a field consisting of a small group of researchers and a handful of infrequent articles in the 1980s, L2 motivation research has thrived (Boo, Dörnyei, & Ryan, 2015), with articles frequently appearing in leading journals and the field even meriting its own handbook (Lamb et al., forthcoming). Motivation, uniquely among the so-called language learner individual differences, has been enthusiastically embraced by both researchers and classroom practitioners, resulting in a fast-changing and rapidly expanding theoretical landscape. This chapter examines some of the key shifts in recent thinking about the motivation to learn a foreign language, some of the methodological challenges these changes have posed, and some of the ways in which the field has responded to those challenges. Two themes will reoccur: (1) the scope of inquiry within motivation research is extensive; and (2) the amount of research into language learning motivation in recent years and the magnitude of the changes in thinking cannot be fully captured within

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a single chapter such as this. For these reasons, the account offered here will be necessarily selective, focusing on certain key concepts while omitting others. Instead of attempting a comprehensive overview, I intend to look at some of the underlying factors drawing researchers to the field in ever greater numbers and to consider what this may hold for the future development of motivation research.

17.2  Defining the Field 17.2.1  What is Motivation? Motivation is a word that we come across in all walks of life and it is a word that we all use. It is a word we all understand, yet our understandings of this term can differ greatly. Motivation as a term is both accessible and malleable, and herein lies both the appeal and an essential weakness of motivation as a concept for academic discussion. We all feel comfortable talking about motivation and with statements such as “Motivation is, without question, the most complex and challenging issue facing teachers today” (Scheidecker & Freeman, 1999, p. 116). Stressing the crucial role of motivation is common in the educational literature. I selected this example from numerous other similar statements simply because the adjectives “complex” and “challenging” employed here are particularly revealing and pertinent to the line of argument I wish to pursue in this chapter. According to the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Glossary of Psychological Terms, motivation is: The process of starting, directing, and maintaining physical and psychological activities; includes mechanisms involved in preferences for one activity over another and the vigor and persistence of responses. (http:// www.apa.org/research/action/glossary.aspx?tab=3)

This represents a precise and comprehensive definition, yet when we start to think in concrete terms of the various factors influencing any human activity, the definition becomes somewhat inadequate. Just think of any activity with which you are currently involved and the various factors influencing your efforts in pursuit of that activity. Some of those factors could relate to long-term, deeply held personal goals; some could be immediate situational demands; some could be directed towards a clear material reward; and some could be about avoiding possible negative outcomes. The list goes on and this is what makes the study of motivation both fascinating and problematic. In fact, the term is so problematic that the APA itself once considered removing it from its main database, Psychological Abstracts (Walker & Symons, 1997).

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Moving on to the specifics of language learner motivation, an even more complicated picture begins to emerge. Primarily due to the scale of the challenge and the time periods involved, the motivation to learn a foreign language is often regarded as being different from that of other learning pursuits. Indeed, as I will explore in more depth in the next section, the relationship between L2 motivation theory and general motivational psychology has been a key concern in the development of the field: to what extent is learning a foreign language a school subject and to what extent is it a special case, a unique undertaking with its own motivational concerns (Ushioda, 2012)? A useful initial framework for discussion was provided by Dörnyei (1994), who offered three distinct levels of analysis. The first of these is the language level, which relates to various motivational aspects of the target language, such as cultural vitality or the pragmatic benefits associated with the language. At another level is the learner, and here we are looking at the various characteristics the individual learner brings to the learning process. The third level identified by Dörnyei is the learning situation, which connects to situation-specific factors relating to the classroom setting, such as teachers, learning tasks, peer groups, and institutional or curricular objectives. Dörnyei and Ryan (2015) state that motivation “provides the primary impetus to initiate L2 learning and later the driving force to sustain the long, often tedious learning process” (p. 72), and this highlights the scale and scope of the challenge facing L2 motivation researchers. The factors that initiate learning can often be very different from those that sustain efforts to learn over the long-term. To what extent does research need to focus on specific aspects of motivation and to what extent do models need to shape the various aspects of motivation into a coherent whole?

17.2.2  What is Language Learning? Just as it is difficult to pin down the concept of motivation, language learning is an activity that evades precise definition. Think of a young girl in rural China studying English as a compulsory subject at school and as a key component of high-stakes examinations, then think of a retired accountant in Germany taking a Chinese class with a group of fellow retirees once a week on a Tuesday afternoon; consider a Syrian teenager recently arrived in the UK and starting to learn English at a publicly funded class, then consider a middle-aged Japanese woman studying Korean in preparation for a short visit to Seoul as a tourist. All of these fall under the umbrella heading “language learning” yet there are clearly huge differences in the reasons for learning, probable learning goals, the degree of personal investment in learning, and even likely learning outcomes. Furthermore, if the term “language learning” covers a broad spectrum of activity, then

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it becomes increasingly problematic to speak of “language learners” as a singular entity. The challenge for L2 motivation research is to tie something as diverse and disparate as language learning to a concept as huge and nebulous as motivation, and to do so in a coherent and convincing manner. When phrased in such a way it seems like an impossible task and one wonders why anybody would take on such a challenge. Yet they do and continue to do so in increasing numbers. In the rest of this chapter, I would like to discuss how this has been done and consider why.

17.3  Early L2 Motivation Research The development of L2 motivation theory is often described in terms of three distinct phases: a social-psychological period; a period of realignment with mainstream education; and a more terminologically problematic current period (Al-Hoorie, 2017; Dörnyei, 2005; Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015; Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2011). Although something of a thumbnail sketch, this description was sufficient in the days when motivation research was a minor concern on the periphery of the language education agenda. However, as the field has expanded dramatically in the years since this historical framework was first proposed, it is probably time to reconsider this three-stage account.

17.3.1  The Social-Psychological Focus The first sustained and systematic research into L2 motivation centred around the work of Robert Gardner and a number of associates, primarily social psychologists, in Canada (see Gardner, 2010: Gardner & Lambert, 1959, 1972), beginning in the late 1950s. Although Gardner’s contribution appears to be undergoing something of a rehabilitation (Al-Hoorie, 2017; Al-Hoorie & MacIntyre, 2019), as Dörnyei and Ushioda (2011) observe, talking about language learner motivation using Gardner’s terms now “has a rather historical feel about it” (p. xi). Therefore, I do not wish to go into too much detail regarding the specifics of theoretical models of this time, but some knowledge of the origins of the field is essential for the current discussion. The key contribution of the social-psychological approach was the realization that the individual learner’s attitudes towards a target language and towards the learning of that language are key antecedents to successful learning outcomes. From the comfort of our twenty-first century vantage point, this may not seem like much of a discovery, probably more like common sense, but prior to this line of investigation the individual

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contribution of the learner had not featured on the research agenda. The work of early motivation researchers can be regarded as part of the broader post-war intellectual and cultural shift towards individualism, a shift that paved the way for subsequent learner-centred approaches to language education. Gardner’s research into the attitudes of language learners in Canada eventually led to the development of what became known as the socioeducational model (see Gardner, 2010). Although a complex, and complicated, model of language acquisition connecting four different aspects of the learning process—social milieu, individual differences, acquisition contexts, and outcomes—Gardner’s work, often to his displeasure, is best known for a dichotomous integrative–instrumental motivation distinction. An integrative orientation was said to arise from positive attitudes towards the target culture with an instrumental orientation, on the other hand, coming from pragmatic factors associated with proficiency in the target language, such as better educational opportunities or career prospects. Backed by an impressive body of empirical research, the intuitive appeal of the integrative–instrumental distinction made this the dominant model of language learner motivation going into the twenty-first century. Gardner’s model of language learner motivation was undoubtedly the most influential of this period, but it was not the only one. Nevertheless, all the models of the time were founded on a shared assumption that learning a foreign language is qualitatively different from other school subjects because foreign language learning involves key issues of individual identity, an openness to the values of an external target language community, and a willingness to adopt features from that community. These researchers were social psychologists focused on macro-level analyses of the interrelationships between social groups and contextual variables. Their primary interest was not in the educational applications of their research.

17.3.2  A Realignment with Educational Psychology In a later work, one that provides an excellent overview of his research, Gardner (2010) says of the socio-educational model: It is not intended to provide explanations to individual teachers as to why or why not some of their students are more or less successful than others, or to give teachers advice on how to motivate their students, or to provide reasons to students to help them understand their own success or lack thereof. It is a model to account for general relationships in a parsimonious and testable structure that is subject to verification and replication.  (p. 26)

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In attempting to rebut criticism of his model, Gardner appears inadvertently to acknowledge fundamental flaws to his approach, certainly flaws when considered from a practical classroom perspective. The most sustained complaint about Gardner’s model, and the whole social-psychological approach, was that it is not classroom-friendly, that it did not “provide explanations to individual teachers”. This is a position concisely summarized by Ushioda (2008), who argued that the social-psychological approach to motivation research “yielded few genuinely useful insights for teachers and learners” (p. 20). The social psychologists were not concerned with the pedagogic applications of their research, yet the audience for this research was primarily an educational one, and by the 1990s, there was an appetite for new, pedagogically relevant approaches to L2 motivation research, approaches that would reduce the conceptual gap between motivational thinking in relation to foreign language learning and that found in mainstream educational psychology. An influential article by Crookes and Schmidt (1991) on “reopening the motivation research agenda” is widely regarded as heralding what was later referred to as a “motivational renaissance” (Gardner & Tremblay, 1994). The Crookes and Schmidt paper captured the mood of the times, in which there were other voices expressing similar concerns (e.g., Au, 1988; Brown, 1990). It would be misleading to imply either a coherent movement or agenda as the new interest in motivation was coming from a diverse range of educational contexts and informed by widely differing concerns, but Dörnyei and Ryan (2015) identify two broad trends influencing the developments of the time. Firstly, there was a perceived need to integrate recent advances within mainstream educational psychology into models of language learner motivation. Language learning motivation theory had developed in isolation, cut off from many of the significant developments in educational psychology that had occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century, namely a move towards a cognitive perspective that explained motivation in terms of attributions, expectancies and goals. Secondly, there were calls to move away from macro-perspective discussions of L2 motivation towards micro-perspectives that focused on actual learning situations, a more “education friendly” (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2011, p. 279) approach. One—ostensibly contradictory—consequence of the new, expanded thinking was to limit the focus of inquiry of the emerging field. L2 motivation studies were moving away from the broader social context, increasingly focused on formal, instructed classroom learning. Research into other, more naturalistic forms of language acquisition diverged both in approach and in terminology from the course being pursued by motivation researchers. An illustration of this is Norton’s adoption of the term “investment” (Norton, 2001; Peirce, 1995; Darvin & Norton, 2015) in

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preference to motivation. Informed by research into the identity struggles of immigrant learners and the unequal power relations between language learners and target language speakers, Norton moved away from the psychological orientation of motivation to develop a more sociologically grounded approach. In contrast, mainstream motivation research was becoming increasingly concentrated on investigations of the psychological dimension to formal classroom learning. Going into the 1990s, L2 motivation research had been limited in both its outlook and its outreach. There was insufficient research to constitute a genuine field, and the little that existed was dominated by a single, somewhat narrow, perspective. However, entering the twenty-first century the field had become energized and focused. L2 motivation research focused on immediate contextual factors in formal learning situations and the field had been revitalized by the incorporation of concepts from mainstream educational psychology. Perhaps the most influential of these theories, certainly in respect to the future development of the field, has been self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2017). This theory—and in particular its twin conceptual pillars, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation—has been one of the most influential constructs in motivational psychology, and since the earliest attempts to apply the theory to language learning (Noels, Clément, & Pelletier, 1999, 2001; Noels et al., 2000), its influence within L2 motivation studies has grown considerably over the years (Sugita McEown, Noels, & Chaffee, 2014). Of course, there were attempts to apply other leading educational theories to language learner motivation, such as Williams and Burden’s (1997) work on attributions (Weiner, 1992, 2010), but it is perhaps self-determination theory that gives the best indication of the direction in which the field was moving: in addition to situational factors, research was shifting its attention towards internal psychological needs and away from macro-level societal forces.

17.4  Recent L2 Motivation Research 17.4.1  The L2 Motivational Self System A major turning point in the development of L2 motivation theory and research is the publication of Zoltán Dörnyei’s (2005) influential book The psychology of the language learner: Individual differences in second language acquisition. This was a landmark publication that facilitated discussion on a whole range of issues connected to language learner psychology, yet the vast majority of citations of the text refer to a single section, the presentation of the L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS). This new motivational framework opened up the research agenda to new approaches by putting learners’ needs for self-actualization at the heart of motivation

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and emerged from Dörnyei’s persistent attempts (1994; Dörnyei, & Csizér, 2002; Csizér & Dörnyei, 2005) to reinterpret the concept of integrativeness in a way consistent with learning contexts where there was no immediate target language community with which to integrate. From Dörnyei’s perspective, one of the anomalies of much of the empirical research in the social-psychological tradition was the consistent finding of an integrative factor as a prominent aspect of language learner motivation in contexts where it did not seem to make any sense. The concept of integrativeness was compatible with a context such as 1960s Canada, where anglophones and francophones lived in close proximity and in apparently neatly defined language communities. However, there are many learning contexts, especially those where language learning is primarily a classroom activity and learners have little immediate contact with speakers of the target language, in which the idea of integrating with a language community is highly problematic. Dörnyei chose to reframe the concept of integrativeness—the core concept at the heart of Gardner’s socio-educational model—as some form of emotional identification with the target language, and an exploration of this emotional identification was the foundation of what became known as the L2MSS. Even though Gardner (2010) had argued that, “acquisition involves making the language part of the self” (p. 7), this was presented as an outcome of language acquisition, not the process itself. Dörnyei chose to put self realization at the heart of language learner motivation, thus a core process of acquisition. A more sophisticated explanation of how language became a part of the self was called for, and in order to do this, Dörnyei turned to two closely related concepts from mainstream psychology: Markus and Nurius’ (1986) concept of possible selves and Higgins’ (1987) self-discrepancy theory. There is no need here for a detailed discussion of the theory as there are numerous detailed accounts available (Dörnyei, 2005, 2009a, 2009b; Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2011). My interest is more with the influence the theory has had on the subsequent development of the field. For the purposes of the current chapter it is enough to say that the L2MSS offers a broad framework based on the interactions of three core components: the Ideal L2 Self; the Ought-to L2 Self; and the L2 Learning Experience. At the centre of this motivational system is the Ideal L2 Self, which represents a desirable yet possible self-image of the learner as a future L2 user, and motivation is energized by the perceived discrepancies between that ideal and the perceived current state. Ideal L2 self visions are constantly being regulated and reshaped by the other two components. The Ought-to L2 Self emerges from the attributes that the learner sees as necessary to meet the expectations of, and obligations to, others. The final component, the L2 Learning Experience, is an ongoing internal narrative formed through an interaction between interpretations of past successes and failures as a

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language learner together with assessments of a range of immediate situational factors. If the period from the early 1990s can be regarded as a process of realignment between L2 motivation research and mainstream educational psychology, then the arrival of the L2MSS marks the point where L2 motivation theory and research falls in step with the mainstream (Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015). Research into the psychology of human motivation is a “reemerging field” (Ryan, 2012), and that re-emergence has been founded on the pillars of interdisciplinarity, methodological development, and practical value. The L2MSS opened up the L2 motivation research agenda, allowing for a much wider range of theoretical, methodological, and practical interests.

17.4.2  The Surge in Interest and Output A survey of post-2005 motivation research (Boo, Dörnyei, & Ryan, 2015) identifies the L2MSS as the clearly dominant current model and highlights ways in which the new, looser theoretical framework ushered in a willingness to experiment with new ideas and new approaches. This has resulted in a fertile environment for experimentation, collaboration, and theoretical development, yet it has also proved to be something of a Pandora’s Box. The self is a concept as huge and slippery as motivation, with diverse conceptualizations reflecting a range of disciplines and perspectives (MacIntyre, MacKinnon, & Clément, 2009; Mercer, 2012). Opening up the motivation research agenda to notions of the self, and in particular the dynamic conceptualization of the self outlined in Dörnyei’s (2009b) refinement of the L2MSS, not only expanded the scope of research, it changed some of the ground rules. The self is full of contradictions, and the links between self-concept and behaviour are unpredictable. Older models of motivation were concerned with identifying discrete “individual differences”, measuring them, and plotting their generalizable, predictable behavioural outcomes. However, in this new research landscape there was no longer any place for static models of motivation or accounts based on linear, cause–effect relationships. The shift towards more dynamic accounts of motivation created an openness to, and perhaps a need for, approaches to research that had not previously been considered. As discussed earlier, one feature of the departure from a social psychological approach was the inclusion of established concepts from educational psychology, such as attributions or selfdetermination theory, but in the aftermath of the L2MSS the field has witnessed an exciting readiness to experiment with even bolder ideas, such as vision (Dörnyei & Kubanyiova, 2014), motivational dynamics (Dörnyei, MacIntyre, & Henry, 2015), long-term motivation in the form of Directed Motivational Currents (Dörnyei, Henry & Muir, 2016), and many more. It seems that the enduring influence of the L2MSS has been not so much as

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a precise framework for empirical research, but more as a guiding metaphor that has allowed the field to flourish. Rather than describing and evaluating this huge body of research, in the next section, I intend to focus on the common themes that connect recent research and to ask what is it that motivates motivation researchers?

17.4.3  The Attractions of Motivation Research 17.4.3.1  Intrinsic Interest Perhaps more than anything else, the surge in research into language learner motivation has been driven by an insatiable interest in the topic. It is almost impossible to be involved in language education and not be interested in motivation. It is also impossible to achieve a complete understanding of motivation; there is always something new to investigate or a new perspective to consider. Motivation represents the interface between the individual learner and learning outcomes. The scope of motivation research includes macro-perspectives that look at broad patterns across large populations, and it includes micro-perspectives that focus on specific contexts or individuals; it includes cross-sectional approaches that look at motivation at a single point in time and approaches that seek to understand ebbs and flows in motivation over extended periods of time. There is something for everyone. Not only is the scope of possible inquiry extensive and inclusive, the topic is perceived to be important; to a certain extent, all aspects of successful language learning are predicated on learner motivation. Furthermore, discussions of motivation often take place at the global level, dominated by talk of learners and broad outcomes as opposed to the details of linguistic processes and development. For many involved in language education, especially those with a practical orientation, this has come as a welcome and refreshing change, appearing to be more in tune with classroom realities than other highly focused, highly specialized areas of second language acquisition (SLA) research. Motivation allows us to look at the big picture. A final point that should not be ignored is that this intrinsic interest in motivation has been enhanced by a number of well-written and engaging works (e.g., Dörnyei, 2001; Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2011) that have made theory and research accessible to an audience that perhaps would have otherwise felt alienated from mainstream SLA research.

17.4.3.2  Methodologically Innovative and Inclusive In its early years, the field of motivation research was synonymous with quantitative research involving self-report questionnaire instruments analysed using various, often sophisticated, statistical techniques. However, this is far from the case nowadays. The first signs of an openness to qualitative investigation began to appear in the 1990s (Ushioda, 1994, 1998), but

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it was not until the advent of the L2MSS that qualitative research received broad acceptance. Somewhat inadvertently, it was perhaps early quantitative investigations (e.g., Ryan, 2009; Taguchi, Magid, & Papi, 2009) of the L2MSS that facilitated a shift to a more sustained qualitative approach. These studies—using established questionnaire methods—succeeded in challenging the socio-educational model on its own quantitative terms and establishing the legitimacy of the L2MSS, but they also served to highlight the limitations of quantitative investigation when describing motivation in terms of dynamic models of self-concept and personal vision. Motivation as conceptualized in the L2MSS could not be researched satisfactorily through quantitative methods alone. Qualitative research has proven especially appealing to practitioner researchers, who are often put off by the scientific approach and averages inherent in quantitative research. Furthermore, the barriers to entry can be low; meaningful qualitative research into learner motivation does not appear to require great technical expertise. One of the most influential of all motivation studies (Ushioda, 1994, 1998, 2001) brought great insights from a very simple research design. For practice-oriented researchers this has proved enticing. In fact, it is also true that most of the quantitative research into L2 motivation has relied on basic inferential statistical techniques, such as correlation analysis and t-tests. The current L2 motivation research environment welcomes both quantitative and qualitative research, yet it does not require advanced research skills. This makes the field highly attractive to newcomers. Not only does the field welcome a range of methodological approaches, it positively embraces innovation. A good illustration of this urge to innovate is found in a recent edited collection on motivational dynamics (Dörnyei, MacIntyre, & Henry, 2015). In addition to relatively conventional approaches, such as qualitative interview design, gathering data on multiple timescales, and mixed methods, the book contains studies employing methods rarely encountered elsewhere, such as Q methodology (Irie & Ryan, 2015), Idiodynamics (MacIntyre & Serroul, 2015), and Retrodictive qualitative modelling (Chan, Dörnyei, & Henry, 2015). These are all research methods that fall outside the language education mainstream (see the methods section of this volume). It seems that the scale of the challenge inherent in investigating language learner motivation demands methodological innovation; the greater our understanding of motivation, the greater our awareness becomes of the limitations of current knowledge and the need for new, fresh approaches.

17.4.3.3  Linking Theory and Practice In an attempt to account for the surge in L2 motivation research output, Dörnyei and Ryan (2015) observe that motivation seems to be the area “where theory and practice intersect most comfortably” (p. 103).

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Motivation is a topic that is immediately appealing to classroom practitioners, who see a practical value and relevance that they may not see in other areas of theory and research. In a learner-centred view of language education, motivation is at the heart of the learning process and improving motivation becomes a key to improving learning outcomes. Motivation research appears to offer the promise of improved practice. For practising language teachers, the field of motivation can offer a gateway into the wider world of research. Often beginning with smallscale studies investigating their own teaching situations, teacherresearchers become exposed to new ideas and new approaches. For many of these teacher-researchers, improving practice is the explicit goal, and, freed from the disciplinary restraints faced by more academically oriented researchers, they feel able to improvise and innovate in a pragmatic fashion. This can produce an extremely creative and supportive research environment in which new ideas are enthusiastically tested and new hybrids emerge. It creates a vibrant, fast-moving research environment which can be attractive to those on the outside and stimulating for those already inside.

17.4.3.4  A Positive, Optimistic View of Language Learning At the heart of much motivation research is a belief in the potential of language learners. Learners can succeed if they have the motivation. Contrast this with older views of language education that rest on notions of innate aptitude or linguistic difficulty. Although the use of personal pronouns says something about the age of the following statement, the sentiment that “given motivation, it is inevitable that a human being will learn a second language if he is exposed to the language data” (Corder, 1967, p. 164) underpins the shift to a learner-centred approach to language education. Success is possible, even “inevitable”, for all those prepared to exert the necessary efforts: put bluntly, motivation leads to success. In earlier models of language education, the teacher was essentially a technician with a knowledge of language and teaching techniques. Language teaching was a matter of transmitting that knowledge of language to students using the most appropriate techniques. In a learnercentred world, the role of the teacher is something far more inspirational. The teacher is a motivator. Unsurprisingly, for many teachers and teacher-researchers this is an enticing proposition. Who can resist the allure of being a life-changing figure in someone else’s life, perhaps living forever in the memory of that person? Few teachers are drawn to the profession by the prospect of financial gain, but for many the idea of making a difference in people’s lives is a powerful attractor and sustaining professional vision. For such teachers, the motivation literature, in particular teacher development material (see Dörnyei & Kubanyiova, 2014), can offer a perceptible “feel-good factor”, with uplifting and

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inspiring stories suggesting the promise of professional achievement and personal fulfilment.

17.4.3.5 Summary The discussion of the appeal of motivation research has been scattered with adjectives such as interesting, important, accessible, uplifting, practical, relevant, engaging, positive, and optimistic. This accords with developments elsewhere in psychology, most notably the positive psychology movement (see Gabryś-Barker & Gałajda, 2016; MacIntyre, Gregersen, & Mercer, 2016), in which the focus has shifted from a pathological view of psychology— essentially curing problems, fixing that which is broken—to one where the emphasis is on “the good things in life and the techniques that can be shown to promote living well” (MacIntyre, 2016, p. 4). MacIntyre also describes positive psychology as fitting “like a glove within the zeitgeist of modern language pedagogy” (p. 3), and motivation researchers are entitled to claim some of the credit for creating this positive zeitgeist. The challenge for the field now is to adapt to the new conditions that it helped create.

17.4.4  A Time to Reflect The last ten years or so have been a tremendously exciting time to be involved in motivation research. It has been a period of intense activity, rapid theoretical development, and bold methodological innovation. However, after a period of such excitement, inevitably there comes a need to step back and take stock of recent developments. I would like to begin my own attempt at stocktaking by offering a simple outline of the historical development of the field, drawing heavily on Tuckman’s (1965) classic model of group formation and dynamics. Looking at Table 17.1, we can trace the development of L2 motivation research from its beginnings in a social psychological perspective Table 17.1.  Four stages in the development of L2 motivation theory and research. Dates

Defining characteristics

FORMATIVE Latter half of the A social psychological approach with a macro20th century perspective, quantitative focus NORMATIVE 1990s

The introduction of concepts from educational psychology and a focus on classroom instruction

EXPANSIVE 2005–2015

A reframing of motivation based on notions of the self leads to rapid expansion of the field, involving increased levels of interest and a willingness to experiment with new ideas and methods

REFLECTIVE 2016~

The field begins to stabilize around a few core concerns while integrating with other areas of research

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unequivocally tied to quantitative methods. From these roots the field begins to define itself through a “classroom friendly” approach drawing on concepts from educational psychology. Research begins to concentrate on investigations of formal classroom learning. The foundations of this more precisely defined field facilitate a period of rapid expansion and, inspired by the reframing of language learning motivation as a part of the self system, researchers felt emboldened to try out new, innovative approaches, both theoretical and methodological. It seems that we are now moving into a period of maturity in which some of the innovative zeal will be replaced by a more considered approach. In the next section, I would like to suggest some key areas for consideration.

17.4.4.1  Connecting Motivation to Other Research Despite the frequently articulated perception that motivation research has always fallen outside the mainstream SLA agenda (Ellis, 2008, p. 690), virtually all recent publications offering an overview of SLA or applied linguistics, such as the current volume, have a prominent section devoted to the topic of motivation. L2 motivation is now mainstream, and research has achieved a level of maturity and prominence that requires a greater understanding of how it connects to other areas of research. Earlier in the chapter, I discussed how part of the appeal of motivation research was that it discussed learner and language learning outcomes at a global level. Consequently, the field has never really engaged with questions of how motivation affects specific processes of learning or acquisition. Ushioda (2010, 2016) has called for a “small lens” to motivation research, one in which motivation is studied in relation to other aspects of learning, such as metacognition, attention, or noticing. It would be inaccurate to say that motivation studies have completely ignored specific processes of acquisition, but the few studies that have attempted to do so reveal some of the challenges involved in such an undertaking. In an ambitious study, Takahashi (2005) explored the role of motivation in developing the pragmalinguistic awareness of Japanese university learners of English, finding that learners who scored highly on a measure of intrinsic motivation were particularly aware of certain request forms and idiomatic expressions. However, from an L2 motivation perspective, the study was based on a measure of motivation not found elsewhere in the L2 motivation literature, making it difficult to situate the findings within the main body of L2 motivation research. Another study of Japanese university learners (Saito, Dewaele, & Hanzawa, 2017) examined the relationship between motivation and speech development. In this case, the study used measures of motivation familiar to L2 motivation researchers, but these were measures based on constructs that would be considered somewhat outdated to

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a specialist motivation audience. Investigating the role of motivation in specific processes of language acquisition would appear to be a possible future direction for research, but in practice very few researchers are equipped with the necessary expertise or interest to deal with two simultaneous areas of inquiry. If the field wishes to be taken seriously as a legitimate area of inquiry within SLA, then this is the challenge it must embrace. In many ways, motivation has served as a form of academic shorthand for a wider interest in the psychology of language learners, incorporating a range of other concepts such as beliefs, self-regulation, emotions, and agency. Perhaps due to the perceived practical value of motivation, for a very long time scholarly resources have been concentrated in this area, perhaps to the detriment of many other aspects of learner psychology (Mercer, 2017). Recent years have witnessed a trend towards looking at language learner psychology as a whole (Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015; Mercer, Ryan, & Williams, 2012; Williams, Mercer, & Ryan, 2015), and it may be that we will see the emphasis on motivation become less pronounced in coming years, with a shift to considerations of how motivation interacts with other constructs as part of a more complete account of language learner psychology. The field now stands at a crossroads. Does it seek to integrate more fully with mainstream SLA or does it choose an independent route directed more towards understanding learner psychology than language acquisition? This is a fundamental question and one more likely to be answered by the concerns of newcomers joining the field than the aims of currently established scholars.

17.4.4.2  The Language Learner and the Person The bulk of motivation studies have been conducted in contexts where a foreign language is taught as a compulsory subject, and especially English in locations where learners rarely encounter the language outside the classroom, such as Japan or China (Boo, Dörnyei, & Ryan, 2015). An underlying assumption of many of these studies is that through a better understanding of motivation, educators will be better equipped to deal with the motivation “problem” in their classes. However, it may be pertinent to ask whose problem this is. Is motivation research problematizing something that is not actually a problem for individual learners, something that is only a problem within the context of a motivation research agenda that assumes high levels of motivation to be desirable for everyone? Perhaps learners in such contexts are perfectly happy with their current levels of motivation to learn a foreign language; perhaps they have other equally valid priorities in their lives. This creates an almost ethical question: what

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right do we have to intervene in and problematize the lives of people who do not have any great desire to master a foreign language? This question can only really be addressed by looking at the whole person as opposed to isolating the language learner from that whole (Ushioda, 2009). Language learning motivation research grew in conjunction with a greater interest in the contributions individual learners make to their own learning, but a key finding of recent motivation research has been that a learner-centred approach is insufficient as we cannot understand the language learner without reference to the whole person. In contexts where language is taught as a compulsory subject, there is a fundamental motivational problem, namely the issue of choice. Choice is the foundation of motivation, and many language learners around the world, learners who are the focus of most motivation research, have little choice in the decision to learn a language. In such cases, it makes little sense to discuss motivation without exploring connections to other related concepts, such as engagement (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). Engagement is yet another broad concept, overlapping with motivation, and “refers to the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught” (Abbot, 2015). Connecting motivation to engagement facilitates a discussion that considers the broader educational experience, not only the language learning element, and this is an approach that seems consistent with calls to understand the whole person and not just the language learner.

17.5 Conclusion It is testament to the vitality and scope of the field of L2 motivation research that I could probably have written this chapter discussing a very different set of motivational concepts constructed around a very different narrative, and that account would have been equally valid. For example, I could have based the discussion around important calls for motivation research to shed its monolingual bias and pay more attention to the multilingual turn in language education (Thompson, 2017) or I could have focused on the need to integrate emotion into models of motivation (Ryan, 2007). Nevertheless, whatever approach I had adopted, two points would have been common to any account: (1) there is a lot of motivation research around; and (2) this research covers a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. I would like to conclude by borrowing Ryan and Legate’s (2012) metaphor of a “fly’s eye” approach to researching human motivation. The optical system of a fly is based

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around multiple “eyes” feeding information from different directions and distances to form a single image. No single theoretical conceptualization of motivation can give us the full picture, neither can any methodological approach investigate motivation in its entirety. It is only through the combination of multiple perspectives that we can gain a meaningful understanding.

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Lamb, M., Csizer, K., Henry, A., & Ryan, S. (eds.) (forthcoming). The Palgrave handbook of motivation for language learning. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. MacIntyre, P. D. (2016). So far, so good: An overview of positive psychology and its contributions to SLA. In D. Gabryś-Barker & D. Gałajda (eds.), Positive psychology perspectives on foreign language learning and teaching (pp. 3–20). Basel: Springer International Publishing. MacIntyre, P. D., Gregersen, T., & Mercer, S. (2016). Positive psychology in SLA. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. MacIntyre, P. D., MacKinnon, S. P., & Clément, R. (2009). From integrative motivation to possible selves: The baby, the bathwater and the future of language learning motivation research. In Z. Dörnyei & E. Ushioda (eds.), Motivation, language identity and the L2 self (pp. 43–65). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. MacIntyre, P. D., & Serroul, A. (2015). Motivation on a per-second time­ scale: Examining approach-avoidance motivation during L2 task performance. In Z. Dörnyei, P. D. MacIntyre, & A. Henry (eds.), Motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 109–138). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Markus, H., & Nurius, P. (1986). Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41, 954–969. Mercer, S. (2012). Self-concept: Situating the self. In S. Mercer, S. Ryan, & M. Williams (eds.), Psychology for language learning: Insights from research, theory and practice (pp. 10–25). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Mercer, S. (2017). Exploring psychology in language learning and teaching. In T. Pattison (ed.), IATEFL 2016 Birmingham Conference Selections (pp. 20–21). Faversham: IATEFL. Mercer, S., Ryan, S., & Williams, M. (eds.) (2012). Psychology in language learning: Insights from theory and research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Noels, K. A., Clément, R., & Pelletier, L. G. (1999). Perceptions of teachers’ communicative style and students’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The Modern Language Journal, 83, 23–34. Noels, K. A., Clément, R., & Pelletier, L. G. (2001). Intrinsic, extrinsic, and integrative orientations of French Canadian learners of English. Canadian Modern Language Review, 57, 424–444. Noels, K. A., Pelletier, L. G., Clément, R., & Vallerand, R. J. (2000). Why are you learning a second language? Motivational orientations and self-determination theory. Language Learning, 50, 57–85. Norton, B. (2001). Non-participation, imagined communities and the language classroom. In M. P. Breen (ed.), Learner contributions to language learning (pp. 159–171). Harlow: Longman. Peirce, B. (1995). Social Identity, investment, and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 29(1), 9–31. Ryan, R. M. (2007). Motivation and emotion: A new look and approach for two reemerging fields. Motivation and Emotion, 31(1), 1–3.

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18 A New Look at “Age”: Young and Old L2 Learners Carmen Muñoz 18.1 Introduction: Age Effects in Second Language Acquisition Learner age has for a long time featured prominently in the research agenda of the second language acquisition (SLA) field. Arguably, a few decades ago this agenda was almost exclusively dominated by the concern with constraints of age on post-puberty learners that originated in the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) as formulated by Lenneberg (1967) for first language (L1) acquisition. The CPH links age of onset or age of acquisition (AOA) to biological constraints on what can be attained beyond puberty, and it was extended to second language (L2) acquisition through the work of Johnson and Newport (1989). Participants in CPH studies typically came to be immigrants arriving to the L2 community at different ages and acquiring the community language to different degrees. In these studies, participants’ ultimate attainment is examined and compared on the basis of their age of arrival (usually equated with AOA), and a negative association is usually found between AOA and ultimate attainment. In Long’s (2005) words, the aim of this line of research is to provide “evidence for the existence, scope or timing of maturational constraints on the human capacity for learning second (including foreign) languages” (p. 288). In a survey of age-related studies published in 1979, Krashen, Long, and Scarcella gathered findings from the studies conducted until then and pointed out a distinction of two types of advantages that clarified the mixed results obtained in research in this area. One was a rate advantage: in the short term, later or older starters appear to have higher results than early or younger starters, especially in morphosyntax. The other was an ultimate attainment advantage: in the long term, earlier or younger

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starters present higher levels of L2 proficiency that may reach native-likeness (or only near-native-likeness; see Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2008). Thus, it has been assumed that maturational constraints are at work that prevent completely successful mastery of an L2 (understood to be the attainment of a native-like level; but see the discussion in Birdsong, 2005) if an individual starts learning the L2 after a certain maturational point. Although originally this upper bound for the critical or privileged period for language acquisition was considered to be puberty (Lenneberg, 1967), evidence from age-related research motivated an alternative view with different cut-off points for different language dimensions, that is, different sensitive periods (i.e., later critical age offset for syntax than for phonetics; Long, 1990). Several biological and neurobiological explanations have been proposed, but no hard evidence exists so far that directly links puberty (or the different cut-off points proposed for the different dimensions of language acquisition) to the loss of the language learning capacity. For a recent discussion of the maturational constraints perspective, see Long (2013). In recent decades, the interest in age effects has not waned but the role of age in additional language learning has been examined through diverse lenses with new priorities emerging. First of all, research evidence has firmly shown that findings from naturalistic learning situations cannot be extended across learning contexts, that is, from naturalistic or immersion learning settings to formal foreign language (FL) learning contexts where exposure to the target language is mostly limited to the classroom (Muñoz, 2008a). Learners’ amount and quality of contact with the language has been revealed as a key difference between these learning settings resulting in different language learning processes and outcomes (e.g., Jaekel et al., 2017; Muñoz, 2006b; Pfenninger & Singleton, 2017), and exerting a stronger influence than AOA on long-term attainment in instructed FL learning contexts (Muñoz, 2011; 2014b). Attention to the influence of age in classroom learning settings has also been recently enhanced due to the increasingly earlier start of FL teaching in many parts of the world. Considerations relating to the feasible ultimate attainment of these input-limited school learners have converged with approaches that are critical of the native-likeness model (Davies, 2003) and the monolingual bias in SLA (Ortega, 2005). Many have recognized that the monolingual yardstick cannot be used with a user or speaker of a second or third, etc., language, in accordance with the idea that the mind of a bilingual is not the sum of two monolingual minds (Grosjean, 1998). In this line, Cook (2002) remarks that, while “ultimate attainment is a monolingual standard rather than an L2 standard”, there is no intrinsic reason why the L2 user’s attainment should be the same as that of a monolingual native speaker (p. 6). This implies that the appropriate comparison in the

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investigation of age-related effects in L2 acquisition is not between later L2 beginners and monoglot native users of the language in question but rather between later L2 beginners and those who begin to acquire an L2 in early childhood (Singleton & Ryan, 2004), although any such comparison would have to ensure that the context and conditions of exposure, as well as attitudes and orientations, were similar in all cases (Muñoz & Singleton, 2011). Hopp and Schmid (2013), who are critical of the position that equates native-likeness with monolingualism as well, suggest that an even better reference group is that of late attriters because they share with late L2 learners the chronological asymmetry in the onset of L1 and L2 input. Another current perspective on age effects arises from the recognition that age is associated with a myriad of factors, crucially indicating that starting age cannot be seen as the cause of non-native-likeness in the deterministic way advocated by the maturational constraints position (e.g., Hopp & Schmid, 2013; Muñoz, 2014a). In fact, research evidence has mounted showing that age may not be easily dissociated from other internal and external factors. Flege’s (2009) words regarding the relative importance of AOA in L2 phonological acquisition are illuminating: “few if any researchers believe that AOA is itself responsible for variation in L2 learning” (p. 183). Rather, Flege continues, its effect is often assessed because it “is related to a wide range of variables that have been hypothesised to affect L2 learning directly” (pp. 183–184), among them: state of neurological development; state of cognitive development; state of development of L1 phonetic category representations when L2 learning begins; L1 proficiency; language dominance; and frequency and kind of L2 input. In this way, AOA deserves the consideration of a “macrovariable”, and hence its effect cannot be compared with the effect of simple variables (pp. 183–184). This would explain, according to Flege, the relative strength shown by starting age in statistical analyses. The existence of a cluster of factors that are associated with age has also been highlighted from more qualitative perspectives. One such host of interrelated variables at play derives from the sociocultural context which inherently brings to bear multiple influences on the learning process that coincide with age (Moyer, 2004, p. 140). Specifically, early exposure predisposes the learner to a greater variety of contact sources (formal and informal, personal and professional domains). Because early exposure is associated with greater consistency and frequency of personal contact, this results in more opportunities to use the L2 and greater confidence and sense of self in the language, which ultimately lead to more practice opportunities and increased fluency in the language. Importantly, however, learner orientation and experience explain the individual variability found (Moyer, 2013).

A New Look at “Age”: Young and Old L2 Learners

In sum, research on age effects in additional language acquisition continues actively exploring the processes and outcomes of learners in different conditions, and implications of the new research findings are enriching this vast area. In this chapter the focus will be on two aspects in which research is mounting given the current extension of L2 and FL learning towards the two ends of the life continuum. Specifically, the chapter presents, first, an overview of recent studies on early FL learning (i.e., starting in pre-school and primary school), and it then focuses on learners in midand late adulthood.

18.2  Early FL Learning The movement towards an early start of FL learning has influenced the agenda of FL learning studies, which now includes the investigation of primary school learners (e.g., García Mayo, 2017; Murphy, 2014) as well as pre-school learners (very early learning).

18.2.1  Very Early FL Learning Very young FL learners have recently become a new population of learners that opens challenging questions regarding not just expectable outcomes but also the very nature and aims of FL learning at this age. In the European Commission’s (2011) Policy handbook, early language learning at pre-primary level “means systematic awareness-raising or exposure to more than one language taking place in an early childhood education and care setting in a pre-primary school” (p. 6). The experience is expected to open children’s minds to multilingualism and different cultures. However, very young FL learners are frequently engaged in pre-school programmes (often outside the school) with the expectation that they will learn the language easily, like “sponges”. That is, their very early start of learning appears spurred by their parents’ belief that younger is better in any circumstances (also when programmes offer very limited exposure to the target language). Moreover, very young FL learners are mostly found in pre-school English programmes, particularly in countries in which there is a strong social pressure for young citizens to join the globalized world and where achieving a high level of English is perceived as a big challenge (i.e., because of the linguistic distance between their native language and English). Understandably, there is very little research on these children’s learning, even less than on the slightly older population of young learners, whose age range usually coincides with the primary education period (see Nikolov & Mihaljevíc Djigunovic, 2011).

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A series of studies by Sun (2015) illustrate this emerging research. In these studies, Sun followed a group of very young Chinese EFL learners for one and a half years with the general aim of examining the impact of internal and external factors on their language learning. One of these studies (Sun, 2015; Sun et al., 2016) examined the receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary, and grammar of a group of seventy-one very young learners (onset age of learning English was between two and five years of age). The results showed that the total amount of school input and the level of the English media environment at home were significant predictors for the three aspects of English proficiency. Globally, external factors explained more variance than internal factors (age of onset, short-term memory, nonverbal intelligence), in contrast with findings obtained on young English learners in naturalistic settings (Paradis, 2011). In another study, a total of forty-three Chinese children from the same programme were followed longitudinally. Their average age at the first time of testing was 4.5 (range 3.2–6.2). The second time of testing took place seven months later. The results showed that the development of the children’s vocabulary was most affected by external factors (e.g. input quantity and usage) again. The study also revealed a significant conceptual transfer between L1 and L2 for children as young as three years old. Another finding of both studies was that learners at an older age of onset of English showed a better performance on the language tasks. Sun (2015) concludes that an early start in an input-limited instructional setting does not guarantee success and that language exposure and usage have a greater impact on young learners’ achievement. A study with very young learners in the Netherlands examined the effects of amount of classroom exposure and teachers’ language proficiency (Unsworth et al., 2015). Three groups of very young learners (168 in total) starting English lessons at age four (grade 1 of primary school) were compared. They had different weekly amount of exposure to English (60 minutes or less, more than 60 and less than 120 minutes, and 120 minutes or more), and their teachers varied in English language proficiency. After two years, the analysis of the children’s scores on receptive grammar and vocabulary skills showed that teachers’ language proficiency was the strongest predictor, and that amount of classroom exposure (more than 60 minutes of weekly classroom exposure versus 60 minutes or less) was also a significant predictor of children’s outcomes. The comparison of the outcomes of these early starters (ESs) with a group of late starters (LSs; grade 7, age 10) after the same period of 2 years showed that the latter had significantly higher scores both on vocabulary and grammar (Unsworth et al., 2012).

A New Look at “Age”: Young and Old L2 Learners

18.2.2 Short- and Long-Term Outcomes of Primary School FL Learning Beginning in the 1980s, a new wave of age-related studies was spurred by the movement towards introducing FL teaching in the primary school. Two pioneer studies were conducted in Spain because of its early implementation of the European Union recommendations to advance FL teaching and learning (Council of the European Union, 1997). Both studies were able to compare cohorts that were not mixed up at any point in the same classroom (in contrast to earlier studies) and both reached similar results showing that older starters outperformed earlier starters (see the studies collected in García Mayo & García Lecumberri, 2003; Muñoz, 2006a). To illustrate, the Barcelona Age Factor (BAF) project compared four groups of learners of English with starting ages 8, 11, 14, and 18+. The two younger cohorts represented the new curriculum and the former curriculum, respectively, and they could be followed longitudinally, after 200, 416, and 726 hours. The results of the comparisons indicated a significant rate advantage of the older starters, that was larger for cognitive demanding dimensions such as morphosyntax, which was interpreted as resulting from the different states of cognitive maturity of older and younger learners (Muñoz, 2006b). The advantage was also larger in the first comparison times, though the younger starters were not observed to fully catch up nor surpass the older starters within the period of the study (bounded by the end of secondary education). More recent studies have appeared as other countries have advanced the starting age to an earlier grade and the results of these new studies are confirming the findings above and providing evidence from different educational systems with comparisons of different ages and amounts of instruction and using various research methods (see the analysis of neuroimaging data in Ojima et al., 2011). One such study was recently conducted in Germany (Jaekel et al., 2017) with a very large sample of students (N = 5,130) distributed in two cohorts. It compared the reading and listening comprehension skills of LSs, age 8–9 years (beginning of year 3 at elementary school), with ESs, age 6–7 years (second half of year 1), who had 1.5 years of additional language exposure. The first comparison took place at the beginning of year 5, which corresponded to two years (or 140 hours) of English language instruction for the LS group and to 3.5 years (or 245 hours) of instruction for the ES group. The second comparison took place at the beginning of year 7, which coincided with four years (444 hours) of instruction for the LS group and with 5.5 years (549 hours) of instruction for the ES group. The study also examined the effects on the performance of the LS and ES groups in reading and listening comprehension of individual differences in learners’ gender, socio-economic status, cultural capital,

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cognitive abilities, and home language. The results showed that in year 5 the ESs outperformed the LSs in both reading and listening comprehension, but that in year 7 the LS group outperformed the ES group in spite of the longer period of instruction of the latter. Thus, while the results in the first comparison time cannot be clearly attributed to either onset age or amount of instruction because the ES group has had more years of instruction, the results in the second comparison time may be clearly attributed to onset age because the LSs had less amount of instruction. The authors remark that their findings follow the pattern expected in a limited-input setting and suggest that LS students could apply their metacognitive knowledge and benefit from explicit language learning earlier and have a faster progression through learning. This may also have fed into the students’ sense of self-efficacy and increased their motivation. As for the effects of the individual differences examined, cohort membership and cognitive variables had a stronger influence in the first comparison time, and language proficiency in year 5 and cohort membership in the second comparison time. The study by Jaekel and his associates compared ESs and LSs at the same age (10.3) but with different amounts of exposure, in contrast to the BAF study, which compared ESs and LSs after the same amount of instruction but at different ages (see a discussion of age-related research designs in Muñoz, 2008b). Another study that shows LSs closing the gap was conducted in Switzerland (Pfenninger & Singleton, 2017, among others). A group of 100 ESs (age of onset: 8–9) and a group of 100 LSs (age of onset: 13–14) were compared when the former had had 5.5 years of instruction (440 hours) and the latter only half a year (50 hours), and a second time when they had had 10.5 years and 5.5 years of instruction (680  hours later), respectively. Their average age was 13–14 years in the first comparison (first year of secondary school) and 18–19 years in the second one. The comparative analysis showed that only six months into secondary school, the LS students had been able to catch up with the ES students in a number of measures (and even their performance was superior in oral and written accuracy). In the second comparison time, no significant differences were found between LSs and ESs, in spite of the extra years of instruction in primary school of the ESs. Specifically, LSs were able to assimilate as much in six years as ESs were able to in eleven years. The authors interpret these results in the line of previous research in other countries and underline the importance of transfer of literacy skills and differences in teaching approaches between primary and secondary schools. In this study the interaction of starting age with contextual factors (e.g., schools, classes, class size, teacher) was also examined. It was observed that contextual effects can impact on students’ motivated behaviour, which can impact achievement in turn. The study also compared age-effects in groups in a semi-immersive situation (content and language integrated learning:

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CLIL). They found that LSs also caught up with ESs in this situation and that amount of exposure and motivation were stronger predictors of FL performance than starting age (Pfenninger & Singleton, 2016). The study by Muñoz, Cadierno, and Casas (2018) focuses on the investigation of linguistic distance and out-of-school exposure effects on Spanish and Danish young learners of English. The two Danish groups included in the study, aged 7 and 9, represent the recent curriculum change in Denmark whereby the introduction of English was moved from grade 3 to grade 1. Their English receptive skills were measured before the beginning of instruction. The analyses showed that the older Danish group outperformed the younger Danish group in both receptive vocabulary and grammar. The key explanatory factor was cognate recognition of EnglishDanish cognates, which was significantly higher in the 9-year olds. Another significant factor was exposure to media (mainly audiovisual material on the internet and television; see Kuppens, 2010), also higher in the older group because of their two-year age difference which implied two extra years of exposure. A different type of setting that sheds light on the interaction of age of exposure and amount and type of exposure is the study abroad context. A study using a pre-test-post-test design compared English language learning by children (mean age: 10.4) and young adults (mean age: 22.4) after three months at home (AH) and abroad (SA; Llanes & Muñoz, 2013; Muñoz & Llanes, 2014). Findings from this study showed that the SA context was superior to the AH context, and that adults outscored children in absolute gains (oral and written fluency, lexical and syntactic complexity, and accuracy). However, the SA context was more advantageous for children than for adults in comparative gains, which suggests that the children’s rate of learning was accelerated by the immersion situation (Llanes & Muñoz, 2013). The comparison of the gains in foreign accent showed no significant differences between the two age groups but participants in the SA setting had a significantly milder foreign accent in the post-test than AH participants. However, although age did not influence the results statistically, child participants abroad experienced the greatest improvement and also spent more time speaking with native speakers than adult participants abroad (Muñoz & Llanes, 2014). These results, which are related to age of exposure rather than AOA suggest that three months in an immersion situation favour the younger learners but do not yet provide enough exposure for them to surpass the adult group. Studies such as those above are concerned with learners beginning to learn the FL in primary school. Some of them present cross-sectional and/ or longitudinal comparisons that include learners in secondary school aiming at longer-term age effects. However, it may be argued that such amounts of exposure to the target language obtained in a school setting

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are still very insignificant compared to the amount of exposure that naturalistic learners have in an immersion situation. As a consequence, their findings may not provide a direct answer to the issue of whether ESs may also surpass LSs in the long term, as observed in a naturalistic context (the ultimate attainment advantage seen above).1 Only a few studies have attempted to compare ES learners and LS learners after a much longer period of instruction. Generally, no significant effects have been found for starting age even when the number of instruction hours is lower for LSs (Al-Thubaiti, 2010; Harada, 2014; Huang & Chang, 2015). Two exceptions can be found in only some dimensions: Larson-Hall (2008) found an ES advantage in auditory perception after 1,500 to 2,000 hours, and Dwaik and Shehadeh (2015) only in reading, not in listening, speaking, grammar, and writing (after 256 extra instruction hours in primary school). In contrast, when the effects of input on long-term outcomes have been investigated, they are clearly significant (Harada, 2014; Huang & Chang, 2015). For example, Muñoz (2011) examined the English language outcomes of a group of 159 college students in Spain, with a minimum length of exposure of ten years (mean: 13.9 years or 2,440.5 hours) and onset age between 2 and 15.5 (mean: 7.5 years of age). The results showed significant correlations of outcomes (general proficiency, receptive vocabulary, and phonemic identification) with several measures of input, including time abroad, current contact with the target language, and length of instruction. Similar effects were observed in another study that examined oral performance in a similar group of participants. Time spent abroad and current informal contact with the language were the best predictors of fluency, lexical diversity, and accuracy, while length of instruction also predicted syntactic complexity (Muñoz, 2014b). In sum, evidence from research in early FL learning in different educational systems has demonstrated the rate advantage of older starters while no evidence has been found of an ultimate attainment advantage (i.e., that the younger starters catch up in the long term). Research has also confirmed the multiplicity of explanatory factors, both internal (i.e., metalinguistic knowledge, literacy, cognate awareness) and external (amount and quality of input) that co-occur with age in an instructed setting. Based on these findings, it may be argued that an age-related research agenda should include more longitudinal studies that cast light on the language learning trajectories of early and late learners and whether the latter catch up with the former in all conditions. Also needed is an exploration as to what classroom approaches may help enhance early FL learning, arguably  If naturalistic learners need a minimum of ten years to reach their ultimate attainment and to control

1

methodologically for the effects of the superior learning rate of older learners (DeKeyser, 2000), it may be speculated that, to have the same amount of exposure hours in input-limited instruction (e.g. four weekly sessions) learners would need more than 200 years.

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through increasing the quality and quantity of the input and the opportunities for interaction with the target language, as well as sustaining early learners’ motivation and increasing their perception of self-efficacy through the years.

18.3 Foreign Language Learning in Mid- and Late Adulthood Mature learners have sometimes been included as participants in immigration studies that examine differences in ultimate attainment as a function of age of arrival. Results have indicated that their level of attainment is lower than that of younger learners, but caution is recommended in drawing conclusions regarding the effects of starting age. First, from a methodological point of view, it has been pointed out that a confound may exist between older learners’ starting age of learning and their biological or chronological age (e.g., tests may be too long and tiring; DeKeyser, 2013). Researchers have also cautioned explicitly against confounding the alleged maturational constraints specific to learning a language after puberty with older learners’ general cognitive decline. To quote from Birdsong and Paik (2008), one needs to distinguish “between ­temporally-bounded age effects that are putatively maturational in nature from effects that persist across the lifespan” (p. 429), that is to say, between age and aging effects. But while as a focus of research in SLA mature learners have been largely neglected, the field has tacitly acknowledged the negative implications for L2 learning of cognitive research findings showing age-related declines. The absence of research on older adults’ language learning and the factors that affect the processes and outcomes of learning is particularly conspicuous at a time when more and more individuals in mid- and late adulthood are learning additional languages. A frequent reason for late language learning is the increased mobility of citizens around the world for reasons of economic, political, or cultural migration (e.g., language is particularly important for cultural migrants wishing to immerse themselves in the target culture; see Forsberg Lundell & Bartning, 2015). Another reason for language learning, especially in late adulthood, is the fact that retired individuals may find themselves with more leisure time to engage in social and educational activities, such as FL learning. In fact, FL courses are increasingly promoted as part of public policies to foster the social, physical, and psychological well-being of older adults in many countries. The following paragraphs aim to give a general overview of the characteristics of older learners and of the so-far still limited evidence we have from SLA research.

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18.3.1  Cognitive Decline Research into aging has observed age-related declines in a variety of areas of cognitive functioning: working memory (WM); declarative memory; sound discrimination; speech segmentation; inductive reasoning; and rule learning among others (see Antoniou, Gunasekera, & Wong, 2013). Some of these effects are well-known by learners and their instructors. Processing speed decreases with age, which is why older learners seem to require more time to finish tests or classroom tasks compared to younger learners (Ramírez Gómez, 2014). The reduction in WM performance makes older learners struggle to transfer new information from WM to longterm memory to make it available for future recall (e.g., Burke & MacKay, 1997). Psycholinguists have highlighted limitations in online abilities that affect the efficiency of mental processes and that are particularly evident in those activities that require executive control for the selective allocation and inhibition of attention (i.e., fluid intelligence; Craik & Bialystok, 2005). Also relevant for ultimate attainment studies, given the increased dependence on explicit mechanisms for language learning in adulthood, is the decline in the ability to form new connections and serial patterns with explicit knowledge (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2008; DeKeyser, 2000; Granena & Long, 2013; Paradis, 2009). On a more positive note, nowadays cognitive scientists assume the existence of brain compensatory mechanisms, that may support the scaffolding for a higher level of cognitive functioning, such as frontal recruitment during difficult tasks, neurogenesis, and lateralization of functioning (Park & Reuter-Lorenz, 2009). It is also now generally agreed that the brain remains plastic throughout life and that experience at any age modifies the brain (e.g., Bialystok & Craik, 2010, Hall et al., 2009). Besides recruiting additional neural resources when something is lost, it has been suggested that adults recruit additional cognitive and environmental resources (quantity and quality of input, instruction, etc.) to cope with the learning task (Rastelli, 2014). Neurological research has also shown that certain factors may affect age-related declines and facilitate language learning, such as long-term aerobic exercise (that reverses age-related declines in hippocampal volume in older adults and improves memory for spatial relations, and affects cognitive control; see Green, 2017). Moreover, experiential factors, such as the older adults’ accumulated knowledge and experience, may bring advantages, like the reduction of the need for novel problem solving (Salthouse, 2004). On the other hand, findings from an increasing number of studies have indicated that engaging in intellectually stimulating activities may delay the emergence of different types of dementia (e.g., Bialystok & Craik, 2010; Verghese et al., 2003). This suggests that engaging in FL learning in old age may have similar positive effects on the cognitive functions of

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adults, and that learning a language may be an “anti-aging activity” (Ryan & Dörnyei, 2013; Singleton, 2017). In that respect, Green (2017) remarks that we lack studies of the potential neuroprotective effects of the learning and use of an L2 later in life. And Singleton (2017) observes that we need research that focuses on the effects of L2 learning on older adults who began the relevant language learning process in old age. Thus, a clear direction for an age-related research agenda is to investigate whether and to what extent FL learning indeed alleviates cognitive decline in older learners as well as brings with it measurable psychological and affective benefits (see Singleton, 2017).

18.3.2  Mature Foreign Language Learners Studies on FL learning by mature adults in the L1 community are scarce but attention to this area is increasing (see Gabryś-Barker, 2017; Singleton & Pfenninger, 2018). In her recent review, Ramírez Gómez (2016) includes a handful of studies that provide interview-based descriptions of older adults as FL learners. For example, the study by Gómez Bedoya (2008, cited in Ramírez Gómez, 2016) highlights that older learners (over sixty years) feel disadvantaged regarding memory ability and work speed when compared to younger learners. The number of studies that focus on language learning achievement by older learners is also very small. Cox and Sanz (2015) conducted a study on the interaction of aging, FL learning, different learning conditions (explicit and less explicit), and attentional control. The participants were a group of young adults (19–27 years old) and a group of older adults (60 years old and over) that were instructed in Latin grammar; the grammar lesson was self-paced (no time restrictions) and interactive (e.g., with pictures). The analysis of the language tests showed that younger adults did not outperform older adults in accuracy, and there was no significant correlation between age, treatment, and results. In contrast, the analysis of the cognitive test measuring attentional control showed that younger adults had significantly shorter response times than older adults, that is, the young adults controlled their attention significantly better than the older adults. In another study, Van der Hoeven and de Bot (2012) examined the retention of lexical information by adults learning new words and relearning forgotten words in an attrited L2. Participants were three groups of L1-Dutch adults: a group of young adults (mean age: 22.4); a group of middle-aged adults (mean age: 50.3); and a group of older adults (mean age: 76). They had all studied French in school for four to six years. It was found that the older and the two younger adult groups performed similarly on relearning old words, but the younger adults were significantly better at learning new words, which seems related to a decreased ability in older

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adults to form new associations between concepts. It was also found that the older learners exhibited a larger vocabulary size when compared with the other two younger adult groups, which may have helped the former on the basis that larger lexical networks contain more links between words. The authors interpret this larger vocabulary size as suggesting a lack of age-related decline in verbal knowledge (i.e., semantic memory; see Park et al., 2002). This finding echoes a previous study by Bahrick (1984) and leads these authors to conclude that “an amount of lexical knowledge that is not forgotten soon after memorization is preserved or consolidated in long-term memory, where it becomes relatively insensitive or immune … to further, age-related loss” (Van der Hoeven and de Bot, 2012, p. 63). Mackey and Sachs (2012) conducted an investigation of the relationship between WM and interaction-driven L2 learning in nine advanced-age adults (age 65–89). They examined older learners’ WM capacities in relation to interaction and feedback because the ability to process and store information efficiently has been associated with learners’ ability to notice or otherwise make use of feedback (Ellis, 2005; Mackey et al., 2010) and it has been shown to decline considerably with age (Grady & Craik, 2000; Salthouse, 2004). Specifically, they focused on L2 question formation following task-based interaction with feedback. They found that the listening-span scores from the WM test had the strongest correlation with the immediate L2 development of older learners, stronger than other factors such as age and length of residence. When comparing their results with those of younger learners in previous studies, Mackey and Sachs (2012) observe that the sustained development (in post-tests) of older learners was more limited, though the rate of feedback was similar. In other words, the age-advanced L2 learners’ language development seemed to benefit less than younger learners from interaction with feedback. In addition, the authors observe that those participants who showed sustained development also had high levels of education, which suggests that years of education may play an indirect role in relation to these participants’ metalinguistic awareness and flexibility. Formal education also had a significant correlation with the temporary storage of words and nonwords, which suggests to the researchers that literacy skills may have acted as a cognitive tool “whereby sounds can be encoded in additional representational formats, improving the ability to maintain them in short-term memory” (p. 727; see Bigelow et al., 2006). Mackey and Sachs (2012) conclude that the confirmed differences between younger and older learners argue against a blanket approach to pedagogy and that for teachers to be able to tailor instruction to the abilities and needs of this population, more SLA research on this overlooked population must be conducted. The study by Kliesch et al. (2018) aimed at exploring the factors that account for individual differences between older learners predicting that

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age is only one of the predictors. A group of ten L1-German participants between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-four took part in a three-week training in which they were taught English, a language in which they reported no or only basic knowledge. The results after this teaching period showed that they all improved their English significantly but those participants with higher capacities in verbal fluency and better WM did better. Age had a negative significant association with learning success, but it explained a smaller part of the inter-individual variance found. Valuable findings from this pilot study are also the reflections on the more appropriate methods to use with older participants given their cognitive decline and hearing loss. With a focus on social and experiential dimensions of adult language learning, and using semi-structured interviews, the study by Kozar and Yates (2017) explored the attitudes and experiences of immigrant learners who arrived in Australia over the age of forty (forty to seventy-three) as they learned English in classrooms and in the community. A combination of factors characterized the participants who made the most progress: higher levels of education and English proficiency on arrival; quality of opportunitites to use the target language in a range of tasks and domains (see Moyer, 2014); a proactive attitude; and the use of a range of language learning strategies beyond the classroom. Age was not found to be a reliable predictor of language learning progress. Interestingly, age was not mentioned as a barrier by those who made good progress while those who made little progress tended to attribute their language learning difficulties to their age, which is suggestive of the notion of internalized ageism or age-related defeatism in Singleton (2017). The negative construction of later adulthood identity was also found to constrain language attainment in a group of adult learners of English in Mexico (Andrew, 2012). The ages of the seven participants in this study ranged from the early twenties to the sixties. This study also observed that the experience of learning a language involves both linguistic and nonlinguistic dimensions and that it varies according to each individual’s position in the lifespan. In sum, the limited research evidence on older L2 and FL learners supports the idea that, as for any other age group, age effects need to be studied in combination with a multiplicity of factors (Muñoz & Singleton, 2011), probably even more so in the case of older adults, since cognitive declines vary between individuals, and even within individuals not all aspects are equally affected by aging (Singleton & Pfenninger, 2018). Also, accumulated experiential variables may be extremely crucial at an advanced age. When language learning takes place in the L2 community, factors that are observed to be key determinants in adult language learning may have an even stronger impact, such as the amount of input and interaction older adults will have experienced in the L1 versus L2 (Flege & Liu, 2001; Flege,

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Yeni-Komshian, & Liu, 1999) and particularly use of the L2 with a partner (Hopp & Schmid, 2013; Kinsella & Singleton, 2014), and their identification with L2 culture (Jia, Aaronson, & Wu, 2002). When learning takes place in the FL classroom, Ramírez Gómez (2016) argues, the influence of instructional methods experienced in previous language learning may exert a strong influence too. Also, educational factors have been observed to be associated with learning success, but, as with any correlational relation, the direction remains unclear. These and other factors need to appear in the age-related research agenda, with a focus on building appropriate teaching methods and support. For example, not enough attention has been paid to ways in which teaching can help older learners in those particular aspects that are more prone to deterioration, though a number of studies have proposed mechanisms to mitigate memory problems, such as WM training (Klingberg, 2010) and inhibition training (Wilkinson & Yang, 2016).

18.4 Conclusion This chapter has presented a broad overview of age-related studies with a particular focus on age effects on FL learning. It has reviewed recent research evidence that confirms previous findings concerning the rate advantage of older children over younger children as well as evidence of the long-term effects of starting age. A noticeable finding of these studies is that the effects of age cannot be studied in isolation of many other factors. The amount and quality of input is one such relevant factor. The chapter has also had a look at two understudied populations of language learners in SLA: very young learners and very old learners. They are newcomers to the age-related agenda, and more research is clearly needed on them, ideally of a longitudinal nature, to enrich our understanding of the ways in which individuals face the task of learning an additional language at different moments in life, with different cognitive resources, motivations, and circumstances.

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19 Identity Ron Darvin and Bonny Norton 19.1 Introduction In language learning research, different terms have been used to refer to identity: “self”; “position”; “role”; “subjectivity”; “subject”; and “agent”. Scholars in the 1970s and 1980s interested in this research area tended to draw distinctions between social identity and cultural identity. Social identity referred to the relationship between the learner and the larger social world, mediated through institutions like families, schools, workplaces, social services, and law courts (e.g., Gumperz, 1982). On the other hand, cultural identity referred to the relationship between an individual and members of a particular ethnic group who share a common history and language, and similar ways of understanding the world. Past theories of cultural identity, however, tended to essentialize and reify identities in problematic ways (Atkinson, 1999). In more recent years, the difference between social and cultural identity is seen to be theoretically more fluid, and the intersections between social and cultural identities are considered more significant than their differences. Contemporary identity research has been consistently marked by a social constructionist paradigm that pays attention to the micro-level of interaction and meaning making. Recognizing that identity is socioculturally constructed, educators draw on both institutional and community practices to understand the conditions under which language learners speak, read, and write the target language. This research marks a shift in the field from a predominantly psycholinguistic approach to include a greater focus on sociological and anthropological dimensions of language learning, particularly with reference to sociocultural, poststructural, and critical theory (Douglas Fir Group, 2016). Pivotal to this sociocultural turn in language education research (Block, 2007) was Norton’s seminal article, “Social identity, investment, and language learning” (Norton Peirce, 1995). At that time, second language acquisition (SLA) research was just beginning to emerge from its predominantly cognitive orientation to examine how social factors facilitated or inhibited language learning (Firth & Wagner, 1997). These changes were

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raising new questions of identity, and Norton saw the need to develop social theories complementary to cognitive theories, which would capture the complexity of language learning as both a social and cognitive process. Her study of five immigrant women in Canada captured how globalization was transforming the world, and large-scale migrations were transforming post-industrialist societies into more multicultural spaces (Norton, 2000). As migrants occupied a variety of spaces in their country of settlement, being able to acquire the country’s official language was key to social integration and meaningful employment. Native speakers of the host community, however, often served as gatekeepers to participation in different contexts by controlling access to language resources and determining rules of use. For immigrants to claim their rightful place in a new country and to imagine better futures, immigrants had to negotiate relations of power at work, school, and other community settings, and assert their own identities. Drawing on the poststructuralist work of Weedon (1987), Norton pointed out that learning a language is a powerful political act, in which language constructs both social organization and a sense of self. She defined identity as “how a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is structured across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future” (Norton, 2013, p. 45). Recognizing the centrality of agency in language learning, she argued that a language learner has the capacity to claim more powerful identities in order to speak, read, and write the target language. Other leading researchers such as Toohey (2000), Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004), Block (2007), and Kramsch (2009) followed Norton’s research, providing evidence that language learners are not unidimensional, but have identities that are multiple, changing, and often sites of struggle. Recognizing that language is a social practice in which speakers negotiate meaning, this conception of identity also recognizes that language is never a neutral medium of communication. Relations of power in the social world impact access to communities and social networks, and also the ways in which language learners interact with target language speakers. In this poststructuralist view, when language learners speak, they not only exchange information with others, but also reconfigure their relationship to the social world. Learners perform different identities and speak from multiple positions and can be positioned in ways that may provide or limit opportunities to speak and be heard. Inscriptions of identity such as race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation can shape interaction in different learning contexts, and the opportunities available for language learning. These contingent positions are shaped not only by learners’ material conditions and lived experiences, but also by learners’ imagined futures (Kanno & Norton, 2003).

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In order to capture the historical and material relationship of learners to the target language, Norton also developed the sociological construct of investment, which indexes the commitment to learn a language while navigating conditions of power in the process of aspiring for a wider range of symbolic and material resources (Darvin & Norton, 2015). Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1977) economics of linguistic exchanges, Norton (Norton Peirce 1995, Norton, 2000, 2013) recognized that the positions of language learners in the social structure could influence the extent to which they are recognized as legitimate speakers of a second language. In the linguistic market, one’s language resources need to be valued as capital by those in positions of power. During a “linguistic transaction” (or communicative event), speakers negotiate their linguistic capital in order to claim their right to speak in different contexts. Investment serves as a complement to the psychological construct of motivation (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2009), which in earlier research often assumed a unitary, fixed, and ahistorical “personality” and relied on the dichotomies associated with traditional conceptions of the learner (good/ bad, motivated/unmotivated, anxious/confident, introvert/extrovert). Norton (2013) recognized that while learners can be highly motivated to learn a language, they may not necessarily be invested in the language practices of a given classroom or community if they are positioned as inadequate or powerless. Recognizing that language learning is a social practice, the construct of investment signals how conditions of power impinge on the desire of learners to learn and practise a target language. In this sense, commitment to learning is understood not just as a product of motivation, but can explain how a learner may resist opportunities to speak in contexts where he or she is positioned in unequal ways. In addition to asking, “are students motivated to learn a language?”, researchers and teachers are encouraged to pose the question, “to what extent are students and teachers invested in the language and literacy practices of a given classroom and community?” (Norton, 2013). Because identity always shifts for both students and teachers (De Costa & Norton, 2017; Norton, 2018), investment is complex, contradictory, and often in a state of flux. As a theoretical tool, investment helps examine the conditions under which social interaction takes place, and the extent to which social relations of power enable or constrain opportunities for language learners to speak. Over the past two decades, Norton has advanced these ideas, and identity and investment are now considered foundational in language education (Cummins, 2006; Douglas Fir Group, 2016; Kramsch, 2013; Miller & Kubota, 2013; Ortega, 2009; Swain & Deters, 2007). Kramsch (2013) points out how Norton’s notion of investment “accentuates the role of human agency and identity in engaging with the task at hand, in accumulating

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economic and symbolic capital, in having stakes in the endeavor and in persevering in that endeavor” (p. 195). In other words, investment serves as a construct that highlights how language learning is inscribed by power. By performing multiple identities, language learners negotiate existing structures and relations of power, while seeking empowering possibilities for themselves.

19.2  Earlier Research Earlier research that drew on Norton’s constructs of identity and investment focused on language learning research in the North American context. For example, McKay and Wong (1996) drew on investment to explain the English language development of four Mandarin-speaking secondary school students in a California school; Skilton-Sylvester (2002) examined the investment of four Cambodian women in adult English as a second language (ESL) classes in the United States; Potowski (2004) and Bearse and de Jong (2008) focused on investment in the context of two-way Spanish– English immersion programmes; and Haneda (2005) drew on the construct of investment to understand the engagement of two university students in an advanced Japanese literacy course. Pittaway (2004) provided a helpful literature review on investment research at that time, and by 2006, Cummins (2006) argued that investment had emerged as a “significant explanatory construct” (p. 59) in the second language learning literature. In more recent years, scholars in the Global North remain committed to identifying research, with numerous monographs on the topic (e.g., Block, 2014; Clark, 2009; Higgins, 2011; Kamada, 2010; Kramsch, 2009; Menard-Warwick, 2009; Mercer & Williams, 2014; Norton, 2013) as well as a comprehensive encyclopedia of language and identity (Preece, 2016). At the same time, interest in identity and investment has increased steadily in different parts of the world. Arkoudis and Davison (2008) devoted a special issue of the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication to the construct of investment, examining Chinese students’ investment in English medium interaction. Articles addressed a wide range of issues that include the investments of college students from non-urban areas in China (Gu, 2008), the relationship between content and English language interaction in the undergraduate classroom (Trent, 2008), and the use of an “English Club” to practise English by mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong (Gao, Cheng, & Kelly, 2008). In this special issue, Norton and Gao (2008) provided a comprehensive analysis of the research studies, noting that identity and investment require particular attention in understanding Chinese learners of English, whether they are in China or other regions of the world. De Costa (2010), in a study of Jenny, a Chinese

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language learner in Singapore, found the construct of investment highly productive, drawing on investment to better understand how and why Jenny embraced standard English to inhabit an identity associated with being an academically able student. Two central questions, which are increasingly debated in the wider applied linguistics community, are “Who owns English?” and “What are learner and teacher investments in the English language?” With reference to Chinese learners in particular, Norton and Gao (2008) noted: As Chinese learners of English continue to take greater ownership of the English language, redefine the target language community, and develop unique forms of intercultural competence, scholars interested in English language learning and teaching need to reframe their research questions and reconsider their assumptions. (p. 119).

In the African context, Norton and her colleagues (Andema, 2014; Early & Norton, 2014; Norton, Jones, & Ahimbisibwe, 2011; Norton, 2014; Norton & Williams, 2012; Stranger-Johannessen & Norton, 2017) have worked in different countries, particularly Uganda, to better understand the investment of learners and teachers in the English language, digital literacies, and language policy. The researchers observed that as learners and teachers developed valued digital literacy, they gained greater cultural and social capital. One teacher named Betty indicated that when she used a digital camera, she felt “like a man”: I feel very powerful like a man because I had never held a camera in my life. I have always seen only men carrying cameras and taking photos in big public functions like may be independence celebration, political rallies and wedding ceremonies. But now as I move in the community taking pictures with my camera, I feel I am also very powerful, like a (Andema, 2014, p. 91). man. 

Because the use of digital technology extends the range of identities available to students and teachers in African contexts, expanding what is socially imaginable in the future, they are able to invest in new literacy practices. Advanced education, professional opportunities, study abroad, and other opportunities have become a component of their imagined futures and imagined identities.

19.3  Identity and Investment in the New World Order Two decades after Norton Peirce’s (1995) original conceptualization of investment, Darvin and Norton (2015) developed a model of investment that responds to the new world order constructed by advances in technology and greater mobility. While globalization has been an ongoing

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project for decades, the rapid development of technology in recent years has resulted in globalization processes that are new in scope and scale (Blommaert, 2010). In this new social landscape, the digital has not only enabled new modes of productivity and socialization, but has also shaped identities, allegiances, and notions of citizenship in new ways. As learners traverse online and offline, local and global spaces with greater fluidity, new constraints and affordances impact their investment in learning. At the same time, the operation of power in these shifting contexts and networks constructs new forms of inequality and exclusion. Technology has transformed language by enabling new vocabularies, genres, and styles, and by reshaping both the meaning and practice of literacy. Instant messaging (IM) and texting have facilitated the production of new words and styles, facilitating the convergence of speech and writing (Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010). Through the digital, literacy has become even more critical in claiming the right to speak (Janks, 2010; Moje & Luke, 2009). Digital affordances have made it increasingly possible for people to assemble texts that integrate language with visual, aural, gestural, and spatial modes. Constructing new spaces of language acquisition and socialization (Lam, 2013; Ito et al., 2010), social media capabilities have also facilitated cross-language interaction (Warschauer, 2009, Luke, 2003) and transcultural and translingual practices (Canagarajah, 2013). Learners are not only able to produce and share texts with greater ease, but they are also able to get immediate feedback and reshape and remediate these texts (Cope & Kalantzis, 2010). Online platforms have become an arena where identities are perpetually performed, curated, and transformed, and learners are able to access information and narratives from different parts of the world. These identities are now lived and enacted through real-time representations, and language learners become increasingly capable of differentiating themselves through ways of speaking, seeing, acting, and participating in more diverse discourse communities. As a tool that mediates interaction, the digital becomes an extension of the self, and transforms what learners can do and mean, how they think and relate to others, and who they can be (Jones & Hafner, 2012; Hafner, 2014). As these texts are created, shared, and consumed, their reach and impact are shaped by how learners both position themselves and are positioned by others in the context of classrooms, communities, and nations, within a global network. The paradox of globalization, however, is that while we increasingly develop a sense of global interconnectedness, the world has become increasingly fragmented. Not only are there social, cultural, and political differences across the horizontal spaces of neighbourhoods, regions, and countries, but also in the vertical spaces of class, gender, and ethnicity. The virtual world also provides an axis where people of shared interests

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and tastes are able to construct new communities (Gee & Hayes, 2011) and gatekeeping mechanisms. It is at the intersection of these axes that new relations of power are produced (Darvin, 2016; Darvin & Norton, 2014). Because of the dynamic nature of these spaces, and the diversity of those who occupy them, the distribution of power in language practices no longer rests on the simple dichotomy of native speaker and language learner. Learners are able to participate in a greater variety of multilingual communities and assert themselves to varying degrees as legitimate speakers (Norton, 2015). As they move across these spaces governed by different value systems, not only do they have to perform multiple identities and to draw on more complex linguistic and semiotic repertoires, they are also positioned in new, often invisible ways. Language learners need to understand how the capillaries of power operate differently across these ideological spaces for them to be able to find their voice and claim the right to speak.

19.3.1  A Model of Investment As new spaces of socialization and knowledge construction continue to emerge in the new world order, two distinct questions confront educators interested in identity and investment in language learning. First, how do language learners negotiate their identities in these spaces so that they can claim the right to speak? Second, how does power operate within these spaces and impact their investment in language learning? To provide a critical framework that addresses these questions, Darvin and Norton’s (2015) model shown in Figure 19.1 locates investment at the intersection of identity, capital, and ideology. Designed to examine how specific communicative events are indexical of the macrocontexts of power, this model draws attention to the institutional processes and

affordances/ perceived benefits CAPITAL

IDENTITY

INVESTMENT systemic patterns of control

positioning

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Figure 19.1.  Darvin and Norton’s (2015) Model of Investment.

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systemic patterns of control that construct communicative practices in the twenty-first century. As learners move across spaces, ideologies collude and compete, shaping identities and positioning learners in different ways. The value of their economic, cultural, and social capital shifts as learners travel across time and space, and it is subject to, but not completely constrained by, the ideologies of different groups or fields. To what extent teachers recognize the linguistic or cultural capital of learners—their prior knowledge, home literacies, and mother tongues—as symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1987) can impact the extent to which learners will invest in the language and literacy practices of a given classroom.

19.3.1.1  Performing Multiple Identities Norton’s (2013) definition of identity is concerned with the ways in which “people understand their relationship to the world”, and this relationship is linked to what Bourdieu (1987) calls a sense of one’s place: This sense of one’s place is at the same time a sense of the place of others, and, together with the affinities of habitus experienced in the form of personal attraction or revulsion, is at the root of all processes of cooptation, friendship, love, association, etc., and thereby provides the principle of all (p. 5). durable alliances and connections.

Learners position themselves and others, accord or refuse them power, because of this sense developed through habitus, “a system of durable, transposable dispositions … principles which generate and organize practices and representations” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 53). Habitus is durable because it is constructed across time, shaped by ideology and reproduced through different social practices. As a set of dispositions, habitus provides a conceptual understanding of what is reasonable and possible to think and act in specific ways. It configures in learners an idea of their rightful place in society and predisposes them to do what they believe is expected of them and to develop relations that are deemed appropriate. At the same time, Norton speaks of identity as an understanding of “possibilities for the future”, and in this sense, the multiple subjectivities that converge in the self are not just constructed by habitus but also imagined and desired: Guided by one’s sympathies and antipathies, affections and aversions, tastes and distastes, one makes for oneself an environment in which one feels “at home” and in which one can achieve that fulfillment of one’s desire to be which one identifies with happiness.  (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 150)

One feels “at home” because of habitus, but one finds happiness through the fulfillment of desire. Although what learners want can also be shaped

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by habitus, it is desire that opens up new “possibilities for the future” through imagination. Whether they seek integration into a country of settlement or a peer group, romance, or financial security, language learners invest because there is something that they desire for themselves. Motha and Lin (2014) assert that desire is situated, co-constructed, and intersubjectively constituted and shaped by multiple contexts. At the centre of language learning is a desire for a target language, and alongside this desire is the imagination of new identities and communities, and the recognition, security, and symbolic ties that are associated with the learning of this language. For Duchêne and Heller (2012), languages are selected, promoted, and defended through mechanisms of pride and profit. While learning certain languages can serve as an instrumental purpose and provide material benefits or profit, it can also facilitate pride in being part of a specific community. Learning a lingua franca like English, for instance, not only provides learners opportunities for employment and academic achievement, but also allows them to imagine other forms of belonging, such as global citizenship. These desires may align with or contradict more benefit-driven motivations (Lewis & Tierney, 2011; Wohlwend & Lewis, 2011). As digital media provide affordances that can communicate ideas in powerful, innovative ways, they construct emotions and desires, while concealing the ideological mechanisms that shape these affective responses. To develop a more critical understanding of one’s investment in language learning, one needs to reflect on how one’s desires can align with or challenge dominant ideologies. What one “wants” (desire) is not necessarily what one believes “ought to be” (habitus), and it is the possibility of being able to resist the predispositions of habitus that provides learners with a greater sense of agency and a means to challenge social reproduction. Because of this dynamic relationship between structure and agency, identity remains a site of struggle. Learners wrestle with the contradictions of habitus and desire, of dominant ideologies and imagined futures, and of a limited sense of one’s place and a creative imagination of new possibilities.

19.3.1.2  Navigating Ideologies We have defined ideologies as “dominant ways of thinking that organize and stabilize societies while simultaneously determining modes of inclusion and exclusion” (Darvin & Norton, 2015, p. 44). The power of ideology is its ability to render itself invisible, whether because it has become naturalized as common sense, or because its mechanisms are intentionally concealed. Neoliberal ideology, for instance, with its logic of profit and market forces, is able to embed itself not just in systems of governance, but also in ways of thinking about the world and the self. The discourse of

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the self as entrepreneur (Foucault, 2008) can valorize the pursuit of individual gain while silencing more collective or altruistic aspirations. This has great implications for the way investment is interpreted, and how learning is understood as a means to achieve both personal and societal benefits. In the digital age, ideologies also operate in new ways. Embedded in the algorithms that programme search engines and social media platforms, ideologies shape the control and flow of information, and the interaction of people (Darvin, 2017). As language learners are socialized into the practices technologized around specific tools, not only do these media shape the way they behave and communicate with each other, they can also promote particular versions of reality and make possible some kinds of relationships more than others (Jones & Hafner, 2012). The paradox of the discourses of globalization and technology is that while they highlight “mobility”, “flows”, “flexibility”, and “de-­regulation”, ideological sites continue to exercise greater control and regimentation (Duchêne, Moyer, & Roberts, 2013). These flows of people, ideas, and resources, whether across national boundaries or across online and offline contexts, are regulated by mechanisms of power, reproduced by institutional processes and ideological practices. Examining how ideologies operate in these spaces of socialization enables an understanding not only of the dynamics of power within communicative events, but also the structures of power that determine entry into the spaces where these events occur. In the same way that identity is multiple and fluid, diverse ideologies operate in different contexts, and this reality draws attention to the fact that the reproduction of dominant culture is sustained by both coercion and consent, through the conscious or tacit acceptance of hegemonic practices. To resist this hegemonic pull, language learners need to identify and navigate systemic patterns of control and understand how ideologies work. By developing this critical skill, learners are able to not only access and produce legitimate knowledge, but also assert their place as legitimate speakers.

19.3.1.3  Negotiating Forms of Capital By understanding ideology-at-work, we can also examine more closely the nature of capital, its role in investment, and the ways it can serve as a tool of both social reproduction and transformation. For Bourdieu (1986), capital is power in forms that extend from the material and economic to the cultural and social. How these forms of capital are distributed represents the structure of the social world. Learners can be positioned in different social spaces based on the volume, composition, and trajectory of their capital. As specific ideologies dominate different fields, the value of a person’s capital also shifts as it travels across time and space. The form the different types of capital take “once they are perceived and recognized

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as legitimate” (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 4) is symbolic capital. This conceptualization highlights how learners are already equipped with capital as they enter the classroom. They have their own material resources, knowledge, linguistic skills, and social networks. How educators recognize the capital of learners as legitimate and valuable and utilize this capital as affordances for learning can shape the investment of learners. At the same time, learners invest in a language because they perceive it will deliver certain benefits: to gain meaningful employment; to enter into university; or to develop new skills. These benefits, however, are not limited to the material or economic. Learners may wish to learn a language to make friends or to pursue a romantic relationship. In these diverse cases, learners draw from the resources they possess to fulfill a certain desire, whether it involves using cultural capital to engage in conversation with an acquaintance about current events or special interests, or tapping into the social capital of a network of friends to connect to a prospective partner. When learners move across spaces, the linguistic capital they bring with them is subject to what Blommaert (2010) calls different orders of indexicality. Drawing on Silverstein’s (2003) indexical order, Blommaert argues that learners’ styles and registers are measured against a value system that reflects the language ideology of the larger sociocultural context. These value systems, or orders of indexicality, affect the ability of learners to deploy communicative resources, and what functions well in one space may not do so in another. Value, meaning, and function are granted by others based on prevailing orders of indexicality and the potential market value of one’s capital. Being in a position to grant such value, language teachers need to reflect on whether they treat the linguistic and cultural capital of learners as affordances rather than constraints. This reflection involves questioning the taken-for-granted value systems used to assess capital. For Rojo (2013), how learners are recognized as legitimate or non-legitimate participants in the educational system is linked to how symbolic capital is operationalized in the classroom. Linguistic demands and requirements establish hierarchies in educational programmes, and not valuing learners’ languages and knowledge discourages the formation of new capital. By examining the interplay of identity, ideology, and capital, researchers are able to explore the dynamics of how learners invest in language and literacy practices of classrooms and communities. This model of investment attempts to make visible how power operates in different learning contexts, and raises the following questions for language teachers: (i) To what extent do I recognize and respond to the material, unequal lived realities of learners and their multiple identities? (ii) What dominant ideologies and systemic patterns of control circumscribe these

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realities? How does my own worldview position these learners in specific ways? (iii) In what ways do I recognize or overlook, value or devalue the linguistic and cultural capital that learners are equipped with?  (Darvin, 2015, pp. 597–598)

By reflecting on these questions, educators can develop a pedagogy that validates the identities of learners and enables them to invest in learning that does not just reproduce dominant ideologies, but challenges and transforms the spaces they occupy.

19.3.2  Recent Research Since its inception, the model of investment has been used as a heuristic to frame different research studies. In a study of two grade 3 French immersion classrooms in Quebec, Canada, Ballinger (2017) draws on the model to examine the extent to which learners are invested in languages of instruction, French and English. The researcher draws links between the more equitable social status of the two languages and the use of these languages in peer interaction. By analysing interactional episodes that involved divergence from the language of instruction, the researcher noted how language status operates at societal, classroom, and individual levels, shaping learners’ language use in the classrooms. The model has also served as a theoretical lens to examine teacher identities. Drawing on a longitudinal study that investigates the imagined identities of a preservice English teacher in New Zealand, Barkhuizen (2016) examines how language teacher identities are constructed in and through narrative. Recognizing that “investment indexes issues of identity and imagined futures” (Darvin & Norton, 2015, p. 39), Barkhuizen (2016) analyses the lived stories of one teacher, Sela, as they unfold across personal, institutional, and ideological contexts. Through these different scales, the researcher demonstrates how one teacher is able to invest in practices and identities that enable both agency and resistance. Stranger-Johannessen (2017) examines how teachers from Uganda exercise their agency by using one particular resource, the African Storybook initiative (ASb), an online platform that provides stories written and illustrated by Africans. By using the model of investment as a means to understand teacher identity, the researcher explores the teachers’ own views of their professional identities, and the material conditions and ideological influences that structure the work they do. He asserts that teacher agency can take form in the absence of explicit guidelines and pedagogical training to use the ASb as a resource. In a study of EFL instructors in South Korea, Gearing and Roger (2017) use the model to analyse to what extent teachers were invested in learning and using the Korean language. Their study showed how their investment was shaped by their own perceived

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inequities of power between themselves and local communities of practice, their attempts to negotiate membership into these communities, and the ways they were positioned as native English speakers. The researchers assert that the perceived value of the local language and the barriers of entry into local communities impact how these English teachers were able to invest in learning the local language.

19.4  Methodologies of Identity Research As the digital becomes more embedded in everyday life, researchers of identity are confronted with a more complex array of potential sites and sources of data. Linking disparate insights from diverse digital practices to understand identity production becomes more complex. Hine (2015) talks about the need for an “ethnography of an embedded, embodied, everyday Internet” (p. 56) where researchers are able to move between face-to-face to mediated forms of interaction, challenging the notion of conventionally bounded field sites and enabling a multi-sited field to emerge. This connective, itinerant, or networked ethnography requires an openness to explore connections as they present themselves. Because digital literacies are interconnected with other literacy practices and aspects of material culture, Leander (2008) proposes a “connective ethnography”, which he defines as “a stance or orientation to Internet related research that considers connections and relations as normative social practices and Internet social spaces as complexly connected to other social spaces” (p. 37). He asserts that novel solutions are required to study this field of relations, which no longer necessarily requires a physical displacement but experiential displacement, as learners move fluidly across multiple sites.

19.4.1  Emergent Opportunities With the accelerated development of new technologies, researchers are able to examine the individual and sociocultural dimensions of language use in new and exciting ways. Through corpus technology, they are able to access corpora, principled collections of electronic texts available for qualitative and quantitative analysis (O’Keefe, McCarthy, & Carter, 2007). The systematic examination of word frequency or key word collocations in specific corpora promotes a greater understanding of the linguistic repertoires of learners and the language patterns of communities. In a study of computer-mediated communication in an academic setting, Temples and Nelson (2013) used corpus-based analysis to understand the intercultural relations among students and the ways they negotiated online discourse to construct identities and develop a sense of community. The researchers

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examined the corpus of online forum posts of Canadian, Mexican, and American female graduate students on an exchange programme. By detecting patterns in the use of personal pronouns—I, we, and you— Temples and Nelson drew conclusions about their level of interactivity and how they generated a discourse that crossed and merged cultural and linguistic boundaries. In digital environments, methodological approaches to identity often involve graphically rendered texts, interactions in communities of interest, and multiple layers of data from participant interviews (Thorne, Sauro, & Smith, 2015). Thorne and Black (2011) outline three interrelated dynamics within digitally mediated environments that help construct functional selves: (1) indexical linkages to macro-level categories (such as nation state affiliation, cultural/linguistic/ethnic affiliations); (2) functionally defined subject positions (such as student, youth, author, editor, expert, and novice, among others); and (3) fluid shifts in language choice, stance, and style that enable participants to personalize, make relevant, and move forward (p. 259). a variety of social actions.

Recognizing the connectedness of these spaces, Büscher and Urry (2009) have devised mobile methods that allow researchers to examine online and offline practices through the frame of movement. In this case, data collection takes into account the bodily travel of people and virtual travel across networks of mediated communications, as people are connected in interactions face-to-face and via mediated communications. Stornaiuolo, Higgs, and Hull (2013), on the other hand, propose a mix of qualitative and quantitative data in studies of learners’ authoring process across online and offline spaces, multiple languages, and semiotic systems. The plurality and hybridity of these sites lead to a wide variety of data to understand learner identity and investment. Demonstrating how identity can serve as a complement to cognitive and psychological constructs, the Douglas Fir Group (2016) offers a transdisciplinary framework for SLA that recognizes language learning as a complex, multidimensional phenomenon involving the interplay of neurobiological mechanisms, cognitive and affective capabilities, and diverse social experiences. By understanding that the human brain integrates emotional and cognitive computations in the context of prevailing ideological structures, the Douglas Fir Group links language learners’ identities and investments to sociocultural institutions and practices. Through this integrative approach, the Douglas Fir Group demonstrates how language learners agentively navigate power structures in their complex multilingual worlds. While emergentist perspectives examine how learners extract structures and patterns from language input, and dynamic

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systems theorists find connections between variables of memory, input, and motivation, identity research provides an understanding of how these learning processes unfold in the context of specific material conditions, where the embodied identities of learners and the ways they are positioned by others ineluctably shape such processes. While identity research has focused on how language learners live in socially stratified worlds that constrain as well as enable human agency, there is much opportunity for research on other relevant themes. Research, for instance, in postcolonial sites where multilingualism is the norm can provide new insight, as can study abroad contexts. There is also a need for more research on social class, especially in the context of neoliberal discourses of consumerism, entrepreneurship, and market competitiveness. Future identity research can also be enriched by multidisciplinary theories of learner agency, which is the subject of Deters and others’ (2015) book. Mercer and Williams’ (2014) edited book Multiple perspectives on the self in SLA, on the other hand, includes developmental, neurophilosophical, and complexity perspectives to discuss identity.

19.4.2  Issues and Challenges One fundamental challenge in identity research is that it will always be partial, no matter how meticulously it is executed and articulated across spatio-temporal scales (Block, 2010). Researchers need to continually grapple with how many interviews, stories, and artefacts can sufficiently represent an individual’s identity. At the same time, identity is not only language mediated, but semiotically mediated. This point is underscored in Blommaert’s (2005) definition of identity as “particular forms of semiotic potential, organised in a repertoire” (p. 207). Because of the complexity of one’s repertoire, any analysis limited to the linguistic will be partial and will miss other semiotic resources that comprise communication: gaze, posture, gestures, dress, etc. (Block, 2010). Self-identifications shift as people represent themselves differently across time and space, projecting a self of their choosing (Davies & Merchant, 2009; Stornaiuolo, Higgs, & Hull, 2013; Weber & Mitchell, 2008). How researchers are able to integrate the semiotic affordances of the visual, aural, spatial, and gestural, in their analysis of identities, thus becomes increasingly significant in the digital age. One other issue Hine (2015) points out is that while ethnographers emphasize immersion in a setting as a means of knowledge generation, an ethnography of the internet raises questions about how to define prolonged immersion and how to determine the boundaries of limitless online space. Issues of privacy and confidentiality also arise when researchers gain access to the social media accounts of participants. Researchers

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become perpetually present, and participants need to decide to which social media activities they want to provide access (Baker, 2013; Eynon, Fry, & Schroeder, 2008). This requires continual negotiation through informed consent, and involves participants actively managing their privacy settings. When ethnographers access and observe social media activities of participants in sites like Twitter or Facebook, they need to make themselves present by adding or friending them. Because of this connection, researchers become more visible, requiring them to make informed decisions about how to manage their own online identities. As participants chat with other online users, Leander (2008) also raises questions regarding the nature of these interactions. In Lam’s (2004) study of Chinese immigrant youth and their online literacies, for instance, the researcher regularly browsed web pages that participants were constructing, used screen-capture to document their online activities, and recorded dialogues in the forums of chat rooms. Because she did not have consent from all the interlocutors of these chat rooms, the key ethical issue that arises concerns the extent to which these interactions could be regarded as data. Another issue is when research projects involve the production of identity texts that become permanent and perpetually present artefacts. When they are made available online, multimedia self-presentations of participants can fix representations of identity, and influence their lives in complex, consequential ways (Nelson, Hull, & Roche-Smith, 2008). Stornaiuolo and Hall (2014) assert that methodological approaches have to be multidimensional, that is, they must take into account this data across contexts and over time, including the meanings which digital artefacts take long after they are created. Tracing the movements of people, texts, and ideas in cross-­ contextual meaning is a methodological challenge in digital contexts, underlining the need to trace “resonances” or the “intertextual echoing of ideas across spaces, people and texts” (p. 29).

19.5 Conclusion In this chapter, we have explained how identity and investment are useful constructs to understand language learning as a social practice circumscribed by power. Conditions of diversity, increased mobility, and digital innovation in the twenty-first century have made language learning more complex. The construction of networked relationships and the transcultural flows of knowledge have enabled new means of collaboration and a greater sense of global citizenship. At the same time, the multiplicity of spaces and the fluidity of this communicative landscape have also facilitated greater autonomy and fragmentation. Technology has provided

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learners with highly customized options that enable the pursuit of more individual goals while reducing the need for collective negotiation. Because of the fluidity with which learners can move in and out of diverse spaces, they attain greater agency to not just engage, but also disengage from others, to invest in and disinvest from shared practices, and to seek or shun collective endeavours. As learners continue to connect with others, the networked relationships they build and the imagined communities they seek can either align with or resist dominant ideologies, challenging or reproducing inequities on a global scale. Responding to these issues of power, inequity, and ideology, the constructs of identity and investment provide a lens through which one can examine the language learning process, and its capacity to privilege some and marginalize others. The spirit of Norton’s foundational work is reflected in other succeeding research that calls attention to the inequalities of the lived experiences of diverse language learners. By building a critical awareness of such issues, investment encourages educators to contribute to a critical pedagogy that foregrounds how language is implicated in ideological understandings of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation, and the reproduction of social inequality. Through a critical dissection of identity, capital, and ideology, the 2015 model of investment challenges teachers and researchers to question the logic of the current world order and to address inequitable language, literacy, and learning practices. It encourages an examination of how language learners are positioned, constrained, or empowered as they navigate diverse spaces and perform a range of identities. By examining how language learning operates in the social world, identity research envisions language education that not only empowers, but also transforms.

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Darvin, R. (2016). Language and identity in the digital age. In S. Preece (ed.), Routledge handbook of language and identity (pp. 523–540). Oxford: Routledge. Darvin, R. (2017). Language, power and critical digital literacy. In S. Thorne & S. May (eds.) Encyclopedia of Language and Education (Vol. 9, pp. 1–14) New York: Springer. Darvin, R., & Norton, B. (2014). Social class, identity, and migrant students. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 13(2), 111–117. Darvin, R., & Norton, B. (2015). Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 36–56. Davies, J., & Merchant, G. (2009). Web 2.0 for schools: Learning and social participation. New York: Peter Lang. De Costa, P. I. (2010). Reconceptualizing language, language learning, and the adolescent immigrant language learner in the age of postmodern globalization. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4(9), 769–781. De Costa, P. I., & Norton, B. (2017), Introduction: Identity, transdisciplinarity, and the good language teacher. The Modern Language Journal, 101, 3–14. Deters, P., Gao, X., Miller, E., & Vitanova, G. (2015). Theorizing and analyzing agency in second language learning: Interdisciplinary approaches. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Dörnyei, Z., & Ushioda, E. (eds.) (2009). Motivation, language identity and the L2 self. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Douglas Fir Group (2016). A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. The Modern Language Journal, 100, 19–47. Duchêne, A., & Heller, M. (eds.) (2012). Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit (Vol. 1). Oxford: Routledge. Duchêne, A., Moyer, M., & Roberts, C. (eds.) (2013). Language, migration and social inequalities: A critical sociolinguistic perspective on institutions and work. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Early, M., & Norton, B. (2014). Revisiting English as medium of instruction in rural African classrooms. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 35(7), 1–18. Eynon, R., Fry, J., & Schroeder, R. (2008). The ethics of internet research. In N. Fielding, R. Lee, & G. Blank (eds.), The SAGE handbook of online research methods (pp. 23–41). London: Sage. Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1997). On discourse, communication, and (some) fundamental concepts in SLA research. The Modern Language Journal, 81(3), 285–300. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics (trans. G. Burchell). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gee, J. P., & Hayes, E. R. (2011). Language and learning in the digital age. Oxford: Routledge. Gao, X., Cheng, H., & Kelly, P. (2008). Supplementing an uncertain investment? Mainland Chinese students practising English together in Hong Kong. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 18(1), 9–29.

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20 Pedagogical Interventions to L2 Grammar Instruction Alessandro Benati and John W. Schwieter 20.1 Introduction What is the role of different pedagogical interventions in instructed second language (L2) acquisition? What are the latest research developments that seek to answer this issue? In this chapter, it is our intention to examine these questions from a variety of theoretical frameworks (linguistic, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic) and pedagogical perspectives (input, interaction, and output). We argue that the role of grammar instruction is limited and constrained due to several linguistic and processing factors. However, non-traditional pedagogical interventions might have some beneficial effects in terms of speeding up the rate of acquisition. After examining the characteristics, empirical evidence, and theoretical and pedagogical implications of different pedagogical interventions, we outline several guiding principles which language instructors should consider for language pedagogy. To this end, our objectives in this chapter are three-fold: 1. to present and examine the role of instruction from a theoretical perspective; 2. to present and examine the changing views in grammar instruction from a teaching perspective; and 3. to present and examine four different options (input, grammar-­focused tasks, interaction, and output) in focus on grammar instruction.

20.2 The Theoretical Perspective on the Role of Instruction The role of instruction in L2 acquisition has been a key question and a theoretical issue in the field. It was directly addressed by Long (1983) in a paper in which he presented the results of several classroom-based

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empirical studies, all addressing the question of whether instruction can be beneficial for L2 learners. In his review, he considered eleven studies which examined whether the learners receiving instruction achieved a higher level of proficiency than those learners who did not. In these eleven studies, classroom only, naturalistic exposure only, and classroom plus naturalistic exposure were compared. Long concluded that the overall findings indicate that instruction is beneficial for adults (intermediate and advanced stages) as well as for children. It is beneficial both in acquisition-rich contexts (i.e., in which learners are exposed to the target language outside the classroom context) and acquisition-poor environments (i.e., in which learners are exposed to the target language only in a classroom context). Such benefits emerge despite the way proficiency is measured. Long concluded that a combination of instruction and naturalistic exposure to the input were optimal conditions as instruction seems to have an effect on the rate of and ultimate success in L2 acquisition. In Krashen’s (1982) Monitor Theory, instruction plays a limited role. According to Krashen, acquisition is an unconscious and implicit process in which L2 learners acquire language through exposure to comprehensible and meaning-bearing input rather than learning grammar consciously through explicit grammatical rules. In addition to the limited role assigned to grammar instruction, Krashen also affirmed that L2 learners acquired grammatical features (e.g., morphemes) of a target language in a predictable order, and this is regardless of their first language or the context in which they acquire them. In the English language, for example, progressive –ing is acquired before regular past tense –ed, which is acquired before third-person –s. Instruction therefore seems constrained by a universal and predictable order of acquisition. The conclusion is that instruction might be unable to alter the route of acquisition as L2 learners follow a specific order of acquisition. From a Universal Grammar perspective, White (2003) views language as an abstract and complex system. Although many aspects of language are acquired by interaction with input (e.g., syntax, morphology, lexicon), one exception is those aspects of language that are universal and built in prior to exposure to the input language. All humans have universal features of language which constrain the acquisition of grammar. For example, sentences have underlying hierarchical structure consisting of phrases (e.g., noun phrase, verb phrase) which require a “head” and a “complement”. This information is built into L2 learners’ internal systems, and learners make use of the input to process any possible variations in the target language. Instruction has no effects on this subconscious knowledge. Learners create an abstract system (mental

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representation) similar to the way in which first language (L1) learners do. For example, sentences have underlying hierarchical structure consisting of phrases. These phrases require a head and may also contain a complement as in: Noun phrase (NP) = noun (head) + complement Alessandro is a professor. Verb phrase (VP) = verb (head) + complement He teaches applied linguistics. Prepositional phrase (PP) = preposition (head) + complement He works at the University of Portsmouth.

L2 learners do not need input to know that languages are hierarchical and consist of these components. This information is built in implicitly, and linguistic features and properties bear little resemblance to what is traditionally taught and practised (i.e., grammatical rules). Mental representation builds up over time due to consistent and constant exposure to input data. It needs input to know whether there are variations between two languages. For example, English is head initial and Japanese is head final. In order for English speakers to build a system with head final such as Japanese, they need the input which interacts with universal properties to build knowledge. For Processability Theory (Pienemann & Lenzing, 2015), L2 learners acquire single structures (e.g., negation) through predictable stages: Stage 1: No eat Stage 2: I no eat Stage 3: I don’t eat Stage 4: I can’t eat

According to Processability Theory, instruction is constrained by these developmental stages and learners follow a very rigid route in the acquisition of grammatical structures. The main implication of this view is that the role of instruction is limited and constrained by an L2 learner’s readiness to acquire a particular structure. Instruction might be detrimental to acquisition if it does not consider a learner’s current developmental stage. Instruction must take into account psycholinguistic readiness in order to be effective. Developmental sequences in L2 learners’ acquisition of tense and aspect, both of which involve the acquisition of morphological features, have been studied intensively in L2 acquisition, especially in recent years. Studies of tense and aspect acquisition lend strong support to the existence of developmental patterns in L2 acquisition. It seems

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that L2 learners create linguistic systems in a systematic and dynamic way that appear to be little affected by external forces such as instruction and correction. In the Input Processing framework, VanPatten (2015) focuses on how learners initially perceive formal features of language input, and the strategies or mechanisms that might guide learners in processing them. L2 learners seem to process input for meaning (e.g., through words) before they process input for form (e.g., through grammatical features). Learners seem to parse sentences by assigning subject or agent status to the first noun or pronoun they encounter in a sentence. The use of these strategies in processing information in the input might cause a delay in the acquisition of formal properties of the target language. According to hypotheses in Input Processing, instruction is effective and has a beneficial effect if it structures and manipulates input so that L2 learners process grammar more efficiently and accurately. An effective pedagogical intervention to grammar instruction is one that uses a particular type of input to push learners away from nonoptimal processing strategies so that they are more likely to make correct form–meaning connections (relationships L2 learners make between referential meaning and the way it is encoded linguistically) or parse sentences appropriately (compute basic structure in real time) during comprehension. Skill-Learning Theory (DeKeyser, 2015) views L2 acquisition as a process which entails going from controlled mode (declarative knowledge) to automatic mode (procedural knowledge) through repeated practice. L2 learners need to be taught explicitly and need to practise the various grammatical features and skills until they are well established (fluency). Instruction is beneficial when it helps explicit knowledge to become proceduralized. For emergentist- and usage-based theories (Ellis & Wulff, 2015), L2 acquisition is mainly implicit, and frequency in the input language plays a key role. Language and its properties emerge over time and are the result of cognitive mechanisms interacting with input. Everything that can be matched is learnable, regardless of its complexity or abstraction. For instance, “beautiful-ly” is learned through connection of “adjective” and a suffix “–ly”. Instruction of this language phenomenon can facilitate the emergence of these connections and may even facilitate application of this rule to other constructions. The frequency of the specific constructions contributes to an easier processing of them in comparison to the rarely-occurring constructions that are processed in a more difficult way. According to the Interaction Hypothesis (Gass & Mackey, 2015), comprehensible input is not sufficient to develop native-like grammatical

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competence, and therefore L2 learners also need comprehensible output. Learners should be involved in meaningful learning tasks where they have opportunities to communicate and negotiate meaning. Instruction might be beneficial if it enhances the input through the application of different pedagogical interventions (e.g., input enhancement, textual enhancement) facilitating “noticing” of forms, which might not be salient in the input. Schmidt (1990) has suggested that in order to acquire an L2, it is necessary for learners to pay conscious attention to forms or structures of the target language. It is necessary for learners to notice forms in the input because if they don’t, they might only process input for meaning without processing or acquiring specific linguistic features. Many features and characteristics of the target language might influence and determine whether learners are able to notice a form in the input (e.g., frequency; perceptual saliency; and communicative value of a given form or structure). Again, instruction might be beneficial if it directs learners’ attention to linguistic features. Sociocultural Theory (Lantolf, Thorne, & Poehner, 2015) regards L2 instruction as crucial to language development in the classroom and should be designed to target the zone of proximal development that is just above learners’ actual developmental level. The theory suggests that during instruction (metalinguistic and explicit in nature), awareness of the structure and function of language is developed by using it socially and particularly in situations in which an “expert” assists a “novice learner” to advance to the next developmental level through scaffolding techniques. The environment provides the context and assists in the understanding of the grammatical properties of the target language. When considering the above frameworks and a review of their perspectives on the role of instruction in L2 acquisition, we can make the following claims: • instruction cannot alter the route of acquisition given that there is support for a natural order of acquisition; • instruction may speed up the rate of L2 acquisition, although this can depend on certain conditions; • instruction can manipulate input and, in turn, can facilitate language processing; and • instruction can foster learners’ attention to language forms in the course of exposure to enhanced input and meaningful task interaction. In the next section, we present and examine the changing views regarding the role of L2 grammar instruction through the different teaching methods and approaches that are available and used today in the field of L2 acquisition.

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20.3  Evolving Views of Grammar Instruction Traditional L2 grammar instruction consisted essentially of presenting and explaining grammatical features of a target language and engaging L2 learners in output-based mechanical practice. The Grammar Translation Method was originally used in the teaching of Latin and Greek. It was primarily employed to help L2 learners study foreign language literature and was the main teaching method used in many European countries up until the 1940s. One of the main tenets of this method was that grammar was taught systematically (following a sequencing grammar syllabus) through explicit teaching of rules. The main assumption was that a language is learned through the deduction of the grammatical properties of the target language. In response to the Grammar Translation Method, the Direct Method was proposed to encourage L2 learners to use the target language to communicate. According to this method, language instructors should provide learners with opportunities to convey meaning through the use of new language. The Direct Method differs from the previous method in the way the teaching of grammar is approached. Instructors should approach grammar instruction inductively. This is based on the assumption that L2 learners should learn grammar by interpreting contextual and situational cues rather than receiving long explanations of grammar rules. From the late 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, a new method in L2 teaching, called the Audio-Lingual Method was developed. This method was underpinned by an L2 learning theory called Behaviourism. The behaviourist’s view is in strong opposition to Chomsky’s (1965) view. The latter assumes that humans have an innate language knowledge and that they are genetically programmed to develop a linguistic system in certain ways. Behaviourism maintained that it is a learner’s experience which is largely responsible for language learning and that it is more important than any innate capacity. This theory was translated into the Audio-Lingual Method, which emphasized the use of memorization and mechanical and pattern drills practice. The 1970s and 1980s are two periods in which a number of innovative methods and approaches emerged (e.g., Total Physical Response, Natural Approach, and Communicative Language Teaching). Total Physical Response is a comprehension-based approach to language teaching. It is based on the assumption that L2 learning should start with understanding the language we hear or read before we proceed to production. Vocabulary and grammar learning are the skills emphasized; however, understanding should proceed producing. Another comprehension-based approach to L2 teaching is the so-called Natural Approach (Krashen & Terrell, 1983). This approach is based on the

Pedagogical Interventions to L2 Grammar Instruction

Monitor Theory developed by Krashen (1982). The main principles of this method are that language instructors should provide good comprehensible and message-oriented input for acquisition. Language instruction should focus on communicative competence rather than on grammatical perfection. Language instruction has to aim at the modification and improvement of the student’s developing grammar rather than at building up that grammar. Most, if not all, classroom activities should be designed to evoke communication and not to lengthy discussion of grammar or manipulative/mechanical exercises. A key development in L2 teaching was the emergence of the Communicative Language Teaching approach. Communicative Language Teaching was considered an approach to language teaching rather than a method. The main contribution of this new type of instruction is the shift from attention to the grammatical forms to the communicative properties of the language. The language instructor creates the opportunity and the conditions in the classroom in a communicative way. In the communicative classroom, learners have someone to talk to, something to talk about, and a desire to understand and to make themselves understood. Grammar should be learned communicatively. Learners should be provided with communicative tasks that contain enough samples of the linguistic features that learners are trying to learn. Learners must be engaging in communicative tasks where grammar is enhanced using different pedagogical interventions (e.g., input enhancement, consciousness raising, processing instruction). A similar approach to the Communicative Language Teaching approach was the so-called Content-Based Instruction approach. Two of the key features of this approach are: communication is central to the teaching and learners are encouraged to use the target language to acquire it. According to this approach, language instructors should integrate the learning of a target language with another content or subject matter (e.g., geography, history). Immersion programmes, which use a Content-Based Instruction approach, are considered quite successful with respect to the proficiency levels attained by its L2 learners. However, immersion learners do not attain native-like proficiency in speaking and writing. It is believed that one of the reasons for this is due to instructional matters. Most immersion language instructors focus their attention on the instruction of subject matter content. The lack of a systematic approach to the teaching of specific forms or language structures contributes to less than optimal levels of proficiency in immersion students. Classroom-based research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s has suggested that a focus on the grammatical properties of a target language can be beneficial for L2 development. This research emphasized the need for a “focus on form” in L2 teaching (Ellis, 1991; Doughty and Williams, 1998;

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Spada, 1997); for output practice (Swain, 1995); for quality enhancement of the input received by L2 learners in the classroom (Sharwood Smith, 1991, 1993); and for the quality of input processing (VanPatten, 1996). In the 1980s and the 1990s, L2 learning researchers also suggested that psycholinguistic factors and processing conditions are relevant for L2 acquisition. An approach to L2 instruction in which L2 learners participate in communicative, real-world tasks that expose them to comprehensible and meaningful input and where they have opportunities for interaction and negotiation of meaning might ultimately engage natural acquisition mechanisms, cause a change in L2 learner’s interlanguage system, and drive forward development. A traditional model for the organization of language lessons, both in the classroom and in textbooks, has long been the Present–Practice– Produce (PPP) approach. Within this model, individual language items are presented by the teacher, then practised in the form of spoken and written exercises (often pattern drills), and then used by the learners in less controlled speaking or writing activities. A different model is the Test– Teach–Test approach (TTT), in which the production stage comes first, and the learners are “thrown in at the deep end” and required to perform a particular task (a role play, for example). This is followed by the teacher dealing with some of the grammatical or lexical problems that arose in the first stage and the learners then being required to perform the initial task again or to perform a similar task. Task-Based Instruction proposed an alternative model to PPP. It was developed in the late 1980s and became popular in the 1990s. It referred to a type of language teaching which takes “tasks” as its key units for designing and implementing language instruction. Task-Based Instruction aims at providing L2 learners with a natural context to use the target language. Learners work to complete a task and have plenty of opportunities for interaction and negotiation of meaning as they have to understand each other and express their own meaning. Task-Based Instruction aims at integrating all four language skills and providing opportunities for the learners to experiment with and explore both spoken and written language through learning activities which are designed to engage learners in the authentic, practical, and functional use of language for meaningful purposes (i.e., to cultivate the learners’ communicative competence). As we have seen, since the 1940s, scholars and practitioners have proposed a variety of options when it comes to L2 grammar teaching (see Richards & Rodgers, 2001; Long & Doughty, 2009; Benati, forthcoming). In the last three-quarters of a century, we have witnessed a variety of methods in language teaching (e.g., Grammar-Translation, Natural Approach, Total Physical Response, Audio-Lingual Method, Communicative Language Teaching, and Task-Based Instruction). Each of these methods

Pedagogical Interventions to L2 Grammar Instruction

has proposed a different approach to the teaching of grammar, representing multiple shifts in terms of how language teachers should approach grammar teaching. When it comes to grammar instruction the question is not whether or not we should teach grammar, but how. Instructors might have to approach grammar teaching through the use of a variety of pedagogical interventions, taking into consideration a number of factors. In the next section, we will examine some of the key pedagogical interventions to grammar instruction with the intention of providing some effective suggestions and solutions for L2 teaching.

20.4  Pedagogical Interventions to Grammar Instruction 20.4.1  Focus on Form Long (1991) and Long and Robinson (1998) distinguished between two types of grammar instruction: “focus on forms” and “focus on form”. Focus on forms refers to a type of instruction that isolates specific linguistic forms and teaches them one at a time. In this traditional approach, grammar instruction is often characterized by paradigmatic explanations of specific linguistic forms or structures. Paradigmatic explanation of particular linguistic features is followed by pattern practice and substitution drills. In this type of mechanical practice, real-life situations are completely ignored and practice is implemented in a fully decontextualized way. The idea that acquiring grammar can be simply achieved by learning about the grammatical rules of a target language and practising those rules through production tasks (very often mechanical and traditional) has been challenged by many scholars in L2 acquisition research. The term grammar in second language acquisition does not refer to textbook rules but to the term mental representation. Mental representation (VanPatten, 2016) refers to learners’ underlying knowledge of language. It is abstract, implicit, and involves a number of language components such as syntax, phonology, and morphology. It requires input and some type of internal mechanisms to develop. Instruction might not be able to affect those internal mechanisms; however, it can assist acquisition through input manipulations. In recent years, findings from empirical research in instructed L2 acquisition (VanPatten & Benati, 2015) and theory have demonstrated that a component of focus on form might facilitate acquisition if it is provided in combination with a focus on meaning (Hinkel, 2005; Nassaji & Fotos, 2011). The term focus on form is characterized by pedagogical interventions to grammar instruction which provide a focus on meaning and a focus on form. L2 learners’ attention is being focused on specific linguistic properties in the course of a communicative task. Spada (1997) has defined

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focus on form more broadly as “any pedagogical effort that is used to draw learners’ attention to language form either implicitly or explicitly” (p. 73). One of the key conditions for L2 learners to acquire the grammatical properties of an L2 is that they be exposed to sufficient input. The centrality of input in L2 acquisition has been emphasized within many frameworks (e.g., Universal Grammar; Interaction Hypothesis; Input Processing) and by scholars (Gass, 1997; VanPatten, 2015; White, 2003). Gass has defined input as “the single most important concept in L2 acquisition” (p. 1). Considering the limited role of instruction, and the importance of incorporating grammar in a more meaningful approach to instruction, educators should look at devising grammar tasks that, on the one hand, enhance the grammatical features in the input and, on the other hand, provide L2 learners with opportunities to focus on meaning. How grammar can be focused on in the language classroom has been proposed through a number of pedagogical interventions to grammar instruction: input oriented, grammar-focused tasks oriented, interactional oriented, and output oriented.

20.4.2  Input-Oriented Pedagogical Interventions Along with the limited role for instruction, researchers have investigated the effects of a number of input-oriented options to grammar instruction which might help L2 learners to internalize the grammatical features of a target language. L2 acquisition researchers consider input the main ingredient (Gass, 1997), the raw data for acquisition (VanPatten & Williams, 2015).

20.4.2.1  Processing Instruction Processing Instruction is a pedagogical intervention to L2 grammar instruction which facilitates the cognitive processes by which learners connect a form in the input to its meaning. Form–meaning connections refer to the relationship learners make between referential meaning and the way it is encoded linguistically. For example, when learners hear the sentence I talked to my teacher and understand that talked means that the action is in the past, a form–meaning connection is made. For Processing Instruction to be authentic, the intervention must attempt to tackle a processing problem informed by the Input Processing Theory (VanPatten, 2004). Two of the overarching processing principles in the Input Processing Theory are: • L2 learners are driven to get meaning first while processing language input (Primacy of Meaning Principle); and • L2 learners assign the role of subject to the first noun they encounter in a sentence (First Noun Principle). According to Processing Instruction, learners are required to simultaneously focus on form to get meaning to improve their ability to process

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the right information and make the right form–meaning connections during comprehension. This is a different function from simply noticing a form in the input, which means being consciously aware of something in the input. Processing Instruction is fundamentally different from other input-oriented pedagogical interventions to grammar instruction such as input enhancement. This is because enhancing a feature in the input might help learners to notice that feature, but it does not necessarily mean that learners actually link meaning with form or that it facilitates how they are able to build sentence structure during sentence parsing. The main goal of Processing Instruction is to alter learners’ processing strategies to facilitate more appropriate and accurate moment-by-moment computation of sentence structure (parsing) and connection of surface formal features with meaning (form–meaning connections). Processing Instruction consists of two main components: learners are given explicit information about a linguistic structure of form and the particular processing strategy that may negatively affect their picking up of the form or structure during language processing; and learners are pushed to process (but not produce) the form or structure during structured input tasks. During these structured input tasks, learners are pushed to process the targeted form or structure through tasks in which the input is manipulated in particular ways to push learners to become dependent on the form or the structure to get meaning (Benati, 2018). Some important guidelines that are used to develop structured input tasks are: • • • • • •

present one thing at a time; keep meaning in focus; move from sentences to connected discourse; use both oral and written input; have the learner do something with the input; and keep the learner’s processing strategies in mind.

Structured input tasks are normally referential or affective. Referential activities are those which have a right and wrong answer and for which the learner must rely on the targeted grammatical form to get meaning. Affective structured input activities are those in which learners express an opinion, belief, or some other affective response and are engaged in processing information about the real world. Affective activities reinforce form–meaning connections established during referential structured input activities. To date, experimental studies within this framework have examined the effects of Processing Instruction in different languages, linguistic features, populations, and contexts, and using different methodological tools (Benati, 2017). The general trends noted in this growing body of work have revealed:

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• Processing Instruction is more effective than traditional instruction; • Processing Instruction is effective on both sentence and discourse-level tasks (interpretation and production in different modes); • Processing Instruction has primary and secondary effects; and • Processing Instruction has long-term effects.

20.4.2.2  Input Enhancement Sharwood Smith (1993) introduced the concept of input enhancement for the first time with reference to the role of grammar in L2 instruction. Input enhancement is a pedagogical intervention that aims at helping L2 learners to notice specific forms in the input. Comprehensible and meaning-bearing input is one of the main factors in L2 acquisition. L2 learners must be exposed to comprehensible and meaningful input for acquisition to take place. Learners acquire an L2 by having access to positive and negative evidence. Positive evidence consists of the various utterances to which learners are exposed in the input. There are pedagogical interventions that help teachers to expose learners to comprehensible input and positive evidence while at the same time draw learner’s attention to linguistic properties in the target language. An input flood provides comprehensible meaningful input and does not disrupt the flow of communication. With an input flood, the input that learners receive is purposely saturated with the target form that learners are anticipated to notice. However, because this pedagogical intervention is so implicit, it is difficult to know whether learners are learning something through the flood. In designing input flood activities, the following guidelines are important to keep in mind: • use written or oral input; • input is modified and contains many instances of the same form/structure; and • input must be meaningful and learners must interact with it. A review of the main studies measuring the relative effects of input flood (Benati, 2016) suggests that it might be effective in increasing learners’ knowledge of what is possible in the target language. Benati’s review also suggests that an input flood might be an effective pedagogical intervention subject to factors such as the length of the treatment and the nature of the linguistic feature. However, an input flood might not be effective in increasing learners’ knowledge of what is not possible in the target language. Textual enhancement is an instructional intervention carried out to increase the saliency of input in written or oral texts with the goal of facilitating learners’ noticing of targeted forms and thereby enhancing their acquisition (Sharwood Smith, 1993). Textual enhancement makes use of typographical cues (e.g., boldfacing, italicizing, underlining, colouring,

Pedagogical Interventions to L2 Grammar Instruction

enlarging the font size, etc.) to draw learners’ attention to particular forms in a text. Researchers have used textual enhancements under a variety of conditions and with a variety of intentions. Designing this type of grammar task will involve following these guidelines: • grammatical tasks using textual enhancement should use written input; and • the target form is enhanced, visually altering its appearance in the text. Benati’s (2016) review of the main studies measuring the relative effects of textual enhancement provides the following insights: • mixed results have been reported on the effects of textual enhancement; • empirical research has shown a small-sized positive effect; and • a number of factors might constrain the effects of input enhancement on the acquisition of grammar: proficiency level; the developmental stage and the degree of readiness of the learner; the type of linguistic feature chosen; and the intensity of the treatment.

20.4.2.3  Focus on Grammar Through Discourse According to a discourse approach to grammar teaching (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2001) grammar pedagogy should not only be considered from a formal viewpoint. Teachers’ efforts should be focused on understanding how grammatical items combine to generate meaningful discourse. A discourse-oriented approach to grammar implies a greater emphasis on contexts larger than the sentence and at the same time a reassessment about what is taught in terms of linguistic items (e.g., word order, tense, and aspect). Designing pedagogical activities for grammar teaching through discourse will involve following these general guidelines (Thornbury, 2006): • • • •

expose learners to discourse illustrating specific patterns; ensure learners understand content and vocabulary; elicit relevant linguistic patterns from learners (e.g., group task); provide opportunities for learners to use the pattern in speech and writing; • provide opportunities for learners to evaluate and correct each other’s production; and • provide additional assignments to reinforce practice of grammar and discourse. Main classroom studies have been carried out among English as a second language (ESL) learners (Hinkel 2002a, 2002b). Hinkel’s studies found that instruction in L2 writing should include explicit instruction on grammar. In addition, she suggested that complex forms (e.g., English tenses,

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passive constructions) need to receive extensive exposure and be studied in relation to the way they are used in context.

20.4.3  Grammar-Oriented Tasks The use of tasks in language teaching has been widely supported. A task is a classroom activity that has an objective attainable only by (i) interaction among participants; (ii) a mechanism for structuring and sequencing interaction; or (iii) a focus on meaning exchange. Two grammar-oriented tasks have been proposed to promote awareness and practice of target forms: structure-based production tasks to complete communicative activities and consciousness-raising tasks. We focus mainly on consciousness-raising tasks.

20.4.3.1  Consciousness-Raising Tasks As defined by Ellis (1991), consciousness raising is a pedagogic activity where learners are provided with L2 data in some form and are required to perform some operation on or with it, the purpose of which is to arrive at an explicit understanding of some linguistic property or properties of the target language. Consciousness raising is an approach to grammar teaching in accordance with new views about education as a process of discovery through problem-solving tasks. It does not conflict with, but rather provides a supplement to, the teaching of grammar communicatively. Consciousness-raising tasks can be inductive or deductive. In the case of an inductive task, learners are given some language data and are required to provide an explicit representation of the target linguistic feature. In the case of a deductive task, learners are given a description of the target linguistic feature and are required to use that description to apply it to L2 data. Consciousness-raising tasks are commonly designed with the following guidelines in mind: • • • •

the task focuses on a complex form or structure for learners; the data provided is adequate to make learners discover the rule; the task requires minimal production on the part of the learner; and there is an opportunity for applying the rule to construct a personal statement.

Wong’s (2005) review of studies measuring the relative effects of textual enhancement provides the following insights: • the effectiveness of consciousness raising depends on the nature of the form used; and • these tasks are useful in order to develop language awareness of grammar structures too complex to be understood through formal instruction.

Pedagogical Interventions to L2 Grammar Instruction

20.4.4 Interaction-Oriented Pedagogical Interventions and Corrective Feedback The role of interactional and corrective feedback is a key issue in L2 acquisition. Interaction refers to conversations between learners and other interlocutors (e.g., native speakers and non-native speakers, learner–teacher interactions). Corrective feedback refers to utterances from a language instructor or another speaker which indicate that the learner’s output is not correct. This term is often interchanged with the term “negative evidence” which relates to different techniques used to alert L2 learners to what is not possible in the target language. Interactional corrective feedback can occur in several ways, ranging from reformulations to elicitations. The different corrective feedback types which we discuss below are: recasts; clarification requests; metalinguistic feedback; and explicit elicitation.

20.4.4.1 Recasts Recasts refer to a reformulation of a learner’s erroneous utterance into a correct form without sacrificing an overall focus on meaning. Recasts are used by instructors to make sure that the speaker becomes aware that something is wrong in their speech production. Below is one example of how a recast can be used: nns: 

I goed to the football match. ns:   Oh, you went alone? nns:  I went with my son. ns:   Did you enjoy it?

In the above example, the non-native speaker (NNS) produces a sentence which contains an error. The native speaker (NS; language tutor) provides a recast by reformulating the learner’s incorrect form into a correct form. The successful correction made by the non-native speaker is called uptake. The native speaker continues the interaction in an attempt to not break the flow of communication. The degree of explicitness in using this technique would vary also depending on the use of intonational signals. In the example below, the added stress, marked by capital letters, makes the recast more explicit: nns: 

It bugs me when a bee sting me. Oh, when a bee STINGS me. nns:  Stings me. ns:   Do you get stung often?  ns:  

(from Lightbown & Spada, 2013)

20.4.4.2  Clarification Requests Clarification requests occur when there is a breakdown of communication between two speakers. One speaker asks the other speaker to clarify his/her utterance. It does not provide the speaker with the correct form;

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however, it gives the other speaker the opportunity for self-repair. Phrases such as ‘‘sorry?’’ or “what did you say?” or ‘‘say that again, please” provide the learner with an opportunity to clarify and/or make their utterance more accurate. nns: 

Where is the [… that thing … bin]? ns:   I’m sorry. What are looking for?

20.4.4.3  Metalinguistic Feedback Metalinguistic feedback provides the NNS with a metalinguistic cue in the input and/or metalinguistic feedback about the correctness of an utterance. The two examples below demonstrate this: nns: 

I see him in the office yesterday. You need a past tense (metalinguistic cue). nns:  He catch a fish. ns:   Caught is the past tense (metalinguistic feedback and correction).  (From Nassaji & Fotos, 2011, p. 77). ns:  

20.4.4.4  Direct Elicitation In direct elicitation, the NS attempts to elicit relevant information from the NNS. There is no correction but an opportunity for self repair or correction: nns:  ns:  



And when the young girl arrive, ah, beside the old woman. When the young girl … ? (From Nassaji & Fotos, 2011: 77)

A review of studies measuring the relative effects of interactional feedback provide the following insights (Mackey & Goo, 2007): • recasts are not always effective in eliciting immediate revision and repair; • recasts can enhance a form and provide learners with a focus on form without interrupting the flow of conversation while still allowing L2 learners to focus on message content; • clarification requests are effective in enabling learners to self-repair; • corrective feedback is more effective when L2 learners are actively engaged in negotiating a form; and • the opportunity of negotiating forms is better achieved when the language instructor does not provide the correct form but instead provides cues to help the learner consider how to reformulate his/her incorrect language. Despite the mixed results, overall classroom research has indicated that it is desirable and helpful to provide corrective feedback without interrupting the flow of communication. Interactional feedback techniques can be

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a useful tool in promoting L2 acquisition. The question is not whether or not we should provide opportunities for interactional feedback, but how we accomplish this in the most effective way.

20.4.5  Output-Oriented Pedagogical Interventions The role of output in L2 acquisition has been considered within two frameworks: the skill building hypothesis and the comprehensible Output Hypothesis. From the skill building hypothesis perspective, L2 learners should first learn rules or items consciously and then gradually automatize them through practice (DeKeyser, 2015). From a comprehensible output perspective, Swain (1985, 1995) has proposed a different role for output. According to Swain, comprehensible input is not sufficient for developing native-like grammatical competence. L2 learners need opportunities for pushed output (speech or writing that demands learners produce language correctly and appropriately). Swain has proposed that output contributes to L2 acquisition in three ways: • Hypothesis testing: L2 learners can test out their hypotheses about how they express their meaning in an L2. Learners may use language production as a way of trying out new language forms and structures as they stretch their interlanguage. They may use their output to test what works and what does not. • Noticing: L2 learners are able to notice a gap in their linguistic ability. The activity of producing the target language may prompt L2 learners to recognize consciously some of their linguistic problems. • Metalingusitic function: L2 learners can reflect consciously on the target language. Metatalk produced in the context of making meaning may serve the function of deepening learners’ awareness of forms and rules and the relationship of those forms and rules to the meaning they are trying to express. Skehan (1996) has also proposed a series of possible contributions for output. He argues that output: • generates better input: L2 learners can negotiate meaning and provide input for somebody else; • promotes syntactic processing: L2 learners are able to pay attention to the means by which meaning is expressed; • helps learners in their hypotheses about grammar: L2 learners can try out hypotheses; and • helps the development of discourse skills: L2 learners are able to move from sentence to discourse production. Considering the various roles that output can have in L2 acquisition, there are various collaborative output tasks (e.g., dictogloss, jigsaw tasks,

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structured-output tasks) that might help L2 learners in acquiring the grammatical properties of an L2. Pushing L2 learners to produce output through collaborative tasks is one way to facilitate accurate and appropriate use of L2 forms and structures.

20.4.5.1 Dictogloss A dictogloss (Wajnryb, 1990) is a type of task-based collaborative output which aims at helping learners to use their grammar resources to reconstruct a text and become aware of their own shortcomings and needs. It consists of a listening phase and a reconstruction phase in which L2 learners are asked to reconstruct a text rather than write down the exact words that are dictated. As the text is read at a natural speed, students cannot write down every word but only key words, and they have to understand the meaning and use their knowledge of grammar in order to reconstruct it. Guidelines to develop dictogloss tasks typically adhere to four stages: • Preparation: L2 learners are informed about the topic of the text. Through a series of warm-up discussions, they are given the necessary vocabulary to cope with the task. It is at this stage that they are also organized into groups. • Dictation: L2 learners hear the text for the first time at natural speed. The first time they hear the text, they do not take any notes, and the second time, they are asked to note down key words to help them remember the content and reconstruct the text. • Reconstruction: L2 learners work together in small groups. In groups, they are asked to reconstruct the text with correct grammar and content. • Analysis and correction: L2 learners analyse, compare, and correct their texts. This examination is achieved with the help of the teacher and other learner groups. Research has shown that a dictogloss is a very effective pedagogical intervention (Swain & Lapkin, 2001) for a number of reasons: • L2 learners are encouraged to focus their attention on form and meaning and all four-language skills are practised; • L2 learners develop a need for communication and for group work; • learners can monitor and adjust their interlanguage; and • L2 learners have ample opportunity for discussion and negotiation.

20.4.5.2  Jigsaw Task In a jigsaw collaborative output task (Wajnryb, 1990), L2 learners can work in pairs or in small groups. Each pair or group has different information, and they have to exchange their information to complete the task. In a typical jigsaw task, L2 learners are asked to work in pairs. They each have different information and they have to give and receive information to

Pedagogical Interventions to L2 Grammar Instruction

complete a task. Each pair is given a partially completed chart containing different information. Learners take turns asking and answering questions in order to gather the relevant information to complete the task. Both partners must request and supply missing information in order to complete the activity. In a jigsaw task, a pair of learners or a group is each given a partially completed text or chart or passage. The text includes a cloze component, and one grammatical form is removed from the text (learner’s version). L2 learners will all have to ask the instructor to supply missing information in order to complete the task. Research (e.g., Swain & Lapkin, 2000) has shown that these types of task: • provide L2 learners with an opportunity to direct their attention to the target linguistic form; and • provide a great amount of negotiation as all participants have to speak and to understand each other in order to complete the task.

20.4.5.3  Structured-Output Tasks Structured-output tasks are an effective alternative to mechanical output practice. They have two main characteristics: they involve the exchange of previously unknown information; and they require learners to access a particular form or structure in order to process meaning. The following guidelines are used to develop structured-output tasks: • • • • •

present one thing at a time; keep meaning in focus; move from sentence to discourse; use both written and oral production; and other learners must respond to the content of the output.

Research investigating the effects of structured-output tasks (Benati & Batziou, 2017) has revealed that they are useful in providing meaning-based output practice and promoting L2 development. They should follow structured-input practice and should be used in combination with input-oriented pedagogical interventions.

20.5  Concluding Remarks Theoretical and empirical findings in L2 research have, on the one hand, indicated the limited role for grammar instruction (e.g., instruction cannot alter the route of acquisition), and on the other hand, highlighted the importance of incorporating grammar in a more communicative framework of language teaching by devising grammar tasks that enhance the grammatical features in the input. The question is to determine what type

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of grammar is more successful in terms of helping learners internalize the grammatical features of a target language. In L2 acquisition, learners bring with them a variety of internal mechanisms and traits which effectively override most instructional efforts. Parallel to these findings in L2 theory and research, there has been a dramatic shift from traditional grammar-oriented interventions to more communicative pedagogical interventions to grammar instruction. This shift has meant a change in the way grammar is taught and practised in the L2 classroom. The more researchers learn about what learners do with input and how they do it, the closer they come to understanding the facilitative effects of instruction. Such theoretical insights have driven researchers to examine the effects of pedagogical interventions which are input-, interaction-, and output-oriented. Traditional grammar instruction is not an appropriate way to approach the teaching of L2 grammatical forms and the structure of an L2. Paradigmatic explanations of a grammatical rule followed by mechanical and meaningful drill practice does not seem effective in focusing on form in the language classroom. However, there are types of “focus on form” pedagogical interventions to grammar instruction that in certain cases and conditions can enhance and speed up the way languages are learned. These are an effective way to incorporate grammar teaching and grammar tasks in communicative language teaching programmes. Input enhancement techniques provide L2 learners with access to comprehensible input and positive evidence while encouraging them to pay attention to grammatical forms in the input. Processing Instruction and structured input practice help learners to process input correctly and more efficiently. This can consequently increase learners’ intake and provide the correct information for learners. Consciousness-raising tasks help learners to pay attention to grammatical forms in the input while at the same time providing the necessary input needed to acquire an L2. Interactional feedback is a facilitative tool to draw learners’ attention to grammatical properties of the language and foster interaction and negotiation of meaning. Collaborative output tasks are useful as well, given that they provide L2 learners with an opportunity to produce output, promote negotiation of form, and develop linguistic skills. Language teachers should vary their choice of a pedagogical interventions. Below are some of the principles which L2 instructors should take into account when developing grammar tasks and using a pedagogical intervention to grammar instruction: • given that L2 acquisition can be effectively influenced by manipulating input, grammar tasks should be developed to ensure that learners process input correctly and efficiently (noticing plus processing);

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• grammar tasks should be designed for learners to notice and process forms in the input and eventually make correct form-mapping connections; • language teaching should include a variety of grammar tasks that repeatedly target both focus on form and focus on meaning; • language teaching should include grammar tasks which apply to all learner types; and • considering the role of output in L2 acquisition, collaborative output tasks should be used to promote language production and the development of grammatical skills.

References Benati, A. (2016). Input manipulation, enhancement and processing: Theoretical views and empirical research. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 6, 65–88. Benati, A. (2017a). Classroom-oriented research: Processing Instruction (findings and implications). Language Teaching. Benati, A (2018). Structured input. In J. I. Liontas (ed.), TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching. New York: Wiley. Benati, A. (forthcoming). Key issues in second language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benati, A., & Batziou, M. (2017). The effects of structured-input and structured-output tasks on the acquisition of English causative. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. Celce-Murcia, M., & Olshtain, E. (2001). Discourse and context in language teaching: A guide for language teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DeKeyser, R. (2015). Skill Acquisition Theory. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (2nd edn., pp. 94–112). New York: Routledge. Doughty, C., & Williams, J. (eds.) (1998). Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis, R. (1991). Grammar teaching practice or consciousness raising? In R. Ellis (ed.), Second language acquisition and second language pedagogy (pp. 232–241). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ellis, R., & Wulff, S. (2015). Usage-based approaches to SLA. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (2nd edn., pp. 75–93). New York: Routledge. Gass, S. (1997). Input, interaction, and the second language learner. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

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Gass, S., & Mackey, A. (2015). Input, interaction, and output in second language acquisition. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (2nd edn., pp. 180–206). New York: Routledge. Hinkel, E. (2002a). Grammar teaching in writing classes: Tenses and cohesion. In E. Hinkel & S. Fotos (eds.), New perspectives on grammar teaching in second language classrooms (pp. 181–198). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Hinkel, E. (2002b). Why English passive is difficult to teach (and learn). In E. Hinkel & S. Fotos (eds.), New perspectives on grammar teaching in second language classrooms (pp. 233–260). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Hinkel, E. (ed.) (2005). The handbook of research in second language teaching and learning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. London: Pergamon. Krashen, S. D., & Terrell, T. (1983). The Natural Approach: Language acquisition in the classroom. Hayward, CA: Alemany. Lantolf, J., Thorne, S., & Poehner, M. (2015). Sociocultural theory and second language development. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (pp. 207–226). New York: Routledge. Lightbown, P., & Spada, N. (2013) How languages are learned (4th edn.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Long, M. (1983). Does second language instruction make a difference? TESOL Quarterly, 17, 359–382. Long, M. (1991). Focus on form: A design feature in language teaching methodology. In K. de Bot (ed.), Foreign language research in cross-cultural perspectives (pp. 39–52). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins. Long, M., & Doughty, C. (eds.) (2009). The handbook of language teaching. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Long, M., & Robinson, P. (1998). Focus on form: Theory, research and practice. In C. Doughty & J. Williams (eds.), Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition (pp. 15–41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mackey, A., & Goo, J. (2007). Interaction research in SLA: A meta-analysis and research synthesis. In A. Mackey (ed.), Conversational interaction in second language acquisition: A collection of empirical studies (pp. 407–452). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nassaji, H., & Fotos, S. (2011). Teaching grammar in second language classrooms. New York: Routledge. Pienemann, M., & Lenzing, A. (2015). Processability theory. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (2nd edn., pp. 159–179). New York: Routledge. Richards, J., & Rodgers, T. (2001). Approaches and methods in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Schmidt, R. (1990). The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 11, 129–158. Sharwood Smith, M. (1991). Speaking to many minds: On the relevance of different types of language information for the L2 learner. Second Language Research, 7, 118–132. Sharwood Smith, M. (1993). Input enhancement in instructed SLA: Theoretical bases. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 15, 165–179. Skehan, P. (1996). A framework for the implementation of task-based instruction. Applied Linguistics, 17, 38–62. Spada, N. (1997). Form-focused instruction and second language acquisition: A review of classroom and laboratory research. Language Teaching, 30, 73–87. Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In S. Gass & C. Madden (eds.), Input in second language acquisition (pp. 235–256). New York: Newbury House. Swain, M. (1995). Three functions of output in second language learning. In G. Cook & B. Seidlhofer (eds.), Principles and practice in the study of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swain, M., & Lapkin, S. (2000). Task-based second language learning: The uses of the first language. Language Teaching Research, 4(3), 251–274. Swain, M., & Lapkin, S. (2001). Focus on form through collaborative dialogue: Exploring task effects. In M. Bygate, P. Skehan, & M. Swain (eds.), Researching pedagogic tasks: Second language learning, teaching and testing (pp. 99–118). Harlow: Pearson. Thornbury, S. (2006). Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. VanPatten, B. (1996). Input processing and grammar instruction: Theory and research. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. VanPatten, B. (ed.) (2004). Processing Instruction: Theory, research, and commentary. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. VanPatten, B. (2015). Input processing. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (2nd edn., pp. 113–134). New York: Routledge. VanPatten, B. (2016). Language. New York: Routledge. VanPatten, B., & Benati, A. (2015). Key terms in second language acquisition. London: Continuum. VanPatten, B., & Williams, J. (2015). Theories in second language acquisition (2nd edn.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Wajnryb, R. (1990). Grammar dictation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, L. (2003). Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wong, W. (2005). Input enhancement: From theory and research to the classroom. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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21 Task-Based Language Learning Michael H. Long, Jiyong Lee, and Kyoko Kobayashi Hillman

21.1 Introduction Most language learning and teaching is organized around series of linguistic units of various kinds, with grammatical, notional-functional, lexical, and hybrid syllabuses all popular. They use a “synthetic” syllabus, in which the target language is cut up into bite-size pieces and presented and practised one at a time. The learner’s job is to synthesize the pieces later for communication. The psychological rationale most commonly invoked for the synthetic syllabus is Skill Acquisition Theory (SAT), an import from first language (L1) psychology not originally developed with language learning in mind. The claim is that instruction first provides students with declarative knowledge of a structure—knowledge that, e.g., third person singular present tense verbs in English take a final –s. Controlled practice then converts declarative into procedural knowledge, knowledge how. Massive practice subsequently automatizes control of the item, until learners can produce works, likes, etc., effortlessly and fluently. Improvement in listening or speaking depends on practice in the skill concerned. The dominance of what we will refer to as (in the broadest sense) “grammar-based” approaches and learning language intentionally continues despite theoretical and empirical evidence suggesting they are ill-conceived, especially, but not only, if the goal is implicit second language (L2) knowledge. It continues despite warnings about SAT’s limited scope: Skill Acquisition Theory is most easily applicable to what happens in (a) high-aptitude adult learners engaged in (b) the learning of simple structures at (c) fairly early stages of learning in (d) instructional contexts.  (DeKeyser, 2015, p. 101)

Task-Based Language Learning

Task-based language learning (TBLL) and teaching offers an attractive alternative. Task-based approaches are broadly consistent with theory and research findings in second language acquisition (SLA, the process language teaching is supposed to facilitate), and also with lessons learned from the history and philosophy of education. “Task-based” refers to the use of a syllabus whose content is a series, not of linguistic forms, but of pedagogic tasks sequenced in terms of increasing task, not linguistic, complexity, and lessons whose primary focus is communicative use of the L2 to complete those tasks. This is an example of what Wilkins calls an “analytic” syllabus. Much as in child L1A, learners experience gestalt samples of communicative target language use. Their job is to analyse the input and induce the underlying rules (or perceive the statistical regularities) and learn the lexis and collocations it contains incidentally while performing the tasks. There is no attempt to impose an external overt or covert linguistic syllabus, which would conflict with the internal “learner syllabus”, whose workings are reflected, among other ways, in well-attested common errors and error types, developmental sequences, U-shaped behaviour, so-called “autonomous syntax”, and gradual approximation to target norms, not sudden categorical acquisition of target structures one at a time, as SAT would imply. The psycholinguistic rationale proposed for TBLT varies somewhat, but is usually an amalgam of cognitive-interactionist and usage-based theories (see, e.g., Long, 2015a, pp. 30–62; Robinson, 2007, 2015; Skehan, 1998, 2015) developed with language learning as the explanandum. When students are adults, whose capacity for purely incidental learning, especially instance learning, is weaker than in young children, a variety of devices is required to enhance incidental learning and thereby speed up the process. The enhancements seek to help learners either detect or notice new items in the input by increasing their perceptual saliency and by drawing learners’ attention to needed lexis and collocations and grammatical patterns, especially when non-salient forms and form–function or form–meaning relationships are concerned. However, most of the attention-drawing procedures are deployed in response to learner performance, not in advance, as in synthetic approaches. Grammar-based and task-based approaches are fundamentally different. The main foci of grammar-based language teaching (LT), and of the four-skills Present–Practice–Produce (PPP) pedagogy through which it is usually delivered, are the L2 as object of instruction, intentional learning, and explicit knowledge. The main foci of task-based language teaching (TBLT), conversely, are the L2 as medium of instruction, enhanced incidental learning, and implicit knowledge.

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21.2  Four Problems with Grammar-Based LT The many ways in which use of synthetic linguistic syllabuses conflicts with theory and research findings in SLA have been laid out in detail elsewhere (see, e.g., Long, 2009, 2015a, pp. 16–29; Long & Robinson, 1998). Here, we will briefly summarize four arguments against grammar-based approaches and overuse of the Initiation–Response–Feedback (IRF) exchange structure pervasive in the kind of teacher–student interaction encouraged by PPP pedagogy.

21.2.1  The Problem with Input, Interaction, and Output Quality Input, interaction, and output in grammar-based PPP are impoverished— limited, repetitive, and mostly a matter of asking and answering display (known information) questions in IRF exchanges designed not for communication, but to manipulate examples of the structure of the day. For example, a teacher may take students through a short reading passage or “dialogue” deliberately crafted by a textbook writer to include numerous examples of the structure, and then ask a series of questions whose purpose is to see that students have “learned” the structure, or in the parlance of SAT, have developed “procedural knowledge” of it. T:  S:  T:    S:  T: 

Where does Mary work? (I) She work in a bank. (R) She works in a bank. Works. (F) She works in a bank. (I) She works in a bank. (R) Good (F)

It is linguistic ping-pong. Utterances are stripped down lexically, and typically have little or no communicative value, even when leaving the well-trodden terrain of information known to everyone from the textbook story, ostensibly to elicit creative examples of the new pattern applied to students’ own lives:

T:  Where does your father work? (I) S:  He works in an office. (R) T:  Good. (F)

The evaluative feedback move betrays the real purpose of the exchange, and the pseudo-communicative nature of the “conversation”. The lack of implicit knowledge is revealed moments later when the teacher notices that Ana is missing from class and asks if anyone knows where she is. Ana’s friend volunteers that “She takes care her sister on Friday.” Repetitive IRF sequences targeting the structure of the day are more common, especially in “elementary” and “intermediate” classes, than many

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supporters of grammar-based LT are willing to admit. Such exchanges have constituted a majority of classroom “talk” in many published empirical studies of grammar-based lessons (see, e.g., Long & Sato, 1983; White & Lightbown, 1984), even when the teachers concerned were trained in, and professed support for, some sort of “communicative” approach. Dinsmore (1985) likened the classroom discourse in the lessons he observed to the dialogue typical of the Theatre of the Absurd, such as Becket’s Waiting for Godot, where human existence has no purpose, and actors are reduced to meaningless repetitive exchanges using language full of clichés, circularities, word play, and nonsense. In the L1 literature, the continuous recurrence of IRF sequences across generations of teachers (teach as you were taught?) has been referred to as “the persistence of the recitation” (Hoetker & Ahlbrand, 1969). SLA research (e.g., Sato, 1990) has shown this is not the way languages are learned. To “teach” isolated grammatical structures first, for communication later, is to put the proverbial cart before the horse. Far from offering a direct path to instant native-like ability, one structure at a time, carefully monitored rehearsal of native-like sentences impedes development and internalization of implicit linguistic knowledge, among other ways because it takes no account of the learner’s internal syllabus, i.e., of what he or she is psycholinguistically ready to learn. Implicit knowledge is what is needed for the instantaneous demands of listening and spontaneous speech, and for functional L2 abilities in general. Really learning a new language entails an inevitably lengthy process of gradual approximation to target norms, replete with errors and interlingual forms along the way, modified and improved mostly by communicative failure and the implicit negative feedback available during negotiation for meaning, which pervades genuine communicative language use but rarely occurs in grammar-based classroom lessons. In the memorable words of Hatch (1978): … language learning evolves out of learning how to carry on conversations … One learns how to do conversation, one learns how to interact verbally, and out of this interaction syntactic structures are developed. (p. 404)

21.2.2  The Problem with Learnability A fixed series of stages in the development of L2 German word order was first identified by the ZIZA group (Meisel, Clahsen, & Pienemann, 1981). The Wuppertal work came with an explanation for the developmental sequence (Clahsen, 1987), and because this was in terms of universal processing constraints, it could predict as yet unverified sequences, not just in other areas of German as a second language (GSL) morphology and syntax, but in other L2s, as well.

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Out of the ZIZA work grew Processability Theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998; Pienemann & Kessler, 2012). PT has motivated numerous studies (continuing to this day) of developmental sequences in a variety of typologically unrelated languages. The findings have been broadly consistent with PT predictions. PT-motivated work (e.g., Bonilla, 2014; Ellis, 1989) conducted to determine whether instruction can alter the sequences has found them robust, and the same is true in naturalistic and instructed language learning, i.e., unchanged by textbook sequences or grammar-based instruction that typically seeks to present and practice production of the final NS stage in a sequence from the get-go. Aside from the processing constraints, attempting to teach mastery of one structure at a time ignores the fact that few are free-standing, even at the elementary level, but are instead interdependent, requiring facility with others that go to make them up. English negative utterances, for example, require knowledge of basic word order, tense, number, and auxiliaries (Mary doesn’t like apples, John can’t play the guitar, Peter didn’t read the book, etc.). The conclusion is that passage through developmental sequences can be sped up, but stages cannot be skipped. Such results led Pienemann (1984, and elsewhere) to formulate his Processability, Learnability, and Teachability Hypotheses: what learners can process determines what they can learn, and what they can learn determines what teachers can teach. This presents a fundamental challenge to synthetic, grammar-based instruction, the implicit assumption underlying which is the opposite: teachers can teach what they want (the structure of the day), when they want (subjunctives on Tuesday), to whomever they want (all students, regardless of their psycholinguistic readiness). Despite the robust research findings, the dominant approach to LT worldwide remains the same: the linguistic plat du jour delivered via PPP, seasoned with grammar to taste (i.e., focus on forms). This is not the fault of instructed SLA (ISLA) research, which has done its job well. Rather, it reflects (1) the immense power of commercial textbook publishing, an industry worth billions of dollars each year (billions with a b) and (2) the influence of washback from standardized discrete-point language testing, another industry worth billions of dollars each year. On the positive side, however, in addition to revealing the limitations of synthetic syllabi and PPP, the ISLA research findings constitute one of several rationales for the analytic syllabus and for TBLT (task-based, not task-supported, LT).

21.2.3  The Problem with Quantity of Practice In courses intended to develop listening and speaking abilities, PPP and the IRF exchange structure have a negative effect, not just on the quality, but also the quantity of speaking opportunities for students. Using

Task-Based Language Learning

round numbers for ease of exposition, and recognizing that class size, among other factors, can vary in different parts of the world, assume three ­sixty-minute lessons per week for a class of thirty students. Roughly fifty per cent of class time in a school year is taken up by reading, writing, classroom management, and testing, leaving an average of ninety minutes per week for listening and speaking. Since teachers generally control the initiation and feedback moves, students (if still paying attention) respond in the thirty minutes remaining for them. However, since about fifty per cent of aural–oral work (dictation, drills of one kind or another, etc.) is handled “lockstep”, in whole-class format, only about fifteen minutes is left for individual student oral production. Split among thirty students, this equates to an average of roughly thirty seconds per student per week—enough time for, say, four short utterances each. Practice in pairs and small groups can alleviate the problem somewhat. However, assuming thirty weeks in a school year, students are effectively asked to learn to speak individually in thirty seconds per week x thirty weeks, i.e., a total of about fifteen minutes each per year. This is a tall order for any students not blessed with unusually high language aptitude.

21.2.4  The Problem with Purely Intentional Learning Learning a new language as an adult is an immense task, especially if the learner’s L1 and L2 are typologically unrelated. For example, it has been estimated that non-native speakers (NNSs) require approximately 9,000 word families to read newspapers and novels, and about 6,000 to watch videos (Nation, 2006). The time available in a typical foreign language course is hopelessly inadequate for treating each of those word families explicitly, and even more inadequate for the far greater number of collocations involved, in addition to L2 phonology, grammar, and pragmatics. Explicit instruction and intentional learning are too slow, an L2 too big, and time too short. Explicit instruction, moreover, induces intentional learning, a conscious operation in which learners attend to aspects of a stimulus array in a search for underlying patterns or structure. When intentional learning works, it results in explicit knowledge: people know something, and know they know. For a functional command of a language, however, usable fluently in spontaneous communication, what students need is implicit knowledge, accessible instantly and without thought. Implicit knowledge is knowledge learners have but are unaware they have. It is the result of incidental, not intentional, learning. Incidental learning is learning without intention to learn at least part of what is learned, i.e., while the learner’s attention is focused on something else (task completion). If, and only if, the learner remains unaware of what

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is learned, the incidental learning process is also a case of implicit learning, i.e., learning without intention and without awareness of the end product, implicit knowledge. Almost all of native speakers’ (NSs) knowledge of their L1 is implicit. Implicit learning is more basic and more important than explicit learning, and superior (Whong, Gil, & Marsden, 2014). It is automatic and fast; it is what underlies listening comprehension, spontaneous speech, and fluency. It is the result of deeper processing and so more durable, and it obviates the need for explicit knowledge, freeing up attentional resources to focus on message content. For many of their academic, occupational, and everyday social survival tasks—everything from listening to academic lectures, answering a teacher’s question, and participating in a classroom discussion, through to demonstrating a new product, delivering a sales report, or recommending a course of medical treatment to a patient, to following street directions, buying a train ticket, or opening a bank account—adults will depend first and foremost on their implicit knowledge. To a lesser degree, the same is true of reading. Since implicit L2 learning is the primary goal, students need opportunities for incidental learning. There are three problems, however. First, like intentional and explicit learning, incidental and implicit learning require more time, and a lot more input (rich, not impoverished, input) than is available in typical foreign language courses. Second, implicit learning may be limited to contingent items, or items either adjacent or brought into adjacency through some other means—by attention or by the use of a meaningful context in which they occur (Williams, 2009). Third, although laboratory studies of implicit learning of rules in artificial language grammars (see, e.g., Aslin & Newport, 2012) and field studies of naturalistic SLA (e.g., Granena & Long, 2013) demonstrate that adults remain capable of incidental and implicit learning, there are equally well-documented maturational constraints on language learning. The constraints show that their capacity for incidental and implicit language learning is weaker than in young children. This is especially true of instance learning, i.e., learning of arbitrary, non-rule-governed items, such as noun gender, lexis, and collocations. For all these reasons, the size of the learning task, the limited time available, the priority accorded implicit knowledge, the possible limits to purely implicit language learning, and the negative effects of increasing age, what will be needed is enhanced incidental learning, both to speed up acquisition and to improve ultimate attainment (Long, 2017). Enhancements can take many forms, depending on the kinds of learners and, especially, the kinds of target linguistic features involved. For example, with task performance the primary focus, some analytically oriented learners may not detect perceptually non-salient items in the input they experience while doing the task, especially if the items are

Task-Based Language Learning

communicatively redundant (Ellis, 2017). Examples (differentially relevant as L2 proficiency increases, and depending on the L1 and L2 involved) might include noun gender, Romance clitic pronouns, adverb placement, and inflectional morphology, such as English third person singular –s and –ed, whose function can be independently understood from context or other linguistics devices, such as adverbs (Peter arrived yesterday) (Sato, 1986). A variety of attention-drawing devices are available, either built in to task-based materials or deployed by teachers in real time, to make such features more salient, so more likely to be detected, i.e., perceived without awareness on the student’s part (Tomlin & Villa, 1994), or noticed, i.e., perceived with awareness at the moment of perception (Schmidt, 1990, and elsewhere).

21.3  Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching Having identified serious problems with grammar-based approaches, we now turn to a brief description and evaluation of an increasingly popular alternative, task-based language learning and teaching. Task-based approaches are not without their critics, too. For responses to the major charges, see Long (2016). Fundamental differences between the two approaches will become clear from the following brief descriptions of six stages in the design, implementation, and evaluation of a full-fledged TBLT course.

21.3.1  Needs Analyses A properly designed TBLT course begins with a needs analysis (NA), in two parts. The first is the identification of target tasks for particular groups of students, i.e., the real-world communicative uses to which learners will put the L2 beyond the classroom, the things they will need to do in and through the L2. The NA is carried out using (i) multiple oral and written sources of information, domain experts being the most important, (ii) multiple methods of gathering the information, such as interviews, questionnaires, and content analysis of training manuals and union contracts, and (iii) triangulation of sources and methods. The rationale for an NA is simple: learners differ, as do their target tasks. Occupations vary enormously, for example, and so do the tasks involved, as can easily be seen by spending a few minutes perusing the Dictionary of Occupational Titles or its online successor O*Net, the Occupational Information Network (both accessible free of charge). The tasks that define the work of a hotel receptionist, diplomat, or automobile mechanic, for example, differ greatly from one another, and all of them from those performed by students in university or vocational training programmes.

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If the learners are, or will be, using the L2 in a second language environment, there will be an auxiliary set of “social survival” tasks. Some may be relevant for the majority of people working or studying overseas, regardless of the primary reason for their presence there, but others may not. Many learners will need to use public transport, open a bank account, rent an apartment, and visit a doctor, but not all will need to buy a car, enroll a child in school, or attend a job interview. Delivering the same course for everyone without first determining what they need to be able to do in the L2 is as unacceptable as it would be for a physician to prescribe the same treatment for all patients without first conducting a medical diagnosis. (For a detailed rationale for NA, examples, and methodological options, see, e.g., Gilabert, 2005; Jasso-Aguilar, 2005; Long, 2005, 2013, 2015a, pp. 85–168; Serafini, Lake, & Long, 2015.) The second stage in a task-based NA involves gathering genuine samples of target language use by NSs performing the most frequent or most critical target tasks, and subjecting the samples to a flat, data-mining-type analysis of target discourse (ATD). Like the tasks themselves, language use can vary considerably in terms of the skills, genres, registers, lexis, and collocations involved, and often also in the meanings and functions of grammatical structures in different discourse domains, e.g., modals in scientific discourse and in doctor–patient interaction. The data for an ATD may consist of recorded speech samples, e.g., of radio and TV weather forecasts, economics lectures, and medical diagnoses, but also written texts, e.g., recipes, application forms, and equipment manuals. The target discourse samples are analysed in preparation for the production of taskbased instructional materials. In an ATD, common patterns are sought, idiosyncratic features removed, and the findings distilled to produce prototypical examples of the way particular target tasks are handled successfully by NSs. The procedure has been applied to such tasks as buying and selling a cup of coffee, obtaining and following street directions, decoding drug labels, and negotiating a police traffic stop. (For a detailed description and examples of the procedures followed in an ATD, as distinct from a comprehensive, generative, hierarchically structured, discourse analysis, see Long, 2015a, pp. 169–204.) An ATD of a particularly complex task, requiring very advanced L2 proficiency, was conducted by Hillman (2017). Hillman had first used multiple sources, multiple methods, and triangulation of methods and sources to identify sixty-eight target tasks and the frequency with which they were used by Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) at the US embassy in Tokyo and in consulates elsewhere in Japan. An ATD was then conducted of one of the most important tasks—and because of the subtle honorific expressions required in Japanese, one of the most difficult for speakers of English: “Delivering celebration speeches in a formal setting.” Using transcripts

Task-Based Language Learning

of recordings of six celebration speeches, patterns in sequences of subtasks were identified, and the analysis validated by having two of the speeches coded independently by a second rater with high inter-rater reliability (Cohen’s kappa of 0.79 and 1.00). Important nouns, verb phrases, collocations, and politeness formulae were then tagged and linked to the sub-tasks. After the overall pattern for celebration speeches had been ascertained, and possible variations in the sequences of sub-tasks captured in a flow diagram, the findings were distilled to produce prototypical celebration speeches. Modified elaborated (not linguistically simplified) versions of the prototypical spoken or written target discourse models are used in the production of task-based materials—pedagogic tasks. Pedagogic tasks (and secondarily, teacher and student speech) constitute the major source of new language for learners, and because based on genuine samples of NS language use during performance of target tasks for those learners, a rich source of relevant new language.

21.3.2  Syllabus Design The unit of analysis at every stage of a TBLT course is the task. When designing a syllabus, target tasks identified by the NA are first classified into more abstract target task-types, after which task-based instructional materials are produced in the form of gradually more complex pedagogic tasks. Series of pedagogic tasks make up the task syllabus. Target tasks are classified into target task-types for two reasons: economy of time and effort, and as one way of dealing, at least in part, with differing needs in heterogeneous groups. For example, making or changing a restaurant, theatre, train, or plane reservation (four target tasks) are all examples, at a more abstract level, of making or changing a reservation (one target tasktype). Filling out application forms for a visa, a job, or a driver’s licence, or to join a club or open a bank account, are all examples of filling out an application form. In a class with heterogeneous learner needs, presenting an oral or written annual sales report (a target task for a company employee in charge of, say, BMW sales in the UK) and giving a public talk or writing a newspaper article on climate change (target tasks for a climate change activist) share much in common at the level of target task-type, e.g., presenting a report of a series of events. (For a sequence of six PTs suitable for the target task-type, Delivering a sales report, see Long, 2015a, pp. 287–291.) For example, both will include narrative segments describing change over time, requiring reference to a series of past events (first, next, then, before, afterwards, past and past perfect verb tenses), cause and effect (because, as a result, consequently, hence), and some of the same lexis and collocations (rose,

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fell, increased, decreased, a rapid/sharp/notable/encouraging/alarming increase/ decline/improvement/drop/fall in X, reduced, doubled, halved, shrank, soared, plummeted). The same target task-type will be relevant for researchers and students reporting empirical studies at scientific conferences, or in journal articles, lectures, and term papers. Task-based materials written for heterogeneous groups will obviously not be as effective as materials produced for homogeneous groups. However, they will be more relevant than commercially published, grammar-based, “generic” materials written on the basis of textbook authors’ unreliable intuitions, not genuine target discourse samples, and marketed by publishers as appropriate for everyone, but in reality, for no-one in particular. The step up from target tasks to target task-types can ameliorate (not solve) the heterogeneity problem, as can work by individual students or sub-groups on occupation-specific or discipline-specific materials at certain stages within a module, and do so while retaining the psycholinguistic, methodological, and motivational advantages of TBLL. Classification of target tasks into target task-types helps address additional problems facing most course designers, teachers, and students: focusing on only one or two of the target tasks in each target task-type saves time and money. The same reasoning applies when the time comes to test students’ task-based abilities. The assumption is that learners will be able to generalize what has been learned when they need to perform other target tasks within the target task-type that were not explicitly covered or tested during the course. That said, the extent to which it is in fact possible to predict the generalizability of task-based abilities is still unknown and an issue on which very little empirical research has been carried out as yet. (For a promising beginning, see Benson, 2014.) Pedagogic tasks (PTs) are simpler versions of target tasks. They are included in a task syllabus (selection) on the basis of the criticality and frequency of the corresponding target tasks revealed by the NA. As in Hillman’s study, data on frequency and/or criticality can be gathered at the same time that target tasks are identified (see Malicka, Gilabert, & Norris, 2017). After NA findings have informed selection decisions, the next question (for any syllabus, regardless of the unit of analysis) is how items should be sequenced (grading). In TBLT, PTs are sequenced, or graded, according to their complexity—task complexity, not linguistic complexity (Long, 2015a, pp. 227– 241; Robinson, 2009, 2011). Robinson (2009) has proposed making clear distinctions between task complexity, task difficulty, and task conditions. Task complexity refers to inherent, fixed, unchanging qualities of tasks. It can depend on the number of components, steps, or dimensions tasks involve, on whether they occur in the here-and-now (context-embedded) or there-and-then (context-reduced, displaced time and space), or on the reasoning demands

Task-Based Language Learning

required or number of possible solutions to a problem. Task difficulty concerns the challenge a task presents to particular learners, depending on the qualities they bring to it. Thus, the difficulty of a task will vary for learners with different levels of L2 proficiency, IQ, language aptitude, relevant content knowledge, and so on. Task conditions are the circumstances under which learners perform a task, e.g., with or without planning time, speeded or unspeeded, alone or in groups, holding all or only part of the information required to complete the task, or with or without teacher assistance. Task difficulty can be raised or lowered by manipulating task conditions. Initial PTs in a sequence are simpler (how simple depends on students’ current abilities), becoming progressively harder until they reach the full complexity of the target task that motivated their inclusion. The final task in a sequence is the full target task, or a simulation thereof, and serves as the exit task for the module. There is a large and growing literature documenting the search for reliable, objectively measurable dimensions of task complexity. Many studies are carried out within the simplify–stabilize–automatize–­ restructure– complexify (SSARC) framework (Robinson, 2007). Robinson defines resource-­directing variables as those that increase cognitive demands (requiring more reasoning, involving more steps or components, etc.), forcing learners to devote more attention to linguistic features, e.g., using more modifiers or relative clauses to differentiate persons, places, or things. This stimulates language development and can result in both increased complexity and accuracy. Resource-directing features include +/– here and now, +/– few elements, and +/– spatial, causal, and intentional reasoning. After a statistical meta-analysis of eighty-six studies, Malika and Sasayama (2017) report that, in general, displaced time and space (there and then) leads to greater syntactic complexity, and more elements or reasoning demands result in greater lexical variety. Resource-dispersing or depleting variables are those that require attentional resources to be allocated to more things at once, e.g., talking to a customer while taking written notes about her order. Robinson claims that resource-dispersing or depleting dimensions of a task do not affect learners’ attention to linguistic features, but do affect procedural demands and automaticity, and can result in increased fluency, but lower complexity and accuracy. Resourcedispersing or depleting task features include +/– single task, +/– task structure, +/– few steps, and +/– independence of steps. Malika and Sasayama (2017) found few clear patterns among relationships between task complexity and oral and written production, but some tendencies, nonetheless. Planning, repetition, structure, support, and familiarity made tasks simpler, with positive effects on all four CALF variables—complexity, accuracy, lexis, and fluency—especially complexity and accuracy. They also found task complexity effects within categories

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of variables. Among resource-directing variables, the number of elements or reasoning demands, but not displaced time and space, had a positive effect on lexis. Among resource-dispersing or depleting variables, planning affected syntactic complexity and accuracy more than other variables, but affected fluency less than repetition and structure. The goal of identifying reliable effects of task complexity on L2 performance has proven elusive. Findings are often non-cumulative because researchers use very different PTs in studies, different dimensions and operational definitions of complexity, and a plethora of outcome measures. In an early statistical meta-analysis, for example, Jackson and Suethanapornkul (2013) found that no fewer than eighty-three different measures had been employed for just one outcome variable, fluency. Clearly, coherent research programmes are needed, rather than one-off studies. Two additional factors have been problematic. First, few studies have reported NS and NNS data on the same tasks. If the only participants are NNSs, variation in performance could be task-induced and/or simply a result of interlanguages being more unstable than NS grammars. Second, Révész (2014) has drawn attention to the fact that researchers often fail to establish that their manipulations of task features actually result in more or less complex versions, simply assuming, instead, that if the CALF variables behaved as predicted, it was due to the intended differences in task complexity. Révész suggested use of measures of cognitive load to eliminate this circularity by obtaining independent evidence of complexity. It has since become customary for researchers to include one or more such measures in their work. A study by Lee (2018) addressed both issues. First, Lee examined data from NSs to provide a more reliable window on task complexity effects unfiltered by variability in NNS competence, so that any changes in performance could be attributed to complexity alone. Forty-two NSs of English performed three versions—least complex, mid-complex, and most complex—of each of three oral tasks: a map task; a seating arrangement task; and a car accident task. Task complexity was operationalized as the number of elements involved. Second, to obtain an independent measure of cognitive load before linguistic outcomes were considered, Lee used (i) participant ratings of perceived difficulty, mental effort, stress, interest, and willingness to perform a similar task, (ii) prospective duration estimations, and (iii) a dual-task method involving participants having to respond to computer screen colour changes that occurred as they worked on the primary tasks. Results from all the measures showed that increasing task complexity led to the expected changes in cognitive load: greater levels of perceived difficulty, mental effort, stress, and interest; shorter prospective duration estimates; and slower reaction times on the dual-task method.

Task-Based Language Learning

As measured by Guiraud’s Index, greater task complexity led to the most lexically diverse speech. Syntactic complexity, however, measured by the number of subordinate clauses per analysis of speech (AS) unit, was highest on the mid-complex task, due to a tendency (encountered in several studies), whether intentional or unintentional, for some participants to simplify the most complex versions of tasks, either by failing to notice or simply ignoring added elements, resulting in less complex speech. In important work comparing independent measures of cognitive load, Révész, Michel, and Gilabert (2015) attempted to validate task complexity using the dual-task method, participant ratings of overall task difficulty and mental effort required, and expert judgments. Forty-eight English NSs and forty-eight English as a second language (ESL) speakers performed simple and complex versions of a picture-narration, map, and decision-­ making task. As in Lee’s (2018) study, the dual-task method involved screen colour changes to which participants had to respond while performing the primary oral task. Using the same questionnaire, expert judgments of the complexity of the different versions were collected from sixty-one ESL teachers, who also provided the reasons for their answers. Results for all three methods showed that the complex versions of tasks imposed a greater cognitive load on participants. In the dual-task method, NNS accuracy on the secondary task was higher on the simple version, and the data on both ESL learners’ and teachers’ mental effort and task difficulty showed higher ratings for the more complex versions. With the objective (dual-task method) and subjective (self-ratings and expert judgments) measures all corroborating their predictions, the authors noted the practical advantages of the ease of use and high face validity of subjective measures for future studies. The progress made notwithstanding, the vast majority of studies to date have focused on relationships between task complexity and various dimensions of L2 performance, usually one or more CALF variables in oral L2 production. There has been little work on the more important issue of L2 acquisition. This is a second important area for future research on taskbased language learning and teaching.

21.3.3  Task-Based Materials Modules of task-based instructional materials take the form of a series of pedagogic tasks, receptive, productive, or both. PTs are sequenced, or graded, according to their complexity as tasks, not linguistic complexity, using which would entail speculation and signal a return to grammar-based LT. The value of a thorough NA becomes doubly clear at this stage, for the results remove the guesswork from deciding what learners should work on and mean that genuine samples of the language they

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need, already linked to relevant tasks for them, are available for manipulation by the materials writer. Task-based materials are not linguistically controlled in the way grammar-based materials are. Authors of textbooks for grammar-based LT are customarily restricted to use of specified structures and verb tenses, and lexical items drawn from specific vocabulary frequency ranges, everything supposedly appropriate for a particular band on one of the ever-increasing number of “proficiency scales” (ILR, ACTFL, CEFR, IELTS, Pearson, etc.) so popular with publishers when marketing their teaching materials and achievement tests. Aside from the earlier discussed lack of psycholinguistic credibility, linguistically graded spoken or written texts often come across as stilted, as inauthentic (which they are), and as “not the way NSs speak”. Even when whole stories or “dialogues” are not inundated with examples of the verb tense or structure of the day, lexical items and collocations NSs would use naturally are replaced by items from a higher frequency range, thereby failing to present learners with realistic models. Collocations and idiomatic usage suffer similar fates. Comprehensibility at a specified “proficiency level” is maintained, but by removing from the input the very items students need to learn. In the design of task-based materials, it is tasks that are simplified, not the linguistic input, and gradually increasing task complexity is the basis for the ordering of PTs within sequences. (For detailed examples of PT sequences, see, e.g., Long, 2015a, pp. 259–297; O’Connell, 2014.) The elaboration process preserves the realism of the genuine NS speech samples collected during stage 2 of the NA. If particular lexical items or collocations are appropriate for a task, but unknown to students, they are retained in the input, made comprehensible by building redundancy into the text, e.g., by paraphrasing or the addition of synonyms. Empirical studies (e.g., Oh, 2001; Yano, Long, & Ross, 1994) have confirmed that the level of comprehensibility of elaborated spoken or written text is usually close, and sometimes comparable, to that achieved by linguistic simplification, without the latter’s toll on acquisition. Also, of considerable importance for such programmes as immersion, CLIL, and TBLT, where the L2 is not the only thing being learned, research has found input simplification, but not elaboration, to dilute curricular content (see, e.g., Long et al., 2018; Long & Ross, 1993).

21.3.4  Methodology and Pedagogy The way a task syllabus is delivered differs fundamentally from the PPP procedure typically employed with grammar-based approaches. It is informed by ten methodological principles (MPs) for LT. Each is motivated by theory and research findings in SLA (Long, 2009, 2015a, pp. 300–328) and

Task-Based Language Learning

independently, in most cases, by the radical tradition in the philosophy of education represented by such thinkers as William Godwin, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Kropotkin, John Dewey, Paul Goodman, and Colin Ward, and by the rich history of free schools established by Sebastien Faure, Madeleine Vernet, Paul Robin, and Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, among many others. (For historical reviews, see, e.g., Avrich, 1980; Long, 2015a, pp. 63–83; Smith, 1983; Suissa, 2006.) There are ten MPs: MP1: use task, not text, as the unit of analysis; MP2: promote learning by doing; MP3: elaborate input; MP4: provide rich input; MP5: encourage inductive “chunk” learning; MP6: focus on form; MP7: provide negative feedback; MP8: respect learner syllabi and developmental processes; MP9: promote cooperative collaborative learning; and MP10: individualize instruction. MP1, MP3, and MP6 are original to TBLT. MPs are realized at the local classroom level by a wide range of context-sensitive pedagogic procedures (PPs). There are no “best” PPs; rather, teachers, the experts on their local classroom situation, decide which are appropriate. This often requires moment-by-moment decision-making as a lesson unfolds, taking into account such factors as learner age, proficiency, literacy, and language aptitude, and whether a linguistic feature is marked or unmarked, perceptually salient or non-salient, and learnable by the student(s) at that time. By way of illustration, consider MP7: provide negative feedback. A teacher may decide it is necessary to provide negative feedback to address persistent errors with inversion, e.g., *John asked why did Neymar leave the best team. Because the error is non-salient (string-­internal, not affecting communication), the PP chosen might need to be drawn from the explicit end of the spectrum, e.g., a prompt or (if the learners concerned are thought capable of benefiting) a pedagogical rule of thumb. For a perceptually salient adverb-placement error, on the other hand, e.g., *I watch every week the Barcelona game, an implicit PP for providing negative feedback, such as a recast or a clarification request, may suffice. Reflecting the MPs listed above, interaction in TBLT classrooms (assuming an NA has shown listening and speaking skills to be relevant for the learners concerned) is very different from the IRF structure prevalent in grammar-based PPP lessons. Instead of language as object, the primary focus is on communication. When working on a two-way PT (MP1: use task, not text, as the unit of analysis; MP2: promote learning by doing), for example, new information must move in both directions between teacher and student(s), and among students, for the task to be completed successfully. Their talk will have a purpose. Due to the learners’ linguistic limitations, teachers and students will inevitably need to negotiate for meaning (as in all communication, even among NSs), especially, although not only, when communicative trouble arises. Instead of the focus in ­grammar-based LT on rehearsal of particular sentence patterns, interaction in task-based

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lessons is motivated by the need to understand or send messages, to solve interesting problems posed by PTs, to express feelings and opinions, and more. Being vested in interesting conversation motivates students, who are more likely to attend to the input, as a result—a requirement for acquisition. (For examples of tasks usable in these ways even at the most basic proficiency level, see Long, 2015a, pp. 259–274; Shintani, 2016.) Many other positive consequences for classroom interaction follow from the basic focus on task accomplishment and communication. To begin with, turns at talk and conversational roles are more evenly distributed. Because students often possess information and opinions unknown to the teacher or to other students with whom they are working on PTs, they must collaborate, initiating exchanges, responding to initiations by others, and providing feedback, e.g., to confirm or check their understanding of what the teacher or another student has said, or to request clarification (MP9: promote cooperative collaborative learning). Exchanges depart from the repetitive IRF pattern limiting students to passive responses to display questions, followed by feedback on grammatical accuracy, not the message. Now, topic-initiating moves, whether by teachers or students, often trigger extended sequences of reacting moves. Classroom talk becomes more like talk outside classrooms. Input is richer and both the quality and quantity of student input and output are greatly improved (MP3: elaborate input; MP4: provide rich input). New language is more readily incorporated into students’ grammars and lexicons, in part because it was intended for them (MP5: encourage inductive “chunk” learning; MP10: individualize instruction). They are aware of its usefulness at the moment it is encountered; because they need it to complete a task, they are attending (MP5: encourage inductive “chunk” learning). Not surprisingly, studies show students learn better from the acquisition-rich environment created by task-based interaction (see, e.g., the statistical meta-analysis by Mackey & Goo, 2007). Negative feedback is plentiful in task-based interaction (MP7: provide negative feedback). Further, as learners negotiate for meaning, more of the feedback they receive is tuned to their current level of development (MP8: respect learner syllabi and developmental processes). The utterance they hear immediately following their own, be it a confirmation that what they said was understood or a comprehension check or clarification request of some kind, will often constitute a slight reformulation of their output. Because the feedback is contingent on, and similar to, what they just said, its meaning will usually already be clear, so their attentional resources will be freed up to devote to the form of the response, in context, and to hold it and what they said in short-term memory long enough to notice any differences (MP6: focus on form, not forms). In other words, the learnability issue is at least partly addressed, because more of the input is

Task-Based Language Learning

triggered by learners’ attempts to use the L2 communicatively, with the parties’ primary focus on what is said, not how it is said:

Student 1:  Green triangle beside blue square? Student 2: The green triangle beside the blue square, yes (confirmation/recast)

Recasts have been found to be the most frequent form of negative feedback in all sorts of L2 classrooms, from immersion to foreign language lessons, and over sixty studies have shown they produce substantial and durable learning gains in grammar and vocabulary. (For excellent narrative reviews, see Goo & Mackey, 2013; Yilmaz, 2016; and for two statistical meta-analyses, Li, 2010, and Mackey & Goo, 2007.) They do so without the disruption to communication caused by overt, on-record “error correction”. Moreover, due to the primary (not exclusive) focus on meaning and task completion, much of the language learning that takes place is incidental, making implicit knowledge a more likely end-product. Task-based interaction also succeeds when students work with fellow students in pairs or small groups, not least because individual output opportunities are far more numerous than during lockstep classroom interaction, and because input is individually tailored. As part of an eightweek pre-test, post-test, delayed post-test study of young adult learners of German receiving twelve hours of instruction per week, Eckerth (2008) conducted detailed analyses of fifty hours of audio-recorded peer–peer interaction. He found little empirical support for the idea that learners reinforce one another’s errors. Rather, thirty-eight per cent of non-target-like hypotheses were replaced by correct forms and integrated into the learners’ IL grammars over the ten-week period, with the majority of changes traceable to learning opportunities arising from the task-based interactions. Moreover, the collaborative dialogue led to learning gains after task completion in twenty-two per cent of cases when, at the outset, neither learner possessed the relevant L2 knowledge. Eckerth’s verdict was that the task-work by pairs of learners indicated “significant gains in the short and medium term. Thus, it can be concluded that learners are able to provide each other with feedback rich in acquisitional potential” (Eckerth, 2008, p. 133).

21.3.5  Task-Based Assessment Student abilities are assessed using task-based, criterion-referenced performance tests (Brown & Hudson, 2002; Long, 2015a, pp. 329–341; Norris, 2009; Van Gorp & Deygers, 2013). This is a relatively straightforward process in the many cases, such as attending an economics lecture, conducting a visa interview, setting up laboratory equipment, or following street directions, where the ability to perform target tasks can be assessed directly

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and discretely, with unambiguous behavioural outcomes as achievement measures. For example, in a university economics lecture, can students identify at least eighty per cent of the information bits designated important by a domain expert (the lecturer), as shown by their scores on a ­multiple-choice test? Task-based assessment can be problematic, however, and involve choices among less desirable options, including whether or not to add a linguistic caboose when comprehension or simply getting a message across may not suffice for acceptable task performance (Nielson et al., 2009). For example, a diplomat’s after-dinner speech in Japanese must be delivered using the correct register, with appropriate formulae and grammatical particles to mark politeness (Hillman, 2017).

21.3.6  Programme Evaluation Studies comparing grammar-based PPP and TBLT have produced the same general findings: TBLT produced comparable results to grammar-based PPP on forms-focused or discrete-point outcome measures, and superior results on communicative measures. Shintani (2011) employed a quasi-­ experimental, pre-test–post-test–delayed post-test design to compare the learning of twenty-four new nouns by thirty-six young Japanese children (ages 6–8), in six intact groups of six, over a twelve-week course. Two ­output-focused grammar-based PPP classes employed five drill-like games. Language learning was intentional, the children having been told at the outset that the goal was for them to learn the twenty-four new words. The two TBLT classes were not told about the goal, and focused on inputbased, game-like, listen-and-do tasks. Theirs was a case of incidental learning. The last two groups, functioning as controls, received TPR instruction, English songs, practice writing the alphabet, and no exposure to the target words. Recordings showed there were 200 IRF sequences and no negotiation for meaning in the grammar-based PPP lessons, with teacher-­initiated tokens of the target vocabulary items dominating. That compared with only twenty-five IRF sequences in the task-based lessons, where student-­ initiated tokens dominated. Overall exposure to the target words was roughly the same in the PPP and TBLT lessons, but target-word production was 444 in the output-based PPP, and only 144 in the input-based TBLT (3:1). There were two listening and two speaking measures, one of each discrete-point, the other communicative and task-based. Both the TBLT and PPP groups outperformed the control groups on all four measures. The TBLT groups performed as well as the PPP groups on the discrete-point listening and speaking measures (despite fewer production opportunities in the input-based TBLT lessons), comparably on the task-based speaking measure (again despite the more limited production opportunities in the

Task-Based Language Learning

input-based lessons), and significantly better than the PPP group on the measure of task-based listening. In a second study, Shintani (2013) randomly assigned forty-five six-yearold Japanese child beginners to form three classes of fifteen: TBLT/focus on form; PPP/focus on forms; and control. Nine lessons over the next five weeks focused on twenty-four nouns and twelve adjectives. Outcomes were measured by a combination of discrete-point and task-based and communicative production measures. The classroom process data again showed that only the TBLT/focus on form condition featured contextualized input, student initiation, and negotiation for meaning. The TBLT/ focus on form groups did as well as the PPP/focus on forms groups for nouns on both discrete-point and task-based/communicative production tests, and better than the PPP/focus on forms groups for adjectives on both tests. (For detailed discussions of Shintani’s studies, see Long, 2015a, pp. 357–361, 2015b, pp. 66–67.) In a study with young adults, Borro (2017) randomly assigned two intact classes of Chinese students at an Italian university to a TBLT (n=11) or PPP (n=10) condition. Each group received two three-hour lessons based on genuine samples of NS Italian used when opening a bank account and changing a mobile phone contract in a shop, each having been identified by an NA as target tasks for the Chinese students. The PPP condition involved intentional learning. Lesson content began with a focus on vocabulary before reading a linguistically simplified version of the NS speech data, along with comprehension questions, explicit grammar instruction, fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises, and a final role-play or text-writing and more output. The linguistic target was a high frequency structure in the input for both tasks, third person clitic pronouns, both direct and indirect object (*Le fragole costano poco, allora la compro *Strawberries are cheap, so I buy it). The PPP group was exposed to twenty pronouns in the bank text and ten in the mobile text. They completed two fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises per lesson, with about twelve items each, for a total of seventy-eight tokens. The TBLT condition involved incidental learning. There was no decontextualized vocabulary instruction before students were exposed to genuine and elaborated oral and written versions of the input and written transcriptions of dialogues containing the target structures enhanced (in bold). The students worked on pedagogic tasks, e.g., matching dialogues with correct fliers among five or six describing special offers, spotting differences between different kinds of bank accounts, and a final role-play. There was no explicit grammar instruction unless in reaction to student questions. The TBLT group encountered eighteen instances of the pronouns in the spoken dialogues, twenty-two pronouns in the bank task, and seventeen in the mobile task, for a total of fifty-seven tokens.

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Borro administered four versions of the same unspeeded grammaticality judgment test (UGJT) and a moving-window self-paced reading test (SPRT) as pre- and post-tests, assessing explicit and implicit knowledge of the target structure, respectively. The SPRT comprised twelve sentences containing the target structure, and twenty-four fillers. Each item occurred in grammatical (semantically consistent), ungrammatical (semantically inconsistent), masculine, and feminine versions. Scores on the outcome measures showed that the TBLT and PPP groups both improved statistically significantly from pre- to post- on the UGJT, but did not differ significantly from one another. Conversely, performance on the SPRT, which assessed implicit knowledge, was superior for those in the TBLT condition. Reaction times (RTs) to grammatical semantically congruent sentences in the TBLT group decreased statistically significantly after the instruction and were significantly shorter than those in the PPP group. RTs to grammatical semantically incongruent sentences decreased slightly, but not significantly. RTs in the PPP group barely decreased from pre- to poston any sentence types. It is noticeable that learning of the target grammatical structure was superior in the incidental learning TBLT condition, despite the lack of overt focus on it there, and despite the higher number of tokens (seventy-eight versus fifty-seven) and explicit treatment of the structure in the grammar-based PPP lessons. These explicit comparisons of grammar-based PPP and TBLT are smallscale and limited in several ways, but each suggests advantages for TBLT at both the process and product levels. Their findings support the claims discussed earlier (section 21.2) concerning the superior quality, quantity, and structure of task-based classroom interaction for L2 acquisition, and its advantages for incidental learning. They are in line with results from other evaluations of TBLT lessons, courses, and whole programmes. Reports of the first twenty years of successful implementation of TBLT in over 200 state primary and secondary schools in Flanders appeared in 2006 (Van den Branden, 2006). Additional formative and summative evaluations of TBLT for children and adults have been published since, all favourable to a greater or lesser extent. (For details and a review of studies, see Long, 2015a, pp. 341–366.) A statistical meta-analysis of fifty-two evaluations of programme-level implementations of TBLT in real classroom settings in many parts of the world (Bryfonski & McKay, 2017) revealed an overall positive and strong effect (d = 0.93) for TBLT implementation, compared with grammar-based PPP, on a variety of learning outcomes, and positive stakeholder perceptions towards the TBLT programmes. However, while results so far are positive, more evaluations of TBLT are needed, especially of complete programmes in situ. The small number of such studies (already far larger than for any other approach) is mostly due to the advent of TBLL and TBLT having been relatively recent.

Task-Based Language Learning

21.4 Conclusion Language teaching in most parts of the world is grammar-based. However, research has shown that, among other major problems, externally timed discrete linguistic items have little credibility as units of acquisition. This is one reason for the growing interest in task as an alternative organizational unit around which to organize learning. Fundamental differences between grammar-based and task-based approaches to language learning and teaching are summarized in Table 21.1. Tasks and task-based approaches are attractive, due to their greater psycholinguistic credibility from a language-learning perspective, and because the incidental and implicit learning they encourage can result in the implicit knowledge needed by learners requiring a functional command of the L2. Moreover, the ability to perform tasks is a more tangible way of identifying what learners need a new language for, and then of evaluating their ability to do what they need to do. Learners know a language, but they do not do a language; they do tasks through a language. Over the past thirty years, a substantial body of research has developed concerning several dimensions of tasks and TBLL, including task criticality, Table 21.1.  Grammar-based and task-based language learning and teaching. Grammar-based LT

TBLT

Language as object

Language as communication

Language for (future) use

Language through use

No needs analysis

Needs analysis

Language for nebulous purposes

Language for specific purposes

Intentional learning

Enhanced incidental learning

Noticing

Noticing or detection

Explicit knowledge

Implicit knowledge

Structure as the unit of analysis

Task as the unit of analysis

Generic materials

Needs-driven materials

Restricted input

Rich input

PPP

Ten MPs and numerous PPs

Lessons often boring

Lessons usually stimulating

Textbook in control

Teacher in control

Norm-referenced assessment

Criterion-referenced assessment

No programme evaluations

Some programme evaluations

Vanishingly little research support

Considerable research support

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frequency, complexity, and difficulty, and the conditions under which tasks are performed. Experience has also grown with practical issues in the design and implementation of TBLT, and with ways of dealing with problems that can arise in the field. As several commentators have noted, despite its comparatively recent appearance, the hundreds of studies in the published literature have already made task-based language learning and teaching by far the most extensively researched approach to language teaching the field has ever seen.

References Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (2012). Statistical learning: From acquiring specific items to forming general rules. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21(3), 170–176. Avrich, P. (1980). The modern school movement. Anarchism and education in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benson, S. (2014). Task-based language teaching: An empirical study of task transfer. Language Teaching Research, 20(3), 341–365. Bonilla, C. (2014). From number agreement to the subjunctive: Evidence for Processability Theory in L2 Spanish. Language Teaching Research, 31(1), 53–74. Borro, I. (2017). Comparing the effectiveness of TBTL and PPP on L2 grammar learning. A self-paced-reading study with Chinese students of Italian L2. MS at the University of Portsmouth. Brown, J. D., & Hudson, T. (2002). Criterion-referenced language testing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bryfonski, L., & McKay, T. (2017). TBLT implementation and evaluation: A meta-analysis. Language Teaching Research, 1–30. Clahsen, H. (1987). Connecting theories of language processing and (second) language acquisition. In C. Pfaff (ed.), First and second language acquisition processes (pp. 103–116). Cambridge, MA: Newbury House. DeKeyser, R. D. (2015). Skill Acquisition Theory. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds.), Theories in second language acquisition. An introduction (2nd edn.) (pp. 94–113). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Dinsmore, D. (1985). Waiting for Godot in the EFL classroom. ELT Journal, 39(4), 225–234. Eckerth, J. (2008). Investigating consciousness-raising tasks: Pedagogically targeted and non-targeted learning gains. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 19(3), 119–145. Ellis, N. (2017). Salience in usage-based SLA. In S. Gass, P. Spinner, & J. Behney (eds.), Salience in second language acquisition (pp. 21–40). London: Routledge.

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Ellis, R. (1989). Are classroom and naturalistic acquisition the same? A study of the classroom acquisition of German word order rules. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 11(3), 305–328. Gilabert, R. (2005). Evaluating the use of multiple sources and multiple methods in needs analysis: A case study of journalists in the Autonomous Community of Catalonia (Spain). In M. H. Long (ed.), Second language needs analysis (pp. 182–199). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goo, J., & Mackey, A. (2013). The case against the case against recasts. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35(1), 127–165. Granena, G., & Long, M. H. (2013). Age of onset, length of residence, language aptitude, and ultimate L2 attainment in three linguistic domains. Second Language Research, 29(3), 311–343. Hatch, E. M. (1978). Discourse analysis and second language acquisition. In E. M. Hatch (ed.), Second language acquisition: A book of readings (pp. 402– 435). Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Hillman, K. K. (2017). Target tasks for US Foreign Service Officers: The challenge for TBLT of the Japanese celebration speech. Scholarly Paper produced as part of a PhD in SLA Program, University of Maryland. Hoetker, J., & Ahlbrand, W. P. (1969). The persistence of the recitation. American Educational Research Journal, 6(1), 145–167. Jackson, D. O., & Suethanapornkul, S. (2013). The Cognition Hypothesis: A synthesis and meta-analysis of research on second language task complexity. Language Learning, 63(2), 330–367. Jasso-Aguilar, R. (2005). Sources, methods and triangulation in needs analysis: A critical perspective in a case study of Waikiki hotel maids. In M. H. Long (ed.), Second language needs analysis (pp. 127–158). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, J. (2018). Task complexity, cognitive load, and L1 speech. Applied Linguistics. Li, S. (2010). The effectiveness of corrective feedback in SLA: A meta-­ analysis. Language Learning, 60(2), 309–365. Long, M. H. (ed.) (2005). Second language needs analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, M. H. (2009). Methodological principles for language teaching. In M. H. Long & C. J. Doughty (eds.), Handbook of language teaching (pp. 373–394). Oxford: Blackwell. Long, M. H. (2013). Needs analysis. In C. Chapelle (ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Long, M. H. (2015a). Second language acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching. Malden, MA: Wiley. Long, M. H. (2015b). Experimental perspectives on classroom interaction. In N. Markee (ed.), Handbook of classroom discourse and interaction (pp. 60– 73). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Long, M. H. (2016). In defense of tasks and TBLT: Non-issues and real issues. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 36, 5–33. Long, M. H. (2017). Instructed second language acquisition (ISLA): Geopolitics, methodological issues, and some major research questions. Instructed Second Language Acquisition, 1(1), 7–44. Long, M. H., Al-Thowaini, A., Al-Thowaini, B., Lee, J., & Vafaee, P. (2018). A micro process-product study of a CLIL lesson: Linguistic modifications, content dilution, and vocabulary knowledge. Instructed Second Language Acquisition, 2(1), 3–38. Long, M. H., & Robinson, P. (1998). Focus on form: Theory, research and practice. In C. Doughty & J. Williams (eds.), Focus on form in second language acquisition (pp. 15–41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, M. H., & Ross, S. (1993). Modifications that preserve language and content. In M. Tickoo (ed.), Simplification: Theory and application (pp. 29– 52). Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre. Long, M. H., & Sato, C. J. (1983). Classroom foreigner talk discourse: Forms and functions of teachers’ questions. In H. W. Seliger & M. H. Long (eds.), Classroom-oriented research on second language acquisition (pp. 268–285). Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Mackey, A., & Goo, J. (2007). Interaction research in SLA: A meta-analysis and research synthesis. In A. Mackey (ed.), Conversational interaction in second language acquisition (pp. 407–452). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malicka, A., Gilabert, R., & Norris, J. M. (2017). From needs analysis to task design: Insights from an English for specific purposes context. Language Teaching Research, 1–29. Malika, A., & Sasayama, S. (2017). Cognitive task complexity: A research synthesis. Paper presented at the Seventh International Conference on TBLT, University of Barcelona, 18–21 April. Meisel, J. M., Clahsen, H., & Pienemann, M. (1981). On determining developmental stages in natural second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 3(1), 109–135. Nation, I. S. P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? Canadian Modern Language Review, 63, 59–82. Nielson, K. B., Masters, M. C., Rhoades, E., & Freynik, S. (2009). Prototype implementation of an online Chinese course: An analysis of course implementation and learner performance. College Park, MD: University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language. Norris, J. M. (2009). Task-based teaching and testing. In M. H. Long & C. J. Doughty (eds.), Handbook of language teaching (pp. 578–594). Oxford: Blackwell. O’Connell, S. (2014). A task-based language teaching approach to the police traffic stop. TESL Canada Journal, 31(8), 116–131. Oh, S.-Y. (2001). Two types of input modification and EFL reading comprehension: Simplification versus elaboration. TESOL Quarterly, 35(1), 69–96.

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Pienemann, M. (1984). Psychological constraints on the teachability of languages. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 6(2), 186–214. Pienemann, M. (1998). Language processing and second language development. Processability theory. Amsterdam/Philadelphia,PA: John Benjamins. Pienemann, M., & Kessler, J.-U. (2012). Processability Theory. In S. M. Gass & A. Mackey (eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 228–246). New York: Routledge. Révész, A. (2014). Towards a fuller assessment of cognitive models of taskbased learning: Investigating task-generated cognitive demands and processes. Applied Linguistics, 35(1), 87–92. Révész, A., Michel, M., & Gilabert, R. (2015). Measuring cognitive task demands using dual task methodology, subjective self-ratings, and expert judgments: A validation study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28(4), 1–35. Robinson, P. (2007). Criteria for classifying and sequencing pedagogic tasks. In M. P. Garcia-Mayo (ed.), Investigating tasks in formal language learning (pp. 7–26). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Robinson, P. (2009). Syllabus design. In M. H. Long & C. J. Doughty (eds.), Handbook of language teaching (pp. 294–310). Oxford: Blackwell. Robinson, P. (2011). Second language task complexity, the Cognition Hypothesis, language learning, and performance. In P. Robinson (ed.), Second language task complexity. Researching the Cognition Hypothesis of language learning and performance (pp. 3–37). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Robinson, P. (2015). The Cognition Hypothesis, second language task demands, and the SSARC model of pedagogic task sequencing. In M. Bygate (ed.), Domains and directions in the development of TBLT: A decade of plenaries from the international conference (pp. 87–121). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schmidt, R. W. (1990). The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 129–158. Sato, C. J. (1986). Conversation and interlanguage development: Rethinking the connection. In R. R. Day (ed.), “Talking to learn”: Conversation in second language acquisition (pp. 23–45). Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Sato, C. J. (1990). The syntax of conversation in interlanguage development. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Serafini, E. J., Lake, J. B., & Long, M. H. (2015). Methodological improvements in identifying specialized learner needs. English for Specific Purposes, 40, 11–26. Shintani, N. (2011). A comparative study of the effects of input-based and production-based instruction on vocabulary acquisition by young EFL learners. Language Teaching Research, 15, 137–158. Shintani, N. (2013). The effect of focus on form and focus on forms instruction on the acquisition of productive knowledge of L2 vocabulary by young beginner learners. TESOL Quarterly, 47(1), 36–62.

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Shintani, N. (2016). Input-based tasks in foreign language instruction for young learners. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Skehan, P. (1998). A cognitive approach to language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skehan, P. (2015). Limited attention capacity and cognition: Two hypotheses regarding second language performance on tasks. In M. Bygate (ed.), Domains and directions in the development of TBLT: A decade of plenaries from the international conference (pp. 123–155). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Smith, M. P. (1983). The libertarians and education. London: George Allen & Unwin. Suissa, J. (2006). Anarchism and education. A philosophical perspective. London: Routledge. Tomlin, R., & Villa, V. (1994). Attention in cognitive science and SLA. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 183–204. Van den Branden, K. (ed.) (2006). Task-based language education: From theory to practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Gorp, K., & Deygers, B. (2013). Task-based language assessment. In A. Kunan (ed.), The companion to language assessment. Vol. 2: Approaches and development (pp. 578–593). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. White, J., & Lightbown, P. M. (1984). Asking and answering in foreign language classes. Canadian Modern Language Review, 40, 228–244. Whong, M., Gil, H.-G., & Marsden, E. (2014). Beyond paradigm: The “what” and the “how” of classroom research. Second Language Research, 30(4), 551–568. Williams, J. N. (2009). Implicit learning. In W. C. Ritchie & T. K. Bhatia (eds.), The new handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 319–353). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Yano, Y., Long, M. H., & Ross, S. (1994). The effects of simplified and elaborated texts on foreign language reading comprehension. Language Learning, 44(2), 189–219. Yilmaz, Y. (2016). The linguistic environment, interaction and negative feedback. Brill Research Perspectives on Multilingualism and Second Language Acquisition, 1(1), 45–86.

22 Task and Syllabus Design for Morphologically Complex Languages Roger Gilabert and Joan Castellví* 22.1 Introduction Like planes that after thousands of hours of careful engineering design can successfully take us to our destination, task design for second or foreign language (L2) use and learning should be able to take learners who do not know or have not mastered a language to successfully and appropriately communicating in it. In this chapter, we reflect on how task design may be carried out when second languages are morphologically complex. The goals of task design are manifold, and most L2 task designers and researchers would agree on the following facts: firstly, task design should guarantee that the pedagogic tasks used in a classroom slowly but steadily approximate L2 learners to real-life performance (see for example the concept of “target tasks” in Long, 2005; 2015). Secondly, while maintaining a focus on meaning, task goals, and task completion, task design should facilitate the conditions for language processing and language learning to take place through focus on form (Doughty & Williams, 1998; Doughty, 2001), and hence guarantee exposure to rich and meaningful input, the provision of opportunities for interaction, production, and feedback (Gass & Mackey, 2007). Thirdly, design should guarantee that regardless of what learners bring to the task (differences in their capacities, motivations, or agencies) certain things happen, such as, for example, the processing of task essential language. In the fourth place, while providing a certain sense of a challenge, task design should help reduce negative emotions of anxiety or perception of difficulty since they may hinder successful task performance and completion. In the fifth place, tasks should be motivating and interesting in order to encourage task engagement (Platt & Brooks, 2002).   We are grateful to the Language Acquisition Research Group (GRAL) at the University of Barcelona, Generalitat de

*

Catalunya (2014SGR1089, 2017SGR560), for its support.

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Whether working in task-supported or in task-based programmes, task design is ultimately a job many teachers and syllabus designers are faced with, since, among other reasons, there is an almost complete lack of available commercial textbooks for the teaching of languages from a task-based perspective. While in the field of task-based language teaching (TBLT) there are no task design models per se, task design is often inferred from the few research frameworks that have taken task design features into consideration in order to investigate how task manipulations may affect performance and learning. In studies following such research agendas, the manipulation of task design and task complexity features has been thought to affect cognitive processes, which in turn affect performance and learning outcomes. The following are three well-known facts about task-based research. Firstly, studies following those agendas have overwhelmingly focused on outcomes rather than on processes. Secondly, they have analysed task features affecting cognitive and conceptual complexity (as independent variables) with little or no attention to linguistic difficulty (see Sasayama, Malicka, & Norris, in press, for a recent research synthesis of complexity studies). This is not exclusive to task-based research since, as we have learnt from Housen and Simoens (2016), in second language acquisition (SLA) linguistic difficulty has rarely been dealt with explicitly as a primary research variable. In the third place, research into tasks has overwhelmingly been done with morphologically poor languages such as English. The goal of this chapter is to address the issue of how task design and task complexity interact with particular characteristics of a morphologically rich language such as Russian. In the first part of the chapter, we define Russian as a morphologically rich language and briefly review the issue of teaching Russian communicatively. In the second part, linguistic difficulty in the context of task design models is discussed, and it is claimed that linguistic difficulty needs to be considered a more central variable during task design since it will interfere with other cognitive processes and this will affect learning opportunities and language outcomes. In the third part of the chapter, we will specifically deal with the issue of linguistic difficulty at lower levels of proficiency. The chapter will end with some recommendations for teachers and syllabus designers engaged in the design of tasks for the teaching of Russian as a second or foreign language.

22.2 A Brief Commentary on the Morphology of Russian and the Tradition of Teaching L2 Russian 22.2.1 The Morphology of Russian By all standards, Russian can be considered a morphologically rich language (MRL), and it is taken here as a representative of languages at the

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high end of the morphological complexity continuum. As opposed to English, in which position and adjacency often implicitly define the relations between grammar elements (e.g., a direct object is generally realized by a noun phrase that appears after the verb without any explicit marking), Russian expresses multiple levels of information already at the word level. As Tsarfaty et al. (2013) suggest: “The lexical information for each word form in a MRL may be augmented with information concerning the grammatical function of the word in the sentence, its grammatical relations to other words, pronominal clitics, inflectional affixes, and so on.” As a way of example, a noun typically has ten different forms, which usually include stress movement, which in turn entails changes in vowel quality due to vowel reduction. For example, дом dom [dóm], “house” in nominative or accusative case; дома dama [damá], in plural nominative or accusative case; дoмy domu [dómu] singular dative; etc. It can also entail the generation of new prosodic and lexical structures of the same word, for example in o дoмах o domakh [adamáx] plural prepositive case, in which the preposition is attached to the noun’s prosodic word as if it were a prefix. In stark contrast, and at the low end of the complexity continuum, in English knowing the form of a word ensures to a large extent the comprehension of the different forms related to that word (e.g., the word “house” is invariant whether it appears in subject, object, or adverbial position). This makes processes such as word recognition, noticing, or cognitive comparison manageable while using the language communicatively. Without a doubt the particularities of Russian morphology pose a considerable challenge for L2 learners and make teachers approach the teaching of Russian with very different conditions from those under which the teaching of English proceeds.

22.2.2 The Tradition of Teaching L2 Russian While it is beyond the goals of this chapter to review the whole history of methodologies for the teaching of L2 Russian, a brief comment on teaching approaches may help the reader contextualize the issue of task and syllabus design for the teaching of Russian as an L2. Communicative language teaching (CLT) for Russian as second language was initiated in the 1980s in Russia, but widespread use of the method was not consolidated, and the fact remains that CLT has had and still has a residual implementation. One often advanced explanation is that teachers found the results of applying CLT to be not as satisfactory as those of the conscious-practical method (сознательно-практический метод). The conscious-practical method was developed by Beljaev (1964, 1965) and Scherba (1974a, b), among others, and it is based on psycholinguistics, and more specifically on Leontjev’s (1970) Activity Theory (“Теория деятельности”) and Vygotsky’s (1966)

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work. In this approach, with considerable research behind it since the 1970s, fifteen per cent or less of the instruction time should be devoted to explanations, and the learners’ communicative activity in the target language should be eighty-five per cent of the time or higher1 (Beljaev 1965, pp. 209–210). This is coherent with the tradition of communicative approaches to language teaching and learning, and it would seem to suggest that communicative language teaching is what teachers of L2 Russian around the world follow. But since the 1980s, Russian L2 teaching has wavered between traditional explanations in grammar syllabi and incursions into CLT, all the way to the conscious-practical method, and with even a few calls for L2 Russian programmes to embrace TBLT (see Comer, 2007, for an example of the teaching of Russian in the United States). For most teachers, it is still common practice to focus heavily on forms and use communicative activities as support practice of the recently explained grammar features. As Comer (2007) puts it, most first-year Russian textbooks follow CLT principles and include activities that are clearly communicative but “they are not pedagogical tasks, inasmuch as they lack an achievable outcome whose propositional contents are verifiable” (p. 184). It is a very common belief that Russian cannot be learned unless explicit focus on forms is provided given the complexities of the language for non-Russian speakers. Communicative activities are often designed to support such explicit teaching and learning. For those wanting to implement a most radical version of CLT, such as TBLT, there is also a need to guarantee that language will be attended to and processed without all attention going exclusively to the communicative and content dimensions of the task. Before some recommendations for task and syllabus design are made, we focus in the next section on how linguistic difficulty is approached by existing task-based models.

22.3 Linguistic Difficulty in Task-Based Models 22.3.1 The Multiple Uses of the Terms Complexity and Difficulty The debate about difficulty and complexity of learning certain aspects of a second language is a central one at the moment. As Housen and Simoens (2016) suggest, how difficult some aspects of grammar are depends on the synergistic influence of the characteristics of a particular L2 feature (e.g., its linguistic complexity, frequency, and salience), the learning conditions under which such a feature needs to be processed, and the individual 1

 Among other goals, current approaches to the teaching of Russian are meant to prepare learners to pass the official Russian exams (TORFL). The descriptors of the levels are consistent with the Council of Europe (2001) and they are presented as CAN DO statements.

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characteristics of the learner. Housen and Simoens (2016, p. 166) provide a superb extended discussion on the difficulties that the SLA field has had in order to define and discriminate the different things researchers mean by using the term “complexity”. They distinguish between, on the one hand, structural complexity (also linguistic or absolute complexity) that has to do with the intrinsic linguistic properties of a particular feature (“typically operationalized in terms of the number and variety of the discrete components of which a language feature consists, and the number and nature of the internal relationships and interconnections with the other features”; p. 166), and, on the other hand, cognitive complexity that is learner-dependent and about how difficult or costly a given feature is for a particular learner at a particular time in a given learning context (“particularly in terms of the mental resources allocated and cognitive mechanisms deployed in processing and internalizing the feature”; p. 166). When Housen and Simoens talk of difficulty, they have the cognitive complexity of a feature in mind and they summarize their concept of difficulty by saying that “a language feature is more difficult than another if its processing and learning requires more time and/or more mental activity from a particular language learner in a particular learning context” (p. 166). That is the definition of difficulty that we adopt in this article since we believe it is the language dimension that, combined with task complexity (i.e., in Robinson’s (2001a) terms, the attention, memory, and reasoning demands imposed by the structure of the task on the language learner), contributes to overall cognitive load of a language learning task. Before moving on to analysing the concept of linguistic difficulty in task-based frameworks, Table 22.1 provides a terminological clarification between the various meanings of complexity as used in this chapter, and it distinguishes it from difficulty and from cognitive load. The goal is not to provide an exhaustive description of complexity and difficulty, but simply to help the reader navigate our text (for extended descriptions and in-depth discussions of the constructs, see Michel, 2017; Housen & Simoens, 2016; Palotti, 2009; 2014).

22.3.2 Linguistic Difficulty in Task-Based Models But how does linguistic difficulty feature in task-based models? As we pointed out earlier, in TBLT there has been no theorizing about design per se. We do not yet have any models of task design that bring together our knowledge of all important components that are necessary for the design of pedagogic tasks for L2 learning. For example, we have no comprehensive models that bring together intrinsic task features (e.g., the reasoning and/or linguistic demands of a task), with the goals and internal structures of the different task phases (e.g., pre-task, task, post-task), in different task

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Table 22.1.  Terminological clarification of complexity and difficulty. Concept

Definition

Associations

Linguistic complexity

From a general SLA perspective, Housen and Simoens (2016) define it in terms of intrinsic linguistic properties of a particular feature.

It is also referred to as absolute complexity. Linguistic complexity subsumes system (lexical) and structural (morphological and grammatical) complexity.

Cognitive complexity (Linguistic difficulty)

Housen and Simoens (2016) define cognitive complexity as learner-dependent. For them “a language feature is more difficult than another if its processing and learning requires more time and/or more mental activity from a particular language learner in a particular learning context” (p. 166).

Although it may generate increases in general cognitive load (see below in table), cognitive complexity here only refers to the cognitive load generated by linguistic features (and not by other task factors or conditions, such as the amount of reasoning or time pressure) for a particular learner at a given time. From a taskbased perspective, cognitive complexity is sometimes used alternatively with “task complexity”

Task complexity

From a task-based perspective, Robinson (2001a) has defined it as the attentional, memory, and reasoning demands imposed by the intrinsic characteristics of the task on the processing of L2 learners.

Task complexity can be associated with the idea of cognitive load, since higher or lower cognitive load (see below in table) can be induced by task design. The amount of reasoning or time pressure are typical task complexity factors.

Task difficulty

In task-based frameworks, Skehan’s concept of task difficulty Skehan (1998) sees it as the corresponds to Robinson’s amount of attention the task concept of task complexity demands from the participants, but it also encompasses code while for Robinson (2001a) it is complexity (see below in table) what learners bring to the task and communicative stress. (ability and affective variables),

Code complexity From a task-based perspective, Skehan (2001) defined it as the linguistic demands a task imposes on the L2 learner. Cognitive load

It is related to Housen and Simoens’ (2016) concept of linguistic difficulty, but only in the context of task-based studies.

From a cognitive psychology In the context of language perspective, Sweller (1988) learning tasks, cognitive load defined it as the cognitive effort can be affected by a number called by the total amount of factors such as task design of mental activity in working (i.e., amount of reasoning or memory at a given moment. time pressure) and the specific linguistic features called upon by a task. It resembles Skehan’s concept of “task difficulty”.

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types (e.g., narrative, decision-making, or information-gap tasks), or with the focus-on-form techniques (e.g., input flooding, input enhancement, or input elaboration) that may be needed to facilitate the conditions for language processing and learning. What is available for task and syllabus designers are two research agendas that have suggested a number of variables of relative “difficulty” or “complexity” that may have an impact on L2 task performance, production, interaction, or development. Task and syllabus designers have often had to infer design decisions from these two very prolific research agendas that have focused on task variables contributing to difficulty and complexity. The two agendas have typically tested variables in isolation (e.g., the effects of pre-task planning time, task familiarity, reasoning demands, or number of elements) and only occasionally by combining two variables (e.g., the effects with pre-task planning with displaced past time reference in here-and-now or there-and-then narrative tasks), and have measured the effects of manipulating such variables on L2 learners complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF), interactional moves (e.g., recasts, language-related episodes), and, to a lesser extent, development (in pre-test and post-test designs or longitudinal designs). As will be seen in what follows, even if provisions have been made in one of the agendas for linguistic difficulty to be factored in during task design, no empirical studies have actually computed linguistic difficulty as a design factor or as an independent variable. Skehan’s model of task difficulty has to do with the amount of attention the task demands from the participants, and so difficult tasks require more attention than easy tasks (Skehan, 1998; Skehan & Foster, 1997). Skehan proposed a three-dimensional model of task difficulty based on code complexity, cognitive complexity, and communicative stress. Code complexity reflects the linguistic complexity and variety, lexical load and variety, and the redundancy and density of forms. Cognitive complexity is affected by cognitive familiarity factors (e.g., familiarity of topic, familiarity of discourse genre, familiarity of task) and cognitive processing factors (e.g., cognitive processing, information organization, amount of computation, clarity of information, and sufficiency of information). Communicative stress is about the conditions under which a task is performed, and it varies according to such factors as the number of participants, the time available for task completion, the length of texts, and opportunities to control interaction. To these he adds learner factors such as learner’s intelligence, breadth of imagination, and personal experience that may also contribute to the difficulty of a task. “Code complexity” in Skehan’s framework refers to the concept of “linguistic difficulty” discussed at the beginning of this section and it clearly stands as an important feature. Most research coming out of this model has focused on cognitive complexity as affected by planning time or familiarity, with no studies factoring in the dimension

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of “code complexity”. An important design recommendation by Skehan (1998) is that: “Given that attentional capacities are limited, tasks of appropriate difficulty imply that learners will be able to cope with the demands upon their attentional resources” (p. 134). We will return to this issue when we consider linguistic difficulty in the context of task design. Robinson’s (2001a, 2003, 2007; Robinson & Gilabert, 2007) Cognition Hypothesis and associated Triadic Componential Framework serve both as references for task design and for sequencing in a syllabus, and draw a distinction between task complexity and task condition, and so they distinguish among cognitive, interactive, and difficulty factors. Robinson (2001b) defines task complexity as “the result of the attentional, memory, reasoning, and other information processing demands imposed by the structure of the task on the language learner” (p. 28). For Robinson (2003) task complexity “refers to the intrinsic cognitive demands of the task” (p. 56). It is important to emphasize that those “cognitive demands” are not specified as either conceptual or linguistic, but rather as general “information-processing” demands. Research coming out of this agenda has overwhelmingly focused on the “conceptual demands” (e.g., in terms of spatial reasoning, intentional reasoning, or number of elements in a task) without computing the load that the specific linguistic features called by the task will contribute to such information-processing (see Robinson, 2001a, 2003, 2007; Robinson & Gilabert, 2007, for complete descriptions of the framework). In Robinson’s view, task design features may affect conceptual demands, which in turn will call for syntactization and grammatization affecting outcomes (in terms of CAF, interaction and/or development). Interestingly, Robinson does not include linguistic difficulty as a sequencing criterion in his framework. We would like to speculate that perhaps linguistic difficulty (or code complexity in Skehan’s terms) is less relevant to English, which is characterized by a relatively morphologically simple structure, few and clear syntactic marks, and a great tendency for monosyllabic words, which simplifies the lexicalization process and allows memory and attention resources to be oriented to lexical entry processing. Code complexity is, however, crucial for morphologically complex languages such as Russian, and it makes the process of a task-based syllabus design difficult, especially at lower levels where linguistic difficulty may take so much attention that learners might barely handle other dimensions of the task.

22.3.3 Claim for a More Central Role of Linguistic Difficulty It is at this point that we would like to suggest a stronger prominence of linguistic difficulty in task-based models and their research agendas as well as a design option for task and syllabus designers. Firstly, we believe that

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linguistic difficulty (as we described by referring to the work of Housen and Simoens, 2016) will compete with conceptual demands. Whether in the input that is usually provided in the pre-task phase, or during production in the task phase, task structure will call both conceptual and linguistic material and will need to be processed simultaneously during task performance. The more we know about what those conceptual and linguistic demands are, the better we can adjust our design for a successful processing and internalization of both meaning and form. Secondly, linguistic difficulty will undoubtedly contribute to cognitive load because the lack of linguistic resources may interfere with the successful completion of the task. Unless carefully controlled during design, linguistic demands that are overwhelmingly high or too far from the learner’s possibilities may pose serious problems for task completion. Thirdly, linguistic difficulty should be considered both at the level of the number of features and the relative difficulty of each feature. In the following section, we illustrate the three arguments with a task for the teaching of Russian as an L2.

22.3.4 An Illustration of Intertwined Conceptual and Linguistic Demands in an L2 Russian Task Let us picture the following task2 that will help illustrate the arguments just laid out. A class of twenty students who have been learning Russian as a foreign language for 150 hours and are about to reach A2 level. The goal of the task (which we will label as “The Russian computer”) is to have learners agree on the use of a single computer with a Russian keyboard that is available in the library. Students must work in groups of four and each one has a schedule that they need to consider as they agree on who will be using the computer and when. The outcome of the task must be a commonly agreed upon schedule for coordinated computer use. At the level of cognitive load, the task is clearly demanding. On the one hand, there is only one computer, it is available for a limited period of time (9 am to 5 pm), and the four learners must consider the four different schedules containing different classes and restrictions. Each schedule contains five days and eight hours every day. The task will demand learners to engage in reasoning that requires a considerable number of logical operations (“I arrive early in the morning but I must leave two hours later”). Interactive demands are also high because it is not just the coordination with one person but with three more people. Linguistic difficulty is explained by the fact that several linguistic features are simultaneously called by the structure of the task. These include, but are not limited to, verbs of movement, imperfective verbal forms (in the present tense, associated with the expression of frequency), and perfective forms (in the past and future  This task is used in a task-based programme for the teaching of L2 Russian at the University of Barcelona.

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tense). To these we must add both reference to numbers and days of the week and their inflected forms, which are needed for successful task completion. It is not just about the amount of linguistic features needed to complete the task, but also about the fact that some features are more difficult than others because they depend on other features (e.g., in order to use numbers in “three days” or “two appointments” in Russian the genitive case is needed in the word immediately following). From the point of view of task definition, the task meets all the criteria that have been advanced by task-based scholars over the years (see Van den Branden, 2006, for a list of definitions of “task” over the years). This task is therefore a differentiated goal-oriented process, where meaning is primary; it is comparable to real-world activity, with a number of steps, which draws on a series of cognitive and communicative procedures and has a defined outcome. Additionally, it is sequenceable and can be subject to pedagogical intervention. The assessment of the task can be carried out in terms of outcome. In this task, linguistic difficulty clearly competes with conceptual demands. Attentional and memory resources need to be utilized both for solving the problem and for processing the language involved in such problem resolution. In terms of mental activity, learners probably need to compare and organize information coming from the different participants, hold it in working memory and in long memory so that it can be recalled recurrently, need to jointly interrogate one another and plan together, and need to reach an agreement that is satisfactory to everyone. As for language processing, they need to joggle not only with lexical items but also with the morphology of verbs of movement, imperfective and perfective verbal forms, numerals and days of the week, and their respective morphologies, all of which are needed for the successful completion of the task. In sum, the higher the mental activity related to conceptual content and to the processing of forms involved in this task the higher the amount of computation needed during task performance. Secondly, linguistic difficulty caused by lack of resources will undoubtedly cause higher cognitive load (Sweller, 1988, 1994) because it may interfere with the successful completion of the task. Both conceptual complexity and linguistic difficulty contribute to what Sweller defined as intrinsic cognitive load. When the conceptual demands of a task are very high, an L2 learner may lack the linguistic resources to meet those demands, and so cognitive load may reach a certain threshold after which task completion, processing, and any potential learning are beyond reach. As Sweller suggests, the solution is to try to work on reducing extraneous cognitive load, that is, the information presented to learners in task materials. If we do so, germane cognitive load (Sweller, Van Merriënboer, & Paas, 1998) will be generated that directs leaners attentional and memory

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resources to the creation, construction, and automation of schemas. In the case of L2 pedagogic tasks, these are schemas for both content and language form. In the task we are using as an illustration, two potential solutions are available. On the one hand, a possibility is to reduce extraneous cognitive load by means of changes to the design that will reduce the amount of conceptual demands, for example by splitting the complex task into more manageable, simpler sub-tasks (e.g., one where they only exchange information, another one where they exchange information and identify potential conflicts, one where information exchange and conflict identification also prompt decision-making, and so on and so forth). A second alternative is to reduce linguistic difficulty, where linguistic features are dealt with as separately as possible (e.g., one sub-task where they only deal with hours—because the schedule refers to a single day—followed by another sub-task where they deal with hours across different days). We will return to this issue in section 22.5. Thirdly, linguistic difficulty should be considered both at the level of the number of features and the relative difficulty of each feature. While our first argument dealt with the amount of linguistic features, this argument has to do with linguistic difficulty proper. Let us just take numbers in Russian. One can learn the numerals in Russian as individual words, but he or she will only be able to count numbers. In order to count objects, the genitive case is needed. Number 1 requires the nominative case in the word it precedes (with different forms for the masculine, feminine, neutral, and plural). Numbers 2, 3, and 4 (or any other numbers ending in 2, 3, or 4) will call the genitive singular. Numbers 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 0 (or numbers ending in 5 … 0) and from 11 to 14 are associated with the genitive plural. So if in the task at hand someone asks a participant how many days he or she can use the computer at 15:00, in order to answer something as simple as “five days” the person will have to remember at least the numeral-case mapping as well as the different forms of the genitive of the word “days” (one day = один день [adin djenj], three days = три дня [trji dnja], five days = пять дней [pjatj dnjej] …). If the learner does not use the right form of the nominative or genitive case for the counted object after the numeral, he or she may still be understood if that is the only error in the utterance. But from a pedagogical viewpoint, it is not only a problem of how to produce the right construction. In the pre-task phase or in previous tasks the amount of comprehensible input needed for noticing forms after the numeral must be larger, and the number of linguistic items the learner must handle in a task involving numerals can also increase the general difficulty of the task. As this point we are not even considering the sequencing issue or what form should be targeted first. All we are claiming at this point is that linguistic difficulty needs to be computed during task design in order to avoid cognitive overload. If not gauged appropriately, the whole computation

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by L2 learners during task performance may collapse and be transformed into negative perceptions of difficulty and anxiety that may cause insufficient processing and learning. Sequencing is an issue we will return to in our specific recommendations. In the following section, we use as a way of example the elementary levels of morphologically rich languages as a suitable context to illustrate the role of linguistic difficulty in task design.

22.4 TBLT for Elementary Russian It is at the early stages of learning Russian as a second or foreign language that linguistic difficulty plays a larger role in task performance. It is so much the case that prominent experts in the teaching of Russian suggest that task-based courses for elementary Russian are beyond reach (Comer, 2007). Beyond the basic alphabet and phonetic system, elementary L2 Russian learners are faced with the enormous endeavour of decoding words with many layers of information. As with any other learners, their limited attentional and memory capacities will force them to prioritize meaning over form, and they will only focus on the latter if they can liberate enough resources to deal with both simultaneous conceptual and linguistic processing. At lower levels, it is really a challenge to design real life tasks that are affordable for beginners. Non-adapted Russian language uses six cases with different declension paradigms for nouns, adjectives, numerals, and pronouns, which agree in gender, number, and case. The conjugation model is relatively simple, but it has six personal forms in the present/ future, and four in the past tense. At higher levels learners have sufficient linguistic knowledge to integrate new linguistic elements, while beginner learners do not have any references to associate the new linguistic items with. For them, there is often overwhelming competition of cues and the attentional limitations make it difficulty for attention to be efficiently distributed among all of them. The lower the level of proficiency, the more important the role that linguistic difficulty plays in the overall amount of computation of the task. Even a simple task in terms of cognitive complexity (resource directing/dispersing), interaction (participation and participant variables), and learner factors (e.g., low anxiety) may sometimes be unattainable when there are too many new linguistic elements. Therefore, the problem for task designers at this level of profiency is not only to create the conditions to favour noticing of new form or of gaps, but also to ensure that the amount of computation is not too high, so that the task can be attainable and satisfactorily completed. In the following section, we make a series of suggestions for task design that will help learners liberate attentional and memory resources in order to be able to cope with linguistic difficulty.

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22.5 Recommendations for Task and Syllabus Design for L2 Russian In the introduction to this chapter, we outlined some desirable principles that can guide second language task design: pedagogic task resemblance to real-life performance; a balanced focus-on-meaning and focus-onform; the avoidance of negative perceptions; the in-built guarantee of language processing and learning despite individual differences; and the promotion of task engagement through motivating and interesting design. These are of course very general criteria that would be impossible to look at in detail in this chapter. Because we need to be selective, we will focus our recommendations on a series of design considerations that we believe will be specifically useful for morphologically complex languages.

22.5.1 Needs Analysis for Task Selection and Description in the Case of Morphologically Rich Languages Regardless of whether a programme is task-supported or task-based, some kind of needs analysis (NA) must happen prior to course implementation. Obtaining detailed information about the kind of tasks learners in the programme will need to perform outside the class is not only desirable but it is the only reasonable option for task and syllabus design to be meaningful and efficient. Needs analysis is by now a highly specialized area of SLA and one that requires careful planning, methodology, and implementation (Long, 2005; Serafini et al. 2015). Methodologically speaking, it involves the use of multiple sources (i.e., different types of informants) and methods (e.g., interviews, observations, and questionnaires, among others) to extract information about the tasks that people will need to perform in specific discourse communities (see for example Malicka, Gilabert, & Norris, 2017, for an example of needs analysis in the hotel industry). If the possibility of such highly sophisticated NA is not available or the discourse community is too general, a decision still needs to be made as to what real target tasks are going to be used as a reference for the design of pedagogic tasks for a language programme. Whatever the case may be, NA information should be collected and/or specified as to: • the goals of the task and how frequently the task is performed; • its internal and external features, such as the number and types of participants typically involved in the task, the kind of channel in which it happens—online, face-to-face, etc.—and the topics they will include, among others; • the competencies, skills, and language needed to perform the task; • the steps and sequences of procedures of the tasks;

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• the factors contributing to task complexity such as available planning time, amount of information to be shared, or the level of reasoning involved; and the sources of difficulty like the excess, relative difficulty of features or lack of linguistic resources; and • the performance standards that can be used for the assessment of the task outcome. In italics, we highlight the aspects of NA that are going to be particularly relevant to MRLs since they will interact during task performance and therefore need to be carefully considered during task design. Despite the many advances in NA theorizing and research, it is an unresolved issue as to how NA may exactly transfer to actual task design (see Malicka, Gilabert, & Norris, 2017, for an example). This is especially true about how the information about the variables contributing to the task’s intrinsic linguistic difficulty can be used to manipulate such features in instructionally meaningful and effective ways during pedagogic task design. Beyond the thorough reading of the NA literature, of all the processes involved in NA, we would like to emphasize a special focus by designers on the identification of the linguistics demands called by the tasks, the careful identification of factors affecting conceptual complexity, as well as the sources of difficulty.

22.5.2 Identification of Target Forms Called by the Task In order to balance out cognitive conceptual complexity and linguistic difficulty so that the learner can accomplish the task, task designers should monitor the amount of “mininal code” demanded by each task. Tasks do not limit the linguistic resources that learners can use, but there are a number of resources that are necessary or “essential” to get to an outcome. One could say that if task designers impose the grammar involved in a given task, they run the risk of putting a TBLT dress on a grammar syllabus (Long, 2015, 2016), but this is not what we are suggesting here. When designing tasks for morphologically poor languages, which are more dependent on mostly lexical meaning, no one would set a task that demands eighty per cent vocabulary that is unknown to learners. In the case of MRLs, we cannot ignore the number and quality of the morphological features that will be needed when performing a task. Observing or asking expert task users how the task is performed during NA will certainly provide information about the linguistic resources needed for task performance. Testing the task with first language (L1) users after NA but before it is re-designed for L2 users, and finally gathering and updating information about the kinds of difficulties L2 learners run into during task performance over the years may serve as rich sources of information for task design. All of these will render a realistic picture of the linguistic difficulty generated by the task,

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and it can be one more factor to compute in order to help designers with making better informed decisions about how to adjust cognitive and conceptual complexity, and this is the issue to which we now turn.

22.5.3 Balanced Task Design Between Cognitive and Conceptual Complexity and Linguistic Difficulty As Révész (2011) suggests, complex tasks will let students focus on form when they are not extremely challenging and when understanding between interlocutors is sufficient for communication. During NA, detailed information about the conceptual content and mental operation required by the task can be obtained. Taxonomies of cognitive processes, such as Bloom et al.’s (1956) taxonomy and its revised version by Anderson et al. (2001), can serve as a basis for the description and classification of processes involved in each particular task. This will range from low order skills such as sharing or summarizing information to higher order skills like interpreting or checking information against other pieces of information, as we saw with the “The Russian computer” task. While breaking up a task into simple sub-tasks by itemizing linguistic difficulty (and presenting one or few linguistic features at a time), it is often the case that doing so renders tasks highly artificial, and we run the risk of again imposing an external grammatical syllabus on L2 learners by isolating features. For example, if we take “The Russian computer” task again as a reference, it would be unreasonable to try to limit the task to the use of some numbers (e.g., 1, 2, 3) but not others if we want them to just focus on the nominative case instead of both the nominative and the genitive case. Instead, itemizing cognitive complexity seems a lot more reasonable because it does not seem so artificial if we limit a schedule to certain times (e.g., we can ask learners to choose between any time from 9:00 to 15:00 or limit it to a less constrained schedule going from 9:00 to 21:00, which provides more options and reduces complexity). This is in line with the claims of Robinson’s (2001a, 2003, 2005) Cognition Hypothesis (i.e., that cognitive task complexity should be used as the sole basis for task design and sequencing), but it is not quite the same since the Cognition Hypothesis does not make a specific mention of the integration of linguistic difficulty. Balancing out conceptual and cognitive demands and linguistic difficulty is crucial, realistic, and doable, but it takes considerable design.

22.5.4 Proactive, Reactive, and Post-Active Focus on Form in the Different Task Phases If we admit to the central role of linguistic difficulty in MRL, it is especially important that focus on form should happen throughout the whole task. As we have learned from the focus on form literature (Doughty &

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Williams, 1998), focus on form may happen proactively during task design, reactively during task performance, or post-actively after the task has been performed. Because reactive focus on form is incidental and is mostly unpredictable as it depends on learners’ internal syllabuses, here we focus on proactive and post-active focus on form since both can be addressed during task design. While input to the task provided during the pre-task phase is important to any kind of task in any kind of context, in the case of MRLs it is of particular value. Input is external to the learner and the noticing of forms (Robinson, 1995, 2003; Schmidt, 2001) will depend on both its characteristics (e.g., saliency, communicative value of the forms) and what learners bring to the task, such as their internal syllabus, communicative needs, developmental readiness, felt task demands, prior language knowledge in terms of L2 proficiency or L1, processing capabilities, motivation, task construal, and agency, among many other factors or combinations of factors (for a review, see Han, Park, & Combs, 2008). As we have learned from SLA models, positive evidence through input will trigger input processing, intake, and intake processing before other deeper processes can take place (Leow, 2015). Pre-tasks are an opportunity to provide input and encourage processes such as the noticing (Schmidt, 2001) of language forms. It is by now a widely accepted fact in TBLT that design should promote noticing, and for MRLs in task-based approaches which wish to avoid explicit grammar teaching, the noticing of morphological aspects is a pre-requisite for any understanding, performance, and learning to take place. Available to designers are a series of techniques that will draw learners’ attention to specific forms. Visual input enhancement (see Lee & Huang, 2008, for a meta-analysis on written input enhancement; see Cho & Reinders, 2013 for oral input enhancement), by highlighting, underlining, enlarging, or bolding morphological forms, will typically guarantee that certain linguistic features get noticed. This in turn may cause learners to engage in cognitive comparisons or demand reactive focus on form by their teachers or peers. Another technique is input flooding (Arteaga, Gess, & Herschensohn, 2003; White, 1998), which entails the flooding of a text with target features considered relevant to task completion. In the case of MRLs, this technique may be used with caution since Russian texts, even at lower levels, may be already flooded with many examples of a feature. A third technique involves the transformation of texts in terms of their relative complexity. Texts in pre-tasks have been transformed by using input simplification (Leow, 1995), input elaboration (Oh, 2011)—where difficult features in a text are not removed but their understanding is facilitated—and explicit teaching (Carroll & Swain, 1993; Leow, 2000). It is assumed here, but not addressed, that reactive focus on form will happen during task performance. During task-based performance, learners

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will identify gaps in their knowledge or will notice new forms with which they are unfamiliar. In such circumstances, they will typically look for help, either from peers, the teacher, or other resources such as dictionaries or their mobile phones. However, the noticing of forms and noticing of gaps during pre-task and task work is certainly going to generate the need to consolidate the many linguistic aspects that task performance generates. In order for learners to engage in processes beyond registering new forms and taking them in order to start generating hypotheses and various mappings, they will probably need more time and resources to internalize, modify, or consolidate what they know about the language. Post-task work can certainly serve that purpose. Focused language work that is meaningfully connected to the task at hand will provide opportunities to reflect on language and raise awareness (through more input and intake processing). Post-task work typically involves specific focus on form, and so attentional and memory resources are liberated from the pressures of task performance. Through language-focused activities ranging from more implicit to more explicit, post-task work can be addressed towards processes such as hypothesis testing, rule-formation, and form–function mapping that will be eventually turned into internalized, modified, and consolidated knowledge (Leow, 2015) available for the performance of future tasks.

22.5.5 Tasks in a Syllabus Task sequencing is largely an unresolved issue in SLA. Despite some recent proposals (Baralt, Gilabert, & Robinson, 2014), exact guidelines for sequencing still remain elusive. We believe that tasks can be organized in increasing complexity according to students’ needs. Certainly, information about task conceptual and cognitive complexity and linguistic difficulty can be used beyond the individual task in order to inform decisions on the grading and sequencing of pedagogic tasks. Cognitive and conceptual complexity can undoubtedly be a criterion for organization, but we would also like to claim that linguistic complexity, and the amount of computation required by it, should also be considered during task design and sequencing. Our central claim in this chapter is that linguistic difficulty should remain stable and realistic (i.e., not artificially split into isolated grammatical units). Even if often there is not much available information about developmental sequences (which is especially true about Russian; Magnani & Artoni, 2015), designers should have a sense of what kinds of features need to be known by the learner before other specific features can be used. Learners should start with conceptually simpler tasks and progressively approximate more complex real target tasks. The experience of Russian instructors often shows that an overwhelming amount of computation needed to address the language processing required by the task may prevent learners from satisfactorily achieving task completion. Additionally, a negative

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perception of task difficulty, too high a level of anxiety, and other affective perception factors may get in the way of successfully performing the task. We propose that for MRLs, each task provides a manageable level of cognitive and conceptual complexity that will allow learners to cope with the linguistic difficulty of the task. If we retake “The Russian computer” as an example, certainly dealing just with information transmission in a first simple sub-task of the task in pairs would be reasonable for them to start becoming acquainted with all the linguistic features that will be needed for the completion of the task. A sub-task asking learners to resolve a limited number of easily solvable conflicts could follow. This would let learners recycle the language and schema generated by the pre-task, task, and post-tasks of the first sub-task. The complexity of the task could increase progressively (and we have no guidelines in the literature as to how many versions may be needed) until the version we presented, with four participants, and with many and complex conflicts to resolve, can be attained. Another aspect of syllabus design is that of task repetition (Bygate, 2001). Whether through exact task repetition or the repetition of similar tasks, it seems especially useful in the case of MRLs, since the first time a learner performs a task in L2 Russian all attention may be geared to the processing of meaning. The repetition of the same task a second time will certainly liberate resources. A third consideration for task design is the alternation of oral, hybrid oral–written, and written tasks in order to take full advantage of what oral and written modes may offer for second language acquisition (Gilabert, Manchón, & Vasylets, 2016). More attentional and memory resources are available during writing, and the processes of planning, execution, and revision associated with writing provide a better opportunity to focus on form (Gilabert, Manchón, & Vasylets, 2016). While at this point there is not a comprehensive model of syllabus design, and task and syllabus designers are largely left to their own resources, some suggestions for syllabus design and reasoned sequencing of task have begun to emerge (Baralt, Gilabert, & Robinson, 2014).

22.6 Conclusion Exactly in the same way that we cannot imagine the engineering design of planes without aerodynamics or propulsion, we believe that for morphologically complex languages such as Russian, linguistic complexity should be an integral part of task design that is carefully considered and integrated in order to guarantee successful task completion. In this chapter, we first contextualized the issue of teaching Russian as an L2. We presented some of the complexities that characterize Russian as an MRL. We

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then identified some of the problems that current task-based models have when it comes to the integration of the particularities of MRLs, which certainly makes linguistic difficulty a much more central aspect than in other types of language. Finally, we made a series of general task and syllabus design recommendations. A number of conclusions can be drawn on the basis of the issues addressed. The first is that there is no reason why Russian, despite its enormous morphological complexity, cannot be taught communicatively through the use of tasks (but see Comer, 2007, 2012). We have argued that MRLs require particularly careful task design, but we also believe that design can solve many of the problems of integrating meaning and form in tasks for the teaching of L2 Russian. This can be done by means of the design of meaningful, realistic, and interesting tasks that present meticulously crafted pre-tasks, tasks, and post-tasks. Pre-tasks can certainly draw L2 learners’ attention to, and help them process, the many and complex features to which they are exposed from very early stages in Russian. Engaging in task performance will provide a testing ground for uses and hypotheses, for the provision of feedback and the mapping of new forms, and for already known meanings, and will help learners identify the gaps in their knowledge. This, we have claimed, will be more efficiently done if the right balance between cognitive/conceptual and linguistic processing is found, and we have provided some examples as to how teachers and designers may go about it. We assume that slowly but steadily engaging in meaningful task performance will help learners traverse developmental sequences (Long, 2015). We are fully aware that language courses have limited numbers of hours, and that the use of tasks may not guarantee covering all the content that learners need to cover for each level. That is indeed an empirical question that TBLT needs to address (see Long, 2016, for some counterarguments). Experiences start being reported (Castellví & Markina, 2017) on how whole initial courses can be taught through tasks. Finally, as Lawson (2005) suggests, designers generate objects, places, or materials which may have a major impact on the quality of life of many people. Mistakes can be inconvenient to the life of people; they may be expensive and can even be dangerous. We would not ask an aeronautical engineer to spare some hours for the sake of quick commercialization of a plane. We would like to make the same type of demands for second language task design. In task-based approaches, we urgently need to revise and advance our research agendas by refining the operationalization of the constructs of complexity and difficulty during task design. While task design for the specific communities we teach is costly—it takes time, often several years of redesign before tasks are fully functional—it is worth every minute if it is done for the sake of achieving successful second and foreign language acquisition.

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References Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., Airasian, P. W., Cruikshank, K. A., Mayer, R. E., Pintrich, P. R., …, Wittrock, M. C. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Pearson, Allyn & Bacon. Arteaga, D., Gess, R., & Herschensohn, J. (2003). Focusing on phonology to teach morphological form in French. The Modern Language Journal, 87(1), 58–70. Baralt, M., Gilabert, R., & Robinson, P. (2014). Task sequencing and instructed second language learning. London: Bloomsbury. Beljaev, B. V. (Беляев, Б. В.) (1964). Psikhologicheskie voprosy usvoenija leksiki inostrannogo jazyka. (Психологические вопросы усвоения лексики иностранного языка). Moscow: Просвещение. Beljaev, B. V. (Беляев, Б. В.) (1965). Ocherki po psikhologii obuchenija inostrannyv jazykam (Очерки по психологии обучения иностранным языкам. Издательство «Просвещение»). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Proizveschenie. Bygate, M. (2001). Effects of task repetition on the structure and control of oral language. In M. Bygate, P. Skehan, & M. Swain (eds.), Researching pedagogic tasks. Second language learning, teaching, and testing (pp. 23–48). Harlow: Longman. Bloom, B. S., Engelhart, M. D., Furst, E. J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives, handbook I: The cognitive domain. New York: David McKay. Carroll, S., & Swain, M. (1993). Explicit and implicit negative feedback: An empirical study of the learning of linguistic generalizations. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 15, 357–386. Castellví, J. & Markina, E. (2017). Designing a task-based syllabus for morphologically complex languages: The case of Russian as a foreign language. Paper given at the Task-based Language Teaching Conference, Barcelona, Spain. Cho, M., & Reinders, R. (2013). The effects of aural input enhancement on L2 acquisition. In J. M. Bergsleithner, S. N. Frota, & J. K. Yoshioka (eds.), Noticing and second language acquisition: Studies in honor of Richard Schmidt (pp. 133–148). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii, National Foreign Language Resource Center. Comer, W. J. (2007). Implementing task-based language teaching from the ground up: Consideration for lesson planning and classroom practice. Russian Language Journal/Русский язык, 57, 181–203. Comer, W.J. (2012). Communicative language teaching and Russian: The current state of the field. In V. Makarova (ed.), Russian languages studies in North America: New perspectives from theoretical and applied linguistics. London: Anthem Press.

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Council of Europe (2001). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge. Doughty, C. (2001). Cognitive underpinnings of focus on form. In P. Robinson (ed.), Cognition and second language instruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doughty, C., & Williams, J. (eds.) (1998). Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gass, S. M., & Mackey, A. (2007). Input, interaction, and output in second language acquisition. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (pp. 175–199). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gilabert, R., Manchón, R., & Vasylets, L. (2016). Mode in theoretical and empirical TBLT research: Advancing research agendas. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 36, 117–135. Han, Z., Park, E. S., & Combs, C. (2008). Textual enhancement of input: Issues and possibilities. Applied Linguistics, 29(4), 597–618. Housen, A., & Simoens, H. (2016). Introduction: Cognitive perspectives on difficulty and complexity in L2 acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 38, 163–175. Lawson, B. (2005). How designers think: The design process demystified. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Lee, S. K., & Huang, H. T. (2008). Visual input enhancement and grammar learning: A meta-analytic review. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30(3), 307–331. Leontjev, A. A. (Леонтьев, А. А.) (1970). Nekotorye problemy obuchenija russkomu jazyku kak inostrannomu (Некоторые проблемы обучения русскому языку как иностранному). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta. Leow, R. P. (1995). Modality and intake in second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 17(1), 79–89. Leow, R. P. (2000). A study of the role of awareness in foreign language behavior. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22, 557–584. Leow, R. P. (2015). Explicit learning in the L2 classroom: A student-centered approach. New York: Routledge. Long, M. H. (2005). Second language needs analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, M. H. (2015). Second language acquisition and task-based language teaching. Oxford: Wiley. Long, M. H. (2016). In defense of tasks and TBLT: Nonissues and real issues. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 36, 5–33. Malicka, A., Gilabert, R., & Norris, J. (2017). From needs analysis to task design: Insights from an English for specific purposes context. Language Teaching Research, 1–20.

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Magnani, M., & Artoni, D. (2015). Teaching learnable grammar in Russian as a second language: A syllabus proposal for case. In E. F. Quero Gervilla, B. Barros García, T. R. Kopylova (eds.), Trends in Slavic Studies. Moscow: Editorial URSS (pp. 57–70). Michel, M. C. (2017). Complexity, accuracy and fluency in L2 production. In S. Loewen & M. Sato (eds.), Routledge handbook of instructed second language acquisition (pp. 50–68). London: Routledge. Oh, S. Y. (2011). Two types of input modification and EFL reading comprehension: Simplification versus elaboration. TESOL Quarterly, 35(1), 69–96. Palotti, G. (2009). CAF: Defining, refining and differentiating constructs. Applied Linguistics, 30, 590–601. Palotti, G. (2014). A simple view of linguistic complexity. Second Language Research, 31(1), 117–134. Platt, E., & Brooks, F. B. (2002). Task engagement: A turning point in foreign language development. Language Learning, 52, 365–400. Révész, A. (2011). Task complexity, focus on L2 constructions, and individual differences: A classroom-based study. The Modern Language Journal, 95, 162–181. Robinson, P. (1995). Attention, memory and the “noticing” hypothesis. Language Learning, 45, 283–331. Robinson, P. (2001a). Task complexity, cognitive resources, and syllabus design: Atriadic framework for examining task influences on SLA. In P. Robinson (ed.). Cognition and second language instruction (pp. 287–318). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, P. (2001b). Task complexity, task difficulty, and task production: Exploring interactions in a componential framework. Applied Linguistics, 22(1), 27–57. Robinson, P. (2003). The Cognition Hypothesis, task design and adult taskbased language learning. Second Language Studies, 21(2), 45–107. Robinson, P. (2007). Task complexity, theory of mind, and intentional reasoning: Effects on L2 speech production, interaction, uptake and perceptions of task difficulty. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 45, 193–214. Robinson, P., & Gilabert, R. (2007). Task complexity, the Cognition Hypothesis and second language learning and performance. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 45(3), 161–176. Sasayama, S., Malicka, A., & Norris, J. (in press). Cognitive task complexity: A research synthesis and meta-analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Scherba, L. V. (Щерба, Л. В.) (1974a). Prepodavanie inostrannykh jazykov v srednej shkole. Obschie voprosy metodiki (Преподавание иностранных языков в средней школе. Общие вопросы методики). Moscow: Atel’stvo Vusshaja Shkola. Scherba L. V. (Щерба, Л. В.) (1974b). O trojakom aspekte jazykovykh javlenij i ob eksperimente v jazykoznanii (О трояком аспекте языковых

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явлений и об эксперименте в языкознании). In L. V. Scherba (eds.), Jazykovaja sistema i rechevaja dejatel’nost’ (Щерба Л. В. Языковая система и речевая деятельность). Leningrad: Nauka. Schmidt, R. (2001). Attention. In P. Robinson (ed.), Cognition and second language instruction (pp. 3–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Serafini, E. J., Lake, J. B., & Long, M. H. (2015). Needs analysis for specialized learner populations: Essential methodological improvements. English for Specific Purposes, 40, 11–26. Skehan, P. (1998). A cognitive approach to language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skehan, P. (2001). Tasks and language performance. In M. Bygate, P. Skehan, & M. Swain (eds), Researching pedagogic tasks: Second language learning, teaching, and testing. Harlow: Pearson Education. Skehan, P., & Foster, P. (1997). Task type and task processing conditions as influences on foreign language performance. Language Teaching Research, 1, 185–211. Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12, 257–285. Sweller, J. (1994). Cognitive Load Theory, learning difficulty, and instructional design. Learning and Instruction, 4(4), 295–312. Sweller, J., Van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Paas, F. (1998). Cognitive architecture and instructional design. Educational Psychology Review, 10, 251–295. Tsarfaty, R., Seddah, D., Kübler, S., & Nivre, J. (2013). Parsing morphologically rich languages: Introduction to the special issue. Computational Linguistics, 39, 15–22. Van den Branden, K. (ed.) (2006). Task-based language teaching: From theory to practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1966). Мышление и речь Издательство. Моsсow: Академия педагогических наук РСФСР. White, J. (1998). Getting learners’ attention: A typographical input enhancement study. In C. Doughty & J. Williams (eds.), Focus-on-form in classroom second language acquisition (pp. 85–113). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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23 Proficiency Guidelines and Frameworks David Little1

23.1 Introduction In the decades following the Second World War, there was a strongly felt need on both sides of the Atlantic to find ways of describing L2 proficiency in terms of functional capacity—the ability to perform communicative tasks in the real world—rather than grammatical knowledge. In the wake of wars against Japan and Korea, the United States government wanted to be able to gauge what its employees could do in the L2s they had learnt; in Europe, a major challenge was to enable adult language learners to develop communicative repertoires sufficient to support mobility. This chapter focuses on the two most influential instruments to emerge from this reorientation of L2 education, the Proficiency guidelines developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL PG; ACTFL, 1986, 2012a; Breiner-Sanders et al., 2000; Breiner-Sanders, Swender, & Terry, 2002) and the Council of Europe’s Common European framework of reference for languages (CEFR), originally published in the organization’s two official languages, English and French (Council of Europe, 2001a, 2001b). Although the two instruments share a functional orientation, the circumstances of their development were different, as is their relation to their target audience. The ACTFL PG are a proficiency scale whose descriptors for speaking, writing, listening and reading run to twenty-four pages in the most recent version (2012a); they are the basis for ACTFL’s language tests, notably the Oral Proficiency Interview, and have had a significant impact on L2 education in the United States in themselves and via ACTFL’s Performance guidelines for K-12 learners (Swender & Duncan, 1998). The CEFR is a book of 260 pages. Its proficiency scales are just one part of a comprehensive discursive and taxonomic description of language use, which, in 1

 I am grateful to Gudrun Erickson, Neus Figueras, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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turn, is embedded in a detailed discussion of Council of Europe language education policy, various dimensions of language teaching and learning, and the assessment of communicative proficiency. Intended to help the Council of Europe’s forty-seven member states to subject their language education policy and practice to critical scrutiny and to support the development of curricula, teaching and learning, and assessment, the CEFR has had a global impact in the decade and a half since its publication (it currently exists in forty languages). This chapter explores the origin and purpose of both instruments, considers their different approaches to the description of language proficiency as language use, and gauges their impact on L2 assessment, teaching, and learning.

23.2 The Origin and Purpose of the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages 23.2.1 The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines First published in 1986, the ACTFL PG were adapted from the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Skill Level Descriptions.2 To begin with, the ILR scale comprised six levels—no proficiency (0); memorized proficiency (1); elementary proficiency (2); limited working proficiency (3); general professional proficiency (4); and advanced professional proficiency (5)—and it did not distinguish between the different language skills. In due course, separate scales were devised for listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and intermediate “plus” levels were added (for example, 2+ is more than elementary proficiency but less than limited working proficiency). The primary focus of the ACTFL PG was oral proficiency: from the beginning the scale was closely associated with ACTFL’s Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), itself adapted from a similar ILR instrument, and the scales for listening, reading, and writing were developed on the model of the oral proficiency scale. The speaking and writing guidelines were revised to provide a more accurate reflection of real-world assessment needs in 1999 and 2001 respectively (ACTFL, 2012a, p. 3). The current (third) version of the ACTFL PG, published in 2012, includes the first revision of the Listening and Reading Guidelines since 1986; it also includes the addition of the Distinguished level to the Speaking and Writing Guidelines, the division of the Advanced level into the three sub-levels of High, Mid, and Low for the Listening and Reading Guidelines, and the addition of general level descriptions at the Advanced, Intermediate, and Novice levels for all skills (ACTFL, 2012a, p. 3). Thus, for all four skills the current version has five main levels—Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, Superior, and 2

 For details, see http://www.govtilr.org/skills/ILRscale1.htm.

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Distinguished—the first three of which are divided into three sub-levels, Low, Mid, and High. The 2012 version of the ACTFL PG is available in an online version that includes a glossary, samples of speaking and writing at each level, and examples of listening and reading texts and comprehension tasks for each level. Currently (summer 2017) the ACTFL website3 offers the PG in thirteen languages: Arabic; Azerbaijani; Chinese; English; French; German; Indonesian; Japanese; Korean; Portuguese; Russian; Spanish; and Turkish. The online version offers samples for all of these languages except Azerbaijani, Indonesian, and Korean. The ACTFL PG have been criticized on a number of grounds (summarized by Liskin-Gasparro, 2003), for example: that they are based on intuitive judgments (Fulcher, 1996); that empirical studies failed to confirm the skill hierarchy in writing or listening (Liskin-Gasparro, 2003, pp. 484–485); that the guidelines are circular (Lantolf & Frawley, 1985); and that there is no warrant for the appeal that the guidelines make to the supposed perceptions of a hypothetical native speaker Kramsch (1986). Although there is substance in these criticisms, they are likely to apply to any attempt to describe the progressive development of functional proficiency in terms that are sufficiently general to be usable.

23.2.2 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages There are five differences between the CEFR and the ACTFL PG. First, whereas the latter were developed primarily to guide assessment, the second half of the CEFR’s title puts learning before teaching and teaching before assessment. There are historical reasons for this. The CEFR was preceded by functional-notional descriptions of L2 repertoires that were elaborated to support teaching and learning rather than assessment. The first of these was The threshold level (van Ek, 1975), developed under the aegis of the Council’s adult education project and designed to “make the free movement of men and ideas in the European area easier by increasing the scale and effectiveness of language learning” (van Ek, 1975, p. i). Three further specifications followed: Waystage, a level below Threshold, published in a revised version as Waystage 1990 (van Ek & Trim, 1991, 1998); Vantage (van Ek & Trim, 2001), a level above Threshold; and Breakthrough (unpublished), a level below Waystage. It is worth noting that although the interest of language testing and certification agencies prompted the Council of Europe’s project team to develop a sample test of Threshold level English, the committee responsible for adult education was strongly opposed to formal assessment and the sample test was never published (Little & King, 2014, p. 124). It is also worth noting that the illustrative scales of descriptors, now commonly assumed to be the core of the CEFR, 3

 http://www.actfl.org.

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were printed in an appendix in the two preliminary versions of the CEFR published for consultation in 1996 (Council of Europe, 1996a, 1996b). The second difference follows from the first. The CEFR’s six proficiency ­levels—basic user: A1 (Breakthrough) and A2 (Waystage); independent user: B1 (Threshold) and B2 (Vantage); and proficient user: C1 (Effective Operational Proficiency) and C2 (Mastery)—are subordinated to a larger discursive and taxonomic treatment of L2 proficiency as L2 use. The third difference is that whereas the ACTFL PG describe proficiency in terms of the skills of speaking, writing, listening, and reading, the CEFR distinguishes four modes of language use, all of which have spoken and written forms: production (speaking and writing); reception (listening and reading); interaction (spoken and written); and mediation. Illustrative scales are provided for production, reception, and interaction. The fourth difference is that whereas the ACTFL PG describe the communicative behaviour the user or learner is capable of at each level, the CEFR also describes the user or learner’s competences, the linguistic and other resources needed to perform the language activities specified for each level. And the fifth difference is that whereas the ACTFL PG were arrived at intuitively by committees of experts, the CEFR’s descriptors and scaling were empirically validated. The procedures used, which are explained in Appendix B of the CEFR, yielded nine levels: the six “criterion” levels and three “plus” levels, A2+, B1+ and B2+. Arguably, however, this difference is more apparent than real. The use of statistical methods to scale descriptors does not alter the fact that the descriptors themselves and the judgments of the individuals involved in their calibration were intuitively arrived at. Since its publication in 2001, the CEFR has been subject to criticisms similar to those levelled at the ACTFL PG. It has also been criticized for seeking to impose a straitjacket on language learning, teaching, and assessment in Europe, notwithstanding the fact that its stated aim is to encourage discussion and comparison rather than to enforce uniform standards. Fulcher’s (2010) charge that in some quarters the CEFR has been “reified”, treated as a set of inflexible standards that need no further elaboration, is certainly valid. One thinks, for example, of the way in which European governments increasingly use the CEFR’s levels to specify the language proficiency immigrants must demonstrate in order to secure entry, residence rights, and citizenship (Pulinx, Van Avermaet, & Extramiana, 2014). But this is a criticism of the CEFR’s users rather than the CEFR itself. It has been pointed out, for example by Alderson (2007), that the CEFR’s descriptors contain insufficient detail to serve as a basis for test design. But this is hardly surprising, since the CEFR is a non-language-specific document. For most practical purposes the descriptors must be interpreted and expanded through the lens of a particular language. The Council of Europe’s CEFR website4 currently (summer 2017) lists so-called Reference  http://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages.

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Level Descriptions (RLDs) for Croatian, Czech, English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. These have not been developed according to a consistent methodology and so take various forms; by far the most extensive is the one developed by the English Profile project.5 The CEFR is vulnerable to the criticism that it attempts to scale too much. The scales for phonological and orthographic control (Council of Europe, 2001a, pp. 117–118) are a case in point, since phonological and orthographic competences can be developed to a high level quite independently of other dimensions of proficiency. Professional singers, for example, frequently achieve a native-like pronunciation and intonation in many different languages while knowing nothing of the languages in question beyond the songs or libretti they sing; to describe their level as C2 is seriously misleading. The scale for orthographic control is unsatisfactory for the same reason. The C2 descriptor Writing is orthographically free of error is also applicable to users or learners at level A1 if they have been well taught and are good at self-monitoring, while the A1 descriptor Can copy familiar words and short phrases e.g., simple signs or instructions, names of everyday objects, names of shops and set phrases used regularly may be applicable to young children who are beginning to master literacy skills (in L1 as well as L2) but is likely to be wide of the mark when applied to adult beginners who are already highly literate. More generally, as Hulstijn (2007) has pointed out, there is no empirical evidence for the parallel development of functional capacity and language competence implied by the parallel scaling of communicative language activities and communicative language competence.

23.3 The Trajectory of L2 Proficiency Development 23.3.1 ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines Table 23.1 summarizes the ACTFL PG levels for the skill of speaking, using excerpts from the full level descriptions. For Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced levels, the “global” descriptors have been used; the sub-levels are not included. In the ACTFL PG the levels are presented from highest to lowest. Here the order is reversed to make it easier to discern the implied trajectory of proficiency development. Although the ACTFL Guidelines were developed independently of curricular considerations, they appear to derive equally from traditional and more recent understandings of L2 teaching and learning. The view of language use presented is functional, emphasizing communication, but stages in the developmental continuum are marked by an increasing control of syntactic structure, from “use of isolated words and phrases” 5

 http://www.englishprofile.org.

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Table 23.1.  Summary of ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines for speaking. Novice

Speakers “can communicate short messages on highly predictable, everyday topics that affect them directly”, primarily by using “isolated words and phrases that have been encountered, memorized, and recalled”; they “may be difficult to understand even by the most sympathetic interlocutors accustomed to non-native speech” (ACTFL, 2012a, p. 9).

Intermediate Speakers can “create with the language when talking about familiar topics related to their daily life”, recombining “learned material in order to express personal meaning”; they “can ask simple questions” and “handle a straightforward survival situation” (p. 7). Advanced

Speakers can “engage in conversation in a clearly participatory manner in order to communicate information on autobiographical topics, as well as topics of community, national, or international interest”; they handle topics “concretely by means of narration and description in the major time frames of past, present, and future”; their language “is abundant, the oral paragraph being the measure of Advanced-level length and discourse”; and they “have sufficient control of basic structures and generic vocabulary to be understood by native speakers of the language, including those unaccustomed to non-native speech” (p. 5).

Superior

Speakers can “communicate with accuracy and fluency in order to participate fully and effectively in conversations on a variety of topics in formal and informal settings from both concrete and abstract perspectives”; they “discuss their interests and special fields of competence, explain complex matters in detail, and provide lengthy and coherent narrations, all with ease, fluency, and accuracy”; they “are able to construct and develop hypotheses to explore alternative possibilities” and can “use extended discourse without unnaturally lengthy hesitation to make their point, even when engaged in abstract elaborations”; “while coherent, [their discourse] may still be influenced by language patterns other than those of the target language” (p. 5).

Distinguished Speakers can “use language skillfully, and with accuracy, efficiency, and effectiveness”; they are “educated and articulate” and “can reflect on a wide range of global issues and highly abstract concepts in a culturally appropriate manner”; they “can use persuasive and hypothetical discourse for representational purposes, allowing them to advocate a point of view that is not necessarily their own”, and they can “tailor language to a variety of audiences by adapting their speech and register in ways that are culturally authentic” (p. 4).

(Novice), through “sentence-level language, ranging from discrete sentences to strings of sentences, typically in present time” (Intermediate; ACTFL 2012a, p. 7), to “the oral paragraph [as] the measure of … length and discourse” (Advanced), and beyond that to the ability to “provide lengthy and coherent narrations” (Superior) and the ability to “use persuasive and hypothetical discourse for representational purposes” (Distinguished). Easy comprehension by educated native speakers is evidently the ultimate target, though the highest level of spoken proficiency may lack certain features characteristic of the native speaker: “A non-native accent, a lack of a native-like economy of expression, a limited control of deeply embedded

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cultural references, and/or an occasional isolated language error may still be present” (ACTFL 2012a, p. 4). In general, cultural appropriateness is a feature only of the Superior and Distinguished levels. In a critical review of the first version of the ACTFL PG, Kramsch (1986, p. 370) argued that they rest on an input–output view of language teaching and learning that presupposes “a linear acquisition of grammatical structures”; and there is certainly nothing in the 2012 descriptors that explicitly supports the view that L2 proficiency develops out of interactive L2 use. Kramsch suggests that the ACTFL’s proficiency goals differ from interactional goals in three ways: “(1) they focus on behavioral functions rather than on conceptual notional development; (2) they have a static rather than a dynamic view of content; (3) they emphasize accuracy to the detriment of discourse aptitude” (Kramsch, 1986, p. 367). Kramsch also makes the point that ACTFL’s Oral Proficiency Interview is vulnerable to the criticism that precisely because it is an interview it cannot involve the negotiation of meaning between equal partners.

23.3.2 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages The developmental trajectory described by the six levels of the CEFR is summarized in three tables: a global scale, which provides a description of overall proficiency for each level (Council of Europe, 2001a, p. 24); the so-called self-assessment grid, which focuses on language activities, merging written interaction and written production into a single category, writing (Council of Europe, 2001a, pp. 26–27; see Table 23.2); and a summary of qualitative aspects of spoken language use: range, accuracy, fluency, interaction, and coherence (Council of Europe, 2001a, pp. 28–29). There is a tension between the first two of these summaries: the global scale seeks to define overall proficiency at each level, whereas the self-assessment grid accommodates the fact that most learners develop an uneven proficiency profile. The global scale and the self-assessment grid seek to distil the illustrative scales presented in Chapters 4 and 5 of the CEFR. Chapter 4 (“Language use and the language user/learner”) includes thirty-four illustrative scales, for listening, reading, oral production, written production, spoken interaction, written interaction, note-taking, and processing text. There are also scales for planning, compensating, and monitoring or repair; for the receptive strategies of identifying cues and inferring; and for the interaction strategies of turn-taking, cooperating, and asking for clarification. Chapter 5 (“The user/learner’s competences”) distinguishes between general competences—declarative knowledge (savoir), skills and know-how (savoir-faire), “existential” competence (savoir-être), and ability

available

C1

C2

I can read very short, I can understand texts that I can read articles and simple texts. I consist mainly of high reports concerned can find specific, frequency everyday or with contemporary predictable job-related language. problems in which the information in I can understand the writers adopt particular simple everyday description of events, attitudes or viewpoints. material such as feelings and wishes in I can understand advertisements, personal letters. contemporary literary prospectuses, menus prose. and timetables and I can understand short simple personal letters.

I can understand I can read with ease long and complex virtually all forms of factual and literary the written language, texts, appreciating including abstract, distinctions of style. structurally or I can understand linguistically complex specialised articles texts such as manuals, and longer technical specialised articles and instructions, even literary works. when they do not relate to my field.

I can understand familiar names, words and very simple sentences, for example on notices and posters or in catalogues.

B2

Reading

B1

I can understand I can understand I can understand the main I can understand extended I can understand I have no difficulty familiar words phrases and the points of clear standard speech and lectures and extended speech in understanding and very highest frequency speech on familiar follow even complex even when it any kind of spoken basic phrases vocabulary related matters regularly lines of argument is not clearly language, whether concerning to areas of most encountered in work, provided the topic is structured and when live or broadcast, even myself, my family immediate personal school, leisure, etc. I reasonably familiar. I relationships are when delivered at fast and immediate relevance (e.g., very can understand the can understand most TV only implied and not native speed, provided concrete basic personal and main point of many news and current affairs signalled explicitly. I have some time to get surroundings family information, radio or TV programmes programmes. I can I can understand familiar with the accent. when people shopping, local area, on current affairs or understand the majority television speak slowly and employment). I topics of personal or of films in standard programmes and clearly. can catch the main professional interest dialect. films without too point in short, clear, when the delivery is much effort. simple messages relatively slow and clear. and announcements.

A2

Listening

A1

Table 23.2.  CEFR self-assessment grid (Council of Europe, 2001a, pp. 26–27).

UNDERSTANDING

available

C1

I can take part effortlessly in any conversation or discussion and have a good familiarity with idiomatic expressions and colloquialisms. I can express myself fluently and convey finer shades of meaning precisely. If I do have a problem I can backtrack and restructure around the difficulty so smoothly that other people are hardly aware of it.

C2

I can connect phrases in I can present clear, I can present clear, I can present a clear, a simple way in order detailed descriptions detailed descriptions smoothly-flowing to describe experiences on a wide range of of complex subjects description or argument and events, my dreams, subjects related to my integrating subin a style appropriate hopes and ambitions. I field of interest. I can themes, developing to the context and can briefly give reasons explain a viewpoint on particular points with an effective and explanations for a topical issue giving and rounding off logical structure which opinions and plans. I the advantages and with an appropriate helps the recipient to can narrate a story or disadvantages of various conclusion. notice and remember relate the plot of a book options. significant points. or film and describe my reactions.

B2

Spoken I can use simple I can use a series Production phrases and of phrases and sentences to sentences to describe where I describe in simple live and people I terms my family know. and other people, living conditions, my educational background and my present or most recent job.

B1 I can deal with most I can interact with a I can express myself situations likely to degree of fluency and fluently and arise whilst travelling spontaneity that makes spontaneously in an area where the regular interaction with without much language is spoken. I native speakers quite obvious searching can enter unprepared possible. I can take an for expressions. I into conversation on active part in discussion can use language topics that are familiar, in familiar contexts, flexibly and of personal interest or accounting for and effectively for social pertinent to everyday sustaining my views. and professional life (e.g., family, hobbies, purposes. I can work, travel and current formulate ideas events). and opinions with precision and relate my contribution skilfully to those of other speakers.

A2

Spoken I can interact in I can communicate in Interaction a simple way simple and routine provided the tasks requiring other person a simple and is prepared direct exchange to repeat or of information on rephrase things familiar topics and at a slower activities. I can rate of speech handle very short and help me social exchanges, formulate what even though I can’t I’m trying to usually understand say. I can ask enough to keep the and answer conversation going simple questions myself. in areas of immediate need or on very familiar topics.

A1

Table 23.2.  (cont.)

SPEAKING

available

WRITING

Writing

I can write a short, I can write short, simple postcard, simple notes and for example messages. I can sending holiday write a very simple greetings. I can personal letter, for fill in forms with example thanking personal details, someone for for example something. entering my name, nationality and address on a hotel registration form.

I can write simple I can write clear, detailed I can express myself in I can write clear, connected text on topics text on a wide range of clear, well-structured smoothly-flowing text which are familiar or of subjects related to my text, expressing in an appropriate style. personal interest. I can interests. I can write an points of view at I can write complex write personal letters essay or report, passing some length. I can letters, reports or describing experiences on information or giving write about complex articles which present and impressions. reasons in support of subjects in a letter, a case with an effective or against a particular an essay or a report, logical structure which point of view. I can underlining what helps the recipient to write letters highlighting I consider to be notice and remember the personal the salient issues. significant points. I can significance of events I can select a style write summaries and and experiences. appropriate to the reviews of professional reader in mind. or literary works.

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to learn (savoir-apprendre)—and communicative language competences. It provides scales for thirteen dimensions of the latter: general linguistic range; vocabulary range; vocabulary control; grammatical accuracy; phonological control; orthographic control; sociolinguistic appropriateness; flexibility; turn-taking; thematic development; coherence and cohesion; spoken fluency; and propositional precision. The illustrative scales are not arranged in a hierarchy. Users must determine which scales are relevant to their purpose and bring them into interaction with one another as seems appropriate. The self-assessment grid summarizes A2 spoken interaction, for example, but if we want to know how the CEFR defines spoken interaction in relation to transactions to obtain goods and services, we need to consider the descriptors brought together in Table 23.3, asking ourselves what implications all the other descriptors have for those contained in the illustrative scale for transactions to obtain goods and services. Broadly speaking, the CEFR levels reflect the themes and intended path of L2 learning in western European educational cultures in the early 1990s, when the descriptors were formulated and the scales constructed. Table 23.3.  CEFR descriptors relevant to spoken interaction at level A2. Transactions to obtain goods and services

Can ask for and provide everyday goods and services. Can get simple information about travel, use public transport: buses, trains, and taxis, ask and give directions, and buy tickets. Can ask about things and make simple transactions in shops, post offices or banks. Can give and receive information about quantities, numbers, prices, etc. Can make simple purchases by stating what is wanted and asking the price. Can order a meal. (Council of Europe, 2001a, p. 80)

Vocabulary range

Has a sufficient vocabulary for the expression of basic communicative needs. Has a sufficient vocabulary for coping with simple survival needs. (p. 112)

Vocabulary control

Can control a narrow repertoire dealing with concrete everyday needs. (p. 112)

Grammatical accuracy

Uses some simple structures correctly, but still systematically makes basic mistakes—for example tends to mix up tenses and forget to mark agreement; nevertheless, it is usually clear what he/she is trying to say. (p. 114)

Sociolinguistic appropriateness

Can handle very short social exchanges, using everyday polite forms of greeting and address. Can make and respond to invitations, suggestions, apologies, etc. (p. 122)

Turn-taking

Can ask for attention. (p. 124)

Spoken fluency

Can construct phrases on familiar topics with sufficient ease to handle short exchanges, despite very noticeable hesitation and false starts. (p. 129)

Proficiency Guidelines and Frameworks

The focus is on language use outside the classroom; although education is one of the four domains of language use identified by the CEFR, the scales and their descriptors contain nothing that unmistakably implies a role for interactive target language use in the context of learning. Progression is from survival (A1), through routine transaction and interaction (A2 and B1), to the use of the L2 for academic and professional purposes (B2, C1, and C2). The descriptors for A1 and A2 and some descriptors for B1 can readily be adapted to reflect the communicative needs of learners at primary school. But at levels B2, C1, and C2, there is a much greater emphasis on L2 literacy that develops in interaction with increasingly advanced educational and professional processes. The extent to which these levels apply to younger learners is thus quite limited.

23.3.3 Equivalences between the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and the CEFR As sections 23.3.1 and 23.3.2 show, there is a lot of common ground between the levels and descriptors of the ACTFL PG and the CEFR, and the widespread adoption of the CEFR’s levels by international language testing agencies has inevitably prompted questions about equivalences and differences between the two scales. This has been a matter of greater concern for ACTFL than for the Council of Europe, which does not administer language tests. In 2010, the American Association of Teachers of German, in collaboration with ACTFL, launched the first in a series of four conferences to explore the challenges involved in empirically aligning the ACTFL PG and CEFR levels. The first conference was held at the University of Leipzig, the second in Provo, UT (2011, hosted by Brigham Young University), the third in Graz (2012, hosted by the European Centre for Modern Languages), and the fourth in Alexandria, VA (2013, hosted by ACTFL). The conferences brought together proficiency and language testing experts from the United States, Canada, and Europe, and led to a memorandum of cooperation between ACTFL and the European Centre for Modern Languages, a so-called partial agreement of the Council of Europe to which thirty-three of the forty-seven member states belong. The first two conferences yielded a collection of preparatory studies (Tschirner, 2012), and ACTFL subsequently issued a document entitled “Assigning CEFR ratings to ACTFL assessments”, which summarizes the results of a series of one-directional alignment studies, mostly carried out by the Institute for Test Research and Test Development at the University of Leipzig (ACTFL, n.d.). The results of this research yielded ACTFL’s official correspondences between ACTFL and CEFR ratings and ACTFL assessments shown in Table 23.4 (ACTFL, n.d., p. 4).

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Table 23.4.  One-directional alignment of ACTFL assessments with the CEFR. Reading and listening

Speaking and writing

Rating on ACTFL assessment

Corresponding CEFR rating

Rating on ACTFL assessment

Corresponding CEFR rating

Distinguished

C2

Distinguished

Superior

C1.2

Superior

C2

Advanced High

C1.1

Advanced High

C1

Advanced Mid

B2

Advanced Mid

B2.2

Advanced Low

B1.2

Advanced Low

B2.1

Intermediate High

B1.1

Intermediate High

B1.2

Intermediate Mid

A2

Intermediate Mid

B1.1

Intermediate Low

A1.2

Intermediate Low

A2

Novice High

A1.1

Novice High

A1

Novice Mid

0

Novice Mid

0

Novice Low

0

Novice Low

0

23.4 Impact on Assessment 23.4.1 ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines There is a direct link between the ACTFL PG and the assessment of communicative proficiency: the PG were conceived and developed as “an instrument for the evaluation of functional ability” (ACTFL, 2012a, p. 3), and the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) is ACTFL’s principal means of assessing “functional ability”. It exists in two forms, “live” and online (OPIc). The live version is conducted face to face or by telephone and lasts 20–30 minutes; the online version lasts 20–40 minutes. Both tests are delivered on behalf of ACTFL by Language Testing International (LTI). According to LTI’s website,6 the live version of the OPI is currently (summer 2017) available in seventy-nine languages, and the OPIc in thirteen languages. Since its first introduction, the validity and reliability of the OPI have been confirmed by numerous studies. Already in the 1980s, however, critics argued that the problem with the OPI was not its validity or reliability but the fact that its design confounded language abilities and elicitation procedures (see, for example, Bachman & Savignon, 1986; Bachman, 1988). This issue remains unresolved. A special issue of ACTFL’s journal, Foreign  http://www.languagetesting.com.

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Language Annals (36.4, 2003), provides an informative conspectus of empirical research focused on the OPI and the criticisms to which it continues to be subjected. Those criticisms notwithstanding, there is no doubt that the OPI has established itself as something of a gold standard in L2 education in the United States. In this regard, its role in the accreditation of language teachers is especially noteworthy. In 2015, twenty-four state departments of education were making use of ACTFL test results in the accreditation of foreign language teachers; sixteen of them required a minimum proficiency level of Advanced Low and eight required Intermediate High (Swender, 2015, p. 775). In addition to the OPI and OPIc, ACTFL has developed, validated, and implemented writing proficiency tests in booklet and online versions (available in twenty-three languages in 2015), reading and listening proficiency tests (seven languages), and the ACTFL Assessment of Performance Toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL), an online performance assessment at Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced levels for language learners at school (Swender, 2015, pp. 775–776). The AAPPL is available in Arabic, Chinese, English/ESOL, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Thai.

23.4.2 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages Although the CEFR was designed to “provide a common basis for the elaboration of language syllabuses, curriculum guidelines, examinations, textbooks, etc. across Europe” (Council of Europe, 2001a, p. 1), there is no doubt that its publication was most eagerly awaited by language testing agencies: the need had long been felt for a common metric that could be used to establish comparability among tests across countries and languages. It quickly emerged, however, that such comparisons posed multiple challenges, captured in the question: “Is your B2 the same as my B2?” Those who called for the Council of Europe to set up a monitoring scheme to police the use made of the scales understood neither the nature of the organization nor its limited resources. In any case, the impact of the CEFR’s scales and descriptors quickly spread far beyond Europe (see, for example, the studies collected by Byram & Parmenter, 2012). An intergovernmental forum, convened in 2007, agreed that it was not the role of the Council of Europe to “verify and validate the quality of the link between language examinations and the CEFR’s proficiency levels and that the member states were responsible for guaranteeing the quality and fairness of testing and assessment” (Goullier, 2007, p. 11). The Council of Europe nevertheless recognized

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the need to support the efforts of the relevant agencies to make responsible use of the CEFR and commissioned the development of two guides, one for linking existing tests and exams to the CEFR (revised version, Figueras et al., 2009), the other for designing new tests based on the CEFR (ALTE, 2011). In many contexts, responsible use of the CEFR has entailed the formulation and calibration of new descriptors, especially at the C levels. Thus, when in 2013 the Council of Europe launched a project to update and extend the CEFR descriptor set, it was able to draw on the work of no fewer than ninety-two individuals, associations, and agencies (Council of Europe, 2017, Appendix 8). The extent of international interest in and commitment to the CEFR was further confirmed by the number of institutions that participated in the online validation of new descriptors developed by the project: 304, most of them in Europe, but some in North and South America, Africa and Asia, and two in New Zealand (Council of Europe, 2017, pp. 13–20). The effort to make responsible use of the CEFR has generated a variety of research. Some of it has been on a relatively large scale and carries far-reaching implications. The first volume in the English Profile Project’s monograph series, for example, uses data from Cambridge English exams to establish criterial features of levels A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2 in L2 English (Hawkins & Filipovic´, 2012), while the second volume explores the use of language functions to define language constructs across the ability range and set learning objectives that are sensitive to learners’ proficiency levels (Green, 2012). On an altogether smaller scale, a project that set out to develop a common approach to the assessment of spoken English across the Austrian university system significantly enhanced the scaled description of speaking proficiency at CEFR levels C1 and C2, with particular reference to academic presentations (spoken production) and formal academic discussions (spoken interaction). The project (Berger, 2015) marked an important step forward in the professionalization of language assessment in the university domain; it also yielded an important resource for the development of curricula and teaching and learning materials. Another small-scale project that deserves replication is described by DíezBedmar (2018). It addressed the difficulty that Spanish learners of English at level B1 faced when they tried to use the grammatical accuracy and strategy descriptors to assess their written language activities. A corpus of B1-level learner texts was subjected to computer-aided error analysis, descriptors were reformulated on the basis of the results, and further linguistic information was provided on the most frequent errors at that level.

Proficiency Guidelines and Frameworks

23.5 Impact on L2 Curricula and Pedagogy 23.5.1 ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines ACTFL is a professional organization for foreign language teachers with more than 12,500 members. The ACTFL PG are central to its understanding of the goals of L2 education, and they have shaped its ethos since their first publication thirty years ago. Arguably, they have done more than any other instrument to make language teachers aware of language as communication and help them to reflect on the pedagogical implications of such a view. This is how Liskin-Gasparro (2003) has summarized their impact: Familiarity with the ACTFL Guidelines, exposure to talk about second language acquisition at workshops and conferences, for some, experience with conducting and rating OPIs, gave classroom teachers with little or no background in second language acquisition a voice in the professional discourse. They had seen for themselves the disconnect between students’ declarative linguistic knowledge, demonstrated in contexts of controlled production in teacher-centred classrooms, and their more limited ability to communicate in autonomous contexts. They had participated in heated discussions about error correction and grammar instruction, and they had been challenged to think past the received wisdom about methods and classroom practices and to step back and observe both themselves and the discourse of their classrooms. For the average classroom teacher, the ACTFL Guidelines were a site of creative work and stimulating professionalization.  (pp. 486–487)

The United States has no national curriculum, no national language policy, and thus no national requirement that languages are taught at any level of schooling. National Standards for Foreign Language Learning were published in 1995, but they offer guidance that states and local school systems are free to follow or ignore (for an overview of the National Standards, see Met & Byram, 1999). The Standards identify three modes of communication—Interpersonal (oral interaction), Interpretive (listening and reading), and Presentational (speaking non-reciprocally and writing)—and they specify content—what students should know and be able to do—in five dimensions: communication; cultures; connections (with other disciplines); comparisons (between languages and cultures); and communities (participation in multilingual communities at home and abroad). ACTFL responded to the Standards by developing the ACTFL performance guidelines for K–12 learners (Swender & Duncan, 1998), performance standards that complement the content defined in the National Standards. In their original form the Performance guidelines were organized according to three proficiency levels derived from the ACTFL PG: Novice; Intermediate; and pre-Advanced. Each level provides descriptors for six dimensions of language use: comprehensibility; comprehension; language control; vocabulary use; communication

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Table 23.5.  Length of time needed to achieve Novice, Intermediate, and pre-Advanced proficiency levels as specified in ACTFL Performance Guidelines for K–12 (based on Swender & Duncan, 1998). Novice

Grade K–4, Grade 5–8, Grade 9–10

Intermediate

Grade K–8, Grade 5–12, Grade 7–12, Grade 9–12

pre-Advanced

Grade K–12

strategies; and cultural awareness. And under each of these dimensions descriptors are grouped according to the three modes of communication identified by the National Standards. Because students in the United States start learning a foreign language at many different ages and continue their learning for different periods of time, the Performance guidelines include calculations of the length of time needed to achieve each proficiency level (see Table 23.5). This scheme assumes that older learners compensate for a later start by making more rapid progress. The most recent version of these guidelines, the ACTFL performance descriptors for language learners (ACTFL, 2012b), is differently organized. It comprises three grids, one for each of the three modes of communication (Interpersonal, Interpretive, and Presentational). Each grid has three columns—Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced—and eight rows: a “global” descriptor followed by descriptors for functions; contexts or content; text type; language control; vocabulary; communication strategies; and cultural awareness. The most recent version of the Standards, Worldreadiness standards for learning languages (National Standards Collaborative Board, 2015) includes performance indicators for Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, and Superior proficiency levels. The ACTFL performance descriptors for language learners do not claim to tell teachers how to teach, but they appear to have been conceived and developed according to a rather traditional view of the relation between language learning and language use. The preamble to the document distinguishes between performance as “the ability to use language that has been learned and practised in an instructional setting” and proficiency as “the ability to use language in real world situations in a spontaneous interaction and non-rehearsed context and in a manner acceptable and appropriate to native speakers of the language” (ACTFL, 2012b, p. 2). This distinction seems to imply a separation between language use in the classroom and communication in the world outside.

23.5.2 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages The publication of the CEFR did not prompt widespread curricular reform in Council of Europe member states, though ministries of education were quick to attach its proficiency levels to the intended learning outcomes

Proficiency Guidelines and Frameworks

of existing curricula and curriculum frameworks. There was a widespread tendency to associate A1 with primary, A2/B1 with lower secondary, and B1/B2 with upper secondary, with an expectation that learners would achieve more in their first than in subsequent foreign languages. The European Commission’s First European survey on language competences administered tests of proficiency in first and second foreign languages to students nearing the end of compulsory schooling in the fourteen participating countries. The foreign languages included were English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and the tests covered the levels A1, A2, B1, and B2. The results (European Commission, 2012) revealed that in many instances curricular aspirations were not met. The relation between the CEFR and language teaching and learning is not always well understood. One reason for this is an apparent ambiguity in the position taken by the CEFR’s authors. As its title indicates, the CEFR was conceived as a reference framework; it is not a ready-made curriculum, far less a guide to language teaching and learning, and it is no part of its function to advocate one approach to language teaching and learning in preference to others. On the other hand, the Council of Europe’s functional-notional approach to the description of target L2 repertoires, first elaborated in The threshold level (van Ek, 1975), played a major role in the development of communicative language teaching, and Chapter 6 of the CEFR restates the Council of Europe’s commitment to learner-centred language education that is informed by needs analysis (Council of Europe, 2001a, p. 142). The CEFR summarizes its “action-oriented” approach as follows: Language use, embracing language learning, comprises the actions performed by persons who as individuals and as social agents develop a range of competences, both general and in particular communicative language competences. They draw on the competences at their disposal in various contexts under various conditions and under various constraints to engage in language activities involving language processes to produce and/ or receive texts in relation to themes in specific domains, activating those strategies which seem most appropriate for carrying out the tasks to be accomplished. The monitoring of these actions by the participants leads to the reinforcement or modification of their competences. (Council of Europe, 2001a, p. 9; emphasis in the original—the words and phrases printed in italics, to which “contexts” in the second sentence should be added, refer to the principal components of the CEFR’s descriptive scheme)

According to this summary, language use entails that we draw on our competences—knowledge, skills, experience, and characteristics—in order to engage in communicative activities. Language learning is a variety of language use in the sense that proficiency develops from sustained interaction between the learner’s gradually developing competences and

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the communicative tasks whose performance requires him or her to use the target language. This has clear implications for language teaching. If learners are to develop a proficiency that allows them to act as individuals and social agents, it seems clear not only that the target language should be the principal medium of their learning, but that their learning should be organized so as to give them unlimited access to initiating as well as responding discourse roles. By exercising their agency in the target language, learners gradually develop a proficiency that adds a new dimension to their identity (for an elaboration of this argument in terms of language learner autonomy, see Little, Dam, & Legenhausen, 2017, pp. 223–227).

23.5.2.1 The European Language Portfolio The Council of Europe developed the concept of a European Language Portfolio (ELP) in parallel with the CEFR. In 1991, an intergovernmental symposium hosted by the federal Swiss authorities recommended the development of both instruments (Council of Europe, 1992, p. 39); and in 1997, the Council of Europe held an intergovernmental conference in Strasbourg (Council of Europe, 1997a) to launch the second draft of the CEFR (Council of Europe, 1996b) and to present a collection of studies that considered how the ELP might be configured for language learners of different ages in different educational domains (Council of Europe, 1997b). Over the next three years, further work on the CEFR produced the version that was published in English and French in 2001 (Council of Europe, 2001a, 2001b). Simultaneously, projects in fifteen Council of Europe member states and three international non-governmental organizations developed, piloted, and revised versions of the ELP for language learners in primary, lower and upper secondary, vocational, tertiary, and adult education (for details, see Scha¨rer, 2000; for further background, see Little, 2002). During the pilot phase the Principles and guidelines that define the ELP and its functions in relation to Council of Europe policy were gradually elaborated and refined (Council of Europe, 2000, 2011). In keeping with the Council of Europe’s ethos, it was never intended to develop “canonical” ELP models for different categories of learner. Instead, a Validation Committee was established, and authorities and agencies in the member states were invited to develop ELPs and submit them to the committee for validation (a matter of establishing their conformity with the Principles and guidelines) and accreditation. According to the Principles and guidelines, the ELP has three aims: to support the development of learner autonomy; to promote plurilingualism; and to foster intercultural awareness (Council of Europe, 2011, p. 5). Its three obligatory components are: a language passport, which captures the owner’s linguistic identity and experience of L2 learning and use; a language biography, designed to provide a reflective accompaniment to L2

Proficiency Guidelines and Frameworks

learning and use; and a dossier in which the owner keeps evidence of his/ her proficiency and L2 experience. An explicit link to the CEFR is provided by checklists of “I can” descriptors, arranged according to the CEFR’s communicative activities and proficiency levels, which are used to set learning targets, monitor progress, and record achievement. The first ELP to be validated, the Swiss model for adolescent and adult learners (bmlv, 2000), included checklists that were developed by the same research project that produced the CEFR’s illustrative scales. Between 2000 and 2010, when validation was replaced by registration, 118 ELPs were validated and accredited, from thirty-two Council of Europe member states and six international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and international consortia (for details, see Little, Goullier, & Hughes, 2011). In the early years, there was an abundance of anecdotal evidence testifying to successful ELP implementation, but empirical support has been scarce. One notable exception is Ziegler’s (2014) study of the positive impact the ELP had on the development of learner self-regulation in six schools (nineteen teachers, twenty-eight classes) in Lower Saxony. But despite the enthusiasm with which the concept of the ELP was greeted and the different models were developed, few of them were ever used on a large scale, and it is impossible to find clear evidence that any of the older models are still in regular use. Widespread use is reported of more recently developed ELPs, however, in Turkey (Little, 2016) and Albania (Ministry of Education and Sport, Albania, 2016). Whereas the CEFR has had an enduring impact on the assessment of L2 proficiency, the impact of the ELP on Europe’s education systems has been disappointing. The Council of Europe nevertheless continues to maintain a substantial ELP website7 that provides background documents, guidance for ELP developers, and a wealth of materials to support classroom implementation.

23.5.2.2 Linguafolio Linguafolio was developed by members of the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages (NCSSFL) on the model of the ELP. Although the ELP’s “I can” checklists are linked to the activities and proficiency levels of the CEFR, the Council of Europe did not provide ELP developers with checklist descriptors. By contrast, in 2009 NCSSFL published “I can” descriptors based on the ACTFL PG; these were subsequently revised as the NCSSFL–ACTFL can-do descriptors (NCSSFL & ACTFL, 2015), which are explicitly linked to the National Standards and the ACTFL performance descriptors for language learners described in section 23.5.1 above. There is thus a tighter fit between Linguafolio and the ACTFL PG and related instruments that guide foreign language education in US schools than there is between the CEFR and the ELP. What is more, NCSSFL is committed to the continued 7

 http://www.coe.int/portfolio.

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development of Linguafolio and is currently (summer 2017) working on an extended set of NCSSFL–ACTFL “can-do” statements that incorporate more detailed treatment of the intercultural dimension and place a new emphasis on language as a tool to access culture.8 Moeller, Theiler, and Wu (2012) and Ziegler and Moeller (2012) report on empirical studies that confirmed the positive impact of goal-setting on learner self-regulation.

23.6 Conclusion Since their first publication, in 1986 and 2001 respectively, the ACTFL PG and the CEFR have been criticized in some quarters for not being based on an empirically founded account of functional L2 development. It is difficult to see how such an account could exist for any one language, however, given the infinite diversity of individual developmental trajectories; and the ACTFL PG and the CEFR are in principle designed to be applied to all languages. There is no doubt that their functional orientation has done much to refocus L2 education on both sides of the Atlantic, emphasizing the development of the individual learner’s communicative capacity and providing language education professionals with tools they can use to discuss and explore common concerns. In that sense, both the ACTFL PG and the CEFR have successfully framed L2 education. Partly, no doubt, because they are embedded in a rigorous professional development and certification process, the impact of the ACTFL PG has been largely confined to the United States, whereas that of the CEFR can claim to be worldwide. Over the past three decades ACTFL has developed a closely integrated set of tools to guide and support L2 education, especially in the school sector. This has no doubt been facilitated by the fact that ACTFL is a powerful membership organization whose annual conferences and other activities take place under the aegis of the ACTFL PG. It may also have been facilitated by the fact that the ACTFL PG are more compact than the CEFR, whose illustrative scales are embedded in a larger descriptive scheme, which in turn is embedded in a complex discussion of language learning, teaching, and assessment, which is framed by the Council of Europe’s policy concerns. The CEFR’s complexity has not always been an advantage. The number of language education professionals around the world, for whom the CEFR is no more than its proficiency levels and illustrative scales, is much greater than the number who have reflected on the nature of the scales and their descriptors in light of the CEFR’s broader discussion of learning, teaching, and assessment.

8

 I am grateful to Lisa Harris, Ryan Wertz, and Ali Moeller for this information.

Proficiency Guidelines and Frameworks

The impact of proficiency guidelines and frameworks on policy, curricula, pedagogy, and assessment will never be straightforward and is almost impossible to gauge with accuracy. This is especially the case with the CEFR, which attracts multiple and sometimes contradictory interpretations. Yet the development and—in many different senses—implementation of the ACTFL PG and the CEFR has undoubtedly raised awareness of the complex nature of communicative proficiency. There is no doubt, in other words, that proficiency guidelines and frameworks can bring significant if unquantifiable benefits to L2 education. Both the ACTFL PG and the CEFR have been revised and extended, and each new stage in their evolution brings a sense of renewal. February 2018 saw the online publication of the Council of Europe’s (2018) CEFR Companion volume with new descriptors.9 Besides adding to the illustrative scales of the 2001 edition of the CEFR, the Companion introduces a number of new scales, including scales for mediation and plurilingual and pluricultural competences. It remains to be seen how the field will respond to these innovations, but there is no doubt that the ACTFL PG and CEFR are here to stay: language education without them has become unimaginable.

References ACTFL (1986). ACTFL proficiency guidelines 1986. Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: ACTFL. ACTFL (2012a). ACTFL proficiency guidelines 2012. Alexandria, VA: ACTFL. ACTFL (2012b). ACTFL performance descriptors for language learners. Alexandria, VA: ACTFL. ACTFL (n.d.). Assigning CEFR ratings to ACTFL assessments. Alexandria, VA: ACTFL. Retrieved from https://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/reports/ Assigning_CEFR_Ratings_To_ACTFL_Assessments.pdf. Alderson, J. C. (2007). The CEFR and the need for more research. The Modern Language Journal, 91(4), 659–663. ALTE (2011). Manual for language test development. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Retrieved from https://rm.coe.int/1680667a2b. Bachman, L. F. (1988). Problems in examining the validity of the ACTFL oral proficiency interview. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 10(2), 149–164. Bachman, L. F., & Savignon, S. J. (1986). The evaluation of communicative language proficiency: A critique of the ACTFL oral interview. The Modern Language Journal, 70(4), 380–390.

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 https://rm.coe.int/cefr-companion-volume-with-new-descriptors-2018/1680787989.

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European Commission (2012). First European survey on language competences. Final report. Brussels: European Commission. Retrieved from https://crell.jrc.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/files/eslc/ESLC_Final%20 Report_210612.pdf. Figueras, N., North, B., Takala, S., Van Avermaet, P., & Verhelst, N. (2009). Relating language examinations to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (CEFR): A manual. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Fulcher, G. (1996). Invalidating validity claims for the ACTFL oral rating scale. System, 24(2), 163–172. Fulcher, G. (2010). The reification of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and effect-driven testing. In A. Psaltou-Joycey & M. Mattheoudakis (eds.), Advances in research on language acquisition and teaching: Selected papers (pp. 15–26). Thessaloniki: Greek Applied Linguistics Association. Goullier, F. (2007). The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and the development of language policies: Challenges and responsibilities. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Green, A. (2012). Language functions revisited: Theoretical and empirical bases for language construct definition across the ability range. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Hawkins, J. A., & Filipovic´, L. (2012). Criterial features in L2 English: Specifying the reference levels of the Common European Framework. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hulstijn, J. J. (2007). The shaky ground beneath the CEFR: Quantitative and qualitative dimensions of language proficiency. The Modern Language Journal, 91(4), 663–667. Kramsch, C. (1986). From language proficiency to interactional competence. The Modern Language Journal, 70(4), 366–372. Lantolf, J. P., & Frawley, W. (1985). Oral-proficiency testing: A critical analysis. The Modern Language Journal, 69(4), 337–345. Liskin-Gasparro, J. E. (2003). The ACTFL proficiency guidelines and the oral proficiency interview: A brief history and analysis of their survival. Foreign Language Annals, 36(4), 483–490. Little, D. (2002). The European Language Portfolio: Structure, origins, implementation and challenges. Language Teaching, 35(3), 182–189. Little, D. (2016). The European Language Portfolio: Time for a fresh start? International Online Journal of Education and Teaching, 3(3), 162–172. Little, D., Dam, L., & Legenhausen, L. (2017). Language learner autonomy: Theory, practice and research. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Little, D., Goullier, F., & Hughes, G. (2011). The European Language Portfolio: The story so far (1991–2011). Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Retrieved from https://rm.coe.int/16804595a7.

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Little, D., & King, L. (2014). Talking with John Trim (1924–2013), Part II: Three decades of work for the Council of Europe. Language Teaching, 47(1), 118–132. Met, M., & Byram, M. (1999). Standards for foreign language learning and the teaching of culture. The Language Learning Journal, 19(1), 61–68. Ministry of Education and Sport, Albania (2016). Language education policy profile: Albania. Country report. Tirana: Ministry of Education and Sport. Retrieved from https://rm.coe.int/language-education-policy-profilealbania-country-report/168076362d. Moeller, A. J., Theiler, J. M., & Wu, C. (2012). Goal setting and student achievement: A longitudinal study. The Modern Language Journal, 96(2), 153–169. National Standards Collaborative Board (2015). World-readiness standards for learning languages (4th edn.). Alexandria, VA: National Standards Collaborative Board. NCSSFL & ACTFL (2015). NCSSFL–ACTFL can-do statements: Performance indicators for language learners. Alexandria, VA: ACTFL. Pulinx, R., Van Avermaet, P., & Extramiana, C. (2014). Linguistic integration of adult migrants: Policy and practice. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Retrieved from https://rm.coe.int/16802fc1ce. Scha¨rer, R. (2000). European Language Portfolio: Final report on the pilot project phase 1998–2000. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Retrieved from https:// rm.coe.int/16804586bb. Swender, E. (2015). Response to letter to the editor. Foreign Language Annals, 48(4), 775–776. Swender, E., & Duncan, G. (1998). ACTFL Performance Guidelines for K–12 learners. Foreign Language Annals, 31(4), 479–491. Tschirner, E. (ed.) (2012). Aligning frameworks of reference in language testing: The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Tu¨bingen: Stauffenburg. van Ek, J. A. (1975). The threshold level. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. van Ek, J. A., & Trim, J. L. M. (1991). Waystage. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. van Ek, J. A., & Trim, J. L. M. (1998). Waystage 1990 (revised and corrected edn.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Ek, J. A., & Trim, J. L. M. (2001). Vantage. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ziegler, N. A. (2014). Fostering self-regulated learning through the European Language Portfolio: An embedded mixed methods study. The Modern Language Journal, 98(4), 921–936. Ziegler, N. A., & Moeller, A. J. (2012). Increasing self-regulated learning through the LinguaFolio. Foreign Language Annals, 45(3), 330–348.

24 Technology-Mediated Language Learning Carol A. Chapelle

24.1 Introduction Technology-mediated language learning today encompasses multifaceted issues connected with the role of digital technologies in mediating opportunities for language learning. Such opportunities arrive when teachers assign digital learning materials and tasks in a face-to-face classroom, when language programmes develop online courses that include ­computer-mediated interactions, and when language learners seek opportunities for study, help, and social interactions on their own. Each of these three uses of technology has arisen within a particular milieu of research and practice in applied linguistics. However, today the three intersect in dynamic and complex ways. Moreover, the areas and their intersections converge with aspects of second language studies including instructed second language acquisition, language assessment, learner autonomy and motivation, as well as informal language learning. This chapter examines the practices, issues, findings, and challenges in each of these three interconnected areas, beginning with the classroom, where the study of computer-assisted language learning has its roots in the middle of the twentieth century.

24.2 Technology and Classroom-Based Language Learning Technology has been used to create language learning tasks since at least the 1960s, but the types of tasks have expanded over the past decades. In the 1960s, students at several universities in North America and Europe began to experience interactive pedagogies that allowed them to receive immediate feedback on their responses to grammar, vocabulary, reading,

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and listening lessons as additional language laboratory assignments (Otto, 2017). Changes in hardware, software, and pedagogy since that time have meant that the repertoire of learning tasks to which students had access steadily expanded to include features such as language input through video, a range of language help options, communication tools, and social media. In language learning today, one can find examples of the full range of technology-mediated tasks that have been introduced. One type of pedagogical task is not replaced by another; instead, task types are added, reconfigured, combined, and reinvented to create an ever-expanding repertoire. Perhaps the strongest force precipitating the expansion of task types and the role of technology in classroom teaching is the growth of access to technology by all facets of society. In the 1960s, technology for language learning was limited to a few faculty and their students in higher education. The availability of microcomputers expanded the number of professionals able to explore pedagogical innovations. During this period in the 1980s, language teachers and researchers began to form professional organizations focusing specifically on language teaching with technology (Chapelle, 2001). These professional organizations have flourished and grown as the use of technologies has continued to permeate the lives of all language teachers and learners.

24.2.1 Technology and the Business of Language Learning Materials Today any examination of language learning materials necessarily includes the ways that technology is used to help present engaging content, provide interactive activities, offer feedback to students, and connect them to aspects of authentic cultural artefacts. Technologies can include a CD-ROM that accompanies a book; an online, interactive book; a companion website with tools and activities; social media sites; or some combination of these. The products that the publishers of language materials produce are critically important because of the number of language learners they reach and the messages they convey to learners and teachers about the role of technology in second language learning. Language teachers typically begin their careers as language learners, where they form initial ideas of what language learning tasks consist of and how they are carried out. Thus, the marriage between the historically separate strands of research and development—materials development and computer-­ assisted language learning—creates an important synergy for both areas of applied linguistics (e.g., Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2013). This “vertical” spread, or even integration, of technology throughout language learning materials in addition to their “horizontal”, or geographical, spread (Chapelle, 2010, p. 66) means that anyone involved with language education today needs to engage with technology. A good set of materials

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typically incorporates interactive tasks that take advantage of technological affordances underlying new pedagogies for grammar, vocabulary, reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as culture learning. An example of materials illustrating the transformation afforded by technology is Longman english interactive (Rost & Fuchs, 2004), which has been the object of research on students’ attitudes and use (Jamieson & Chapelle, 2010). A second, more recent example, is Liaisons: An introduction to French, which is organized around an engaging mystery about Claire Gagner, a student living in Montréal working at the front desk of a hotel while studying psychology at McGill University (Wong, Weber-F`eve, & VanPatten, 2017). The context-embedded language that the beginning students hear is a sharp contrast to what beginners of the past were exposed to on the printed page. Expressions like “Je m’apelle Claire Gagner” [My name is Claire Gagner] convey provocative meaning when spoken by the visibly charmed hotel clerk as she gazes in to the eyes of the handsome Alex Prevost, who has just introduced himself to her. The story takes Claire on the road from Montréal to Qu´ebec City, and then finally to France, each step surrounded by mysterious circumstances that keep viewers eagerly waiting for the next episode. Of course, age- and level-appropriate video was not impossible to bring to the classroom prior to the use of computer technology, but it is the affordances of technology that allow for the presentation of materials offering students individual access to video segments, opportunities for repetition, and online interactive exercises that check comprehension and provide language focus and cultural highlights within the meaning-based activity of film watching. Materials such as Liaisons put into practice ideas that were explored through small-scale research and development projects of the past. In particular, the learning tasks are based on the input processing theory of second language acquisition which postulates certain ideal conditions (e.g., the relationship between form and meaning, repetition, consciousness raising) for grammar learning to take place (VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993). Recommendations or criteria for technology-mediated language learning tasks have been developed from other theoretical perspectives on second language acquisition as well (Chapelle, 1998; Doughty & Long, 2003). However, in view of the many theoretical perspectives, contexts and needs for learning, and technological affordances, a comprehensive set of recommendations has not been developed. In contrast, recommendations tend to be associated with the area of language being learned (e.g., grammar or speaking), and these are applied for various learners with varying goals and needs. Each of the areas of language knowledge and skills is supported in multiple ways by new technologies. For the teaching of grammar, Heift and Vyatkina (2017) summarized three approaches beyond quiz-like drills with immediate right/wrong feedback. Intelligent computer-assisted language

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learning provides students with specific feedback on the nature of their grammatical errors as they work on a variety of different types of openended or structured tasks. Data-driven learning teaches students to work with a corpus of text to learn about grammatical patterns inductively, that is, from discovering patterns. Computer-mediated communication tasks are similar to face-to-face communication tasks in which students work together to solve a problem or accomplish a goal by using the language with their primary focus on meaning. The use of the technology can change the modality of the communication by using interactive text chat or a combination of audio and text, both of which provide additional opportunities for language focus. Heift and Vyatkina’s (2017) analysis described learning tasks using these three approaches as influenced by interactionist (Gass, 1997; Long, 1996) and sociocultural (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Thorne, 2003) theoretical views of second language acquisition. Vocabulary learning is supported through the use of lexical tools for primarily meaning-focused activities when language users need help (e.g., to look up a word in an online dictionary, or check a lexical phrase using a concordancer). More programme-guided lexical tutors also provide form-focused activities intended to explicitly teach vocabulary through techniques such as deductive presentation, interactive drills and exercises, word analysis techniques, and lexical strategy training (Ma, 2017). The lexical tools are primarily for unintentional vocabulary learning and the tutors for intentional vocabulary learning, both of which are important for students. Pragmatics learning is supported through explicit instruction through video and explanation of appropriate language for particular contexts, as well as experiential learning in online collaborations with peers who are speakers of the target language. Reading, writing, listening, and speaking pedagogies have all developed and evolved by guiding students to use existing technological tools in ways that support their language learning. For example, students can identify texts of interest to them to research a particular topic, write with the help of online tools for vocabulary and grammar, listen to videos multiple times using subtitling as needed, and use online models for pronunciation. In each of the areas, technology is employed in a number of different ways so that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between what is taught and the pedagogy used for technologically mediated learning. In fact, any of the many theoretical approaches to second language acquisition that postulate ideal conditions for learning can be put to work to create design principles for learning through technology (Chapelle, 2009; Rodríguez, 2017). Regardless of the specific area targeted for learning, all of these activities call upon multiple aspects of language knowledge and skill. Moreover, they call upon the learners’ ability to use technology for communication and learning.

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24.2.2  New Pedagogies The new forms of communication and learning made possible by technology have given rise to new pedagogies that are typically integrated into language courses in many different ways. The most pervasive pedagogical advance is probably the integration of immediate feedback and systematic formative assessment coordinated with the learning materials. Based on an extensive investigation of such assessments in foreign language learning materials, Jamieson and Musumeci (2017) found that a large number of foreign language learning materials assess students’ learning in a manner that is coordinated with the learning materials. Still, some aspects of the assessment could be improved by, for example, better addressing the goals of instruction, and by providing more explanatory feedback to learners, as well as by detailed score reporting. They suggested that improvements might be possible through better communication between researchers studying second language acquisition, teachers, materials developers, and assessment specialists. Building on the research-based pedagogy of task-based language teaching, Gonzalez-Lloret ´ and Ortega (2014) introduced technology-mediated task-based language teaching (TBLT) with a collection of papers that explain the theory and demonstrate it in practice. Gonzalez-Lloret ´ (2014) presented key principles of TBLT stemming from the hypotheses about how the learning of both language form and function can occur through learners’ engagement in meaning-focused tasks. Their definition has been useful for researchers such as Abrams (2016a, 2016b), who draws upon the task characteristics to design and research technology-mediated tasks for beginning learners of German. The tasks are set up to allow students to learn from multimodal content-rich sources that they would be expected to use outside the classroom. Much remains to be done to understand the important aspects of learning in multimodal contexts, but technology-­mediated TBLT provides a good foundation by including the task characteristics such as interactive text into a larger research agenda. For example, many studies have found the superiority of communication tasks carried out through online chat modalities over those conducted through face-to-face conversation (Lin, 2015). These types of findings are useful in designing research-based communication tasks. Other pedagogical approaches playing an important role in research and practice have been inspired by the new ways of engaging with language made possible by technology. One type is corpus-based learning activities, which are also referred to as “data-driven learning”. This encompasses a range of learning activities in which students have access to extensive examples of language. Originating from corpus linguists’ conception of how linguistic patterns are discovered by exploring real language, various data-driven language learning activities take students through such a process of discovery.

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Activities under the umbrella of data-driven learning vary in the specific goals of learning, the amount of guidance learners are given, and the corpus of texts that students have access to. For example, Cotos (2017) explained how corpus-based pedagogies are used for teaching language for specific purposes by developing corpora targeting particular students’ needs. Her approach illustrates how corpus-based pedagogy can be combined with other aspects of technology-mediated pedagogy to create materials that meet students’ needs for learning particular genres and registers of texts. The use of the internet for communication among students has served as a springboard for pedagogy focused on the cultural dimensions of language learning. Even prior to the advent of widespread mobile technologies, telecollaboration (Dooly, 2017) was developed to include a range of pedagogies that place students of different languages and cultures into collaborative conversations over the internet. The students are at remote locations relative to one another, typically in different countries. The collaboration can explicitly target cultural topics by designing tasks designed to raise cross-cultural insights, or it can be based on tasks that allow for cultural learning incidentally through the process of working collaboratively with someone from another culture. The research in this area examines the language produced during conversation by looking for indicators of learners’ intercultural development, and results have indicted a range of learning (e.g., increased understanding of the students’ own cultural positioning), as well as communication breakdowns due to students’ lack of cross-cultural ability (Dooly, 2017). The expanding opportunities for engagement on the internet with mobile technologies have prompted teachers and researchers to explore other forms of pedagogy as well. One strand of pedagogies called mobile learning encompasses the range of learning activities in which students can engage on their mobile devices (Kukulska-Hulme, Lee, & Norris, 2017). A second strand encompasses pedagogies based on students’ participation in virtual worlds, which are spaces on the internet where players can interact with one another through the use of avatars in an environment created by teachers and others. Teachers can develop their own virtual worlds to create a simulated environment for communication tasks, but the internet also hosts virtual worlds. According to Sadler (2017), Educators and students now have a wide array of VWs available to them that can grant instant access to native speakers of a huge variety of languages who are located around the world. As these environments and their associated technologies continue to advance, they promise to change the ways that we understand both human-to-human interaction and what it means to be a student of language. (p. 199)

An area of particular interest is how the learners’ communication through the use of an avatar can ease the stress many feel in face-to-face oral

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conversation. A third strand of pedagogy is digital gaming, which can place participants into a variety of goal-oriented, competitive scenarios, where they need to use the language (Reinhardt, 2017). A fourth strand is fan-fiction, the use of social media for participating in fan activities centred on a particular fictional episode. Sauro (2014) described how fan-­ fiction can be used to develop highly interactive communities of language users focused on fictional content. Each of these pedagogical approaches and features makes use of technologies that have been developed for a variety of educational or communication purposes but have been shaped to meet the demands of language education. These nascent pedagogical approaches prompted by new technologies hold the potential for creating novel opportunities for language learning by expanding learners’ exposure to rich, authentic language conveying interesting, relevant content. In addition, these pedagogies afford opportunities for language production, feedback, interaction, collaboration, and cross-cultural conversation. Building such pedagogies, however, relies on professional knowledge about how technology can mediate in the specific areas of language development required for language learning. With each new pedagogical innovation come questions about the extent to which the intended positive effects actually materialize for students, making this a fertile area for research.

24.2.3 Research Technology-mediated language pedagogies underscore the importance of carefully designed research that yields relevant knowledge about language learning and technology. Do students actually engage in the intended conditions for learning when presented with the opportunities to do so? Can the effects of technology-mediated pedagogies be compared to effects of pedagogy based on traditional practices in face-to-face classrooms with teachers and textbooks? Research investigating these questions appears in journals in applied linguistics that focus on instructed second language acquisition in addition to a growing collection of journals on technology and language learning (e.g., CALICO Journal, ReCALL Journal, CALL, and Language Learning & Technology). Such research has amassed a body of knowledge about how interactive computer technologies can be designed to work towards language learning goals. Such research uses a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate questions about ­technology-mediated language pedagogy technology use, as well as its cognitive, affective, and sociocultural effects. One quantitative strategy for evaluating technology for language learning is to compare outcomes from technology-mediated pedagogy with those from a no-technology classroom condition. Many such studies have been conducted over the past fifty years, and their results have

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been summarized in meta-analyses (e.g., Grgurovic, Chapelle, & Shelley, 2013; Zhao, 2003). Such summaries typically find that when students’ outcomes in the technology conditions are compared with those in traditional classrooms, the students using technology perform slightly better. Grgurovic, Chapelle, and Shelley (2013) noted that such differences are found only when rigorous research designs have been undertaken, including controls for ability prior to instruction, sufficient time allowed for the learning objectives, and appropriate tests of the outcomes. Regardless of research design, however, they concluded that overall the technology conditions investigated were not inferior to the no-­technology conditions. Such results are interesting in the aggregate, but their limitations have been enumerated in the past (Chapelle & Jamieson, 1991; Dunkel, 1991; Pederson, 1987) and continue to be a current topic in the field (Cerezo et al., 2014). Today the most vexing issue facing researchers wishing to compare ­technology-mediated learning and traditional classrooms is that traditional classrooms typically include technology-mediated learning. In this context, a comparison study designed on the assumption that the teacher-led classroom is both normal and the gold standard for language learning appears anachronistic to teachers, software developers, and researchers wishing to better understand how they can capitalize on the affordances of technology for learning. How can tasks be designed that connect learners to content that engages their interest while fostering their language awareness? How can a combination of computer–student interactions be combined with human–human interactions to optimize cognitive and social dimensions of learning through interaction? How should feedback from the computer, other students, advanced speakers, and teachers be intermingled to maximize the strengths of each? How can students’ contact with the cultural and intercultural dimensions of language learning be scaffolded to allow them to benefit from their access to information and communities on the internet? Each of these general questions is focused on key tenets of language learning—interest, language awareness, social and cognitive interaction, feedback, culture learning—as they intersect with specific technical affordances. Investigation of such issues demands a more complex view of learning and evaluation of learning than what is needed to design a technology versus traditional classroom comparison study. Researchers have to theorize why and how the conditions created by technology-mediated pedagogy contribute to learning, and plan observations of behaviour hypothesized to lead to learning. Language learning outcomes are often hypothesized to be detectable at some distant time even when they can be specified precisely. The research in this more complex milieu may examine a range of

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evidence about hypothesized positive processes. Some examples of such studies are included in a review by Golonka et al. (2014), who took into account the variety of research aims in studies of technology for language learning. They did so by identifying the claims made about the hypothesized effects of the technology use, which included both products of learning and processes. The products included learning outcomes, such as improved pronunciation and improvements in the amount and complexity of language that students were able to produce, whereas processes included such behaviours as those indicating attitudes and engagement. They found strong evidence for these two outcomes from studies of pedagogy based on automated speech recognition and chat. Their review of the research highlighted the many different goals of technology-mediated pedagogy and, accordingly, the need for carefully constructed theoretical bases from which to interpret the results. Evaluation methods for the study of technology innovations have been an ongoing area of exploration. Clearly, evaluations need to employ research methods that target the intended effects of instruction. The published research investigating technology and language learning undertake evaluation using a variety of approaches to investigate particular types of claims about the benefits of various types of pedagogies. Many such papers evaluate the technology-mediated pedagogy by developing an argument that provides support for the quality of the pedagogy. Chapelle (2017) identified five types of arguments that researchers use: comparative arguments based on research comparing two or more learning conditions, often one without technology; authenticity arguments based on analyses of the naturalness of the technology-mediated learning conditions; corpus linguistic arguments about the value of the analyses relevant texts showing language use; theory-based arguments presenting rationales and data interpreted on the basis of a theory of learning; and pedagogy-based arguments showing how learning goals are met by the technology-mediated tasks and their use. The perspective of evaluation as argument has a long history in social science and education, and more recently in applied linguistics (Norris, 2006). In technology for language learning studies, an argument-based approach has been shown to be useful for framing evaluations as well as for interpreting the results of multiple sources of data in an evaluation study (Gruba et al., 2016). The value of an argument-based approach is that it requires evaluators to make the claims they are investigating explicit. Explicit claims frame interpretation of findings. These types of evaluations hold potential for designing research that is specific to particular technology-mediated pedagogies (e.g., Chapelle, Cotos, & Lee, 2015; Le, 2017).

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24.3  Online Pedagogy New technologies have reinvigorated and changed the character of the pedagogical interventions that can be developed for use outside a ­teacher-led classroom. Such pedagogies have a long history as distance learning courses conducted via paper mail and perhaps some contacts over the telephone. The remote locations of participants and use of text printed on paper and audiotapes had some obvious limitations for language teaching. As White (2017) explained, there has been a shift in the positioning of distance language programmes from being regarded by many as a somewhat marginal enterprise, to being recognized as sites for technological and pedagogical innovation that extend the theory and practices of language teaching. Central to these developments has been an abiding concern to identify the distinctive nature and effectiveness of technology-mediated distance language teaching, together with advancing theory, research and practice to inform what is a burgeoning domain of activity. (White, 2017, p. 134)

For example, based on research that has informed TBLT, Doughty and Long (2003) outlined ten methodological principles that could be implemented by pedagogical procedures in technology-mediated distance learning courses. Distance learning courses are proving to be an ideal environment for the testing of hypotheses about learning in real language courses, resulting in findings that can be extrapolated to similar students and courses. Working within input-processing theory, for example, Russell (2012) examined variations on design principles used to develop the learning tasks that were based on the tenets of input processing instruction. Five conditions for teaching the Spanish subjunctive were constructed for the online course, and students were placed into one of the conditions. Russell (2012) concluded that the “instructional techniques that are highly explicit and that contain multiple layers of input enhancement are superior to instructional techniques that are inductive with only a single layer of input enhancement for short-term learning of complex grammar online” (p. 65). The statement of findings offers a vivid example of the types of precise design principles that can be implemented in an online course and manipulated to investigate different learning conditions. Implementing distance learning courses, however, entails much more than understanding how learning can best take place in learner–­ computer interactions. Research investigating the multiple factors that promote successful distance learning encompasses students, teachers, and other institutional and technical aspects of the context. With dropout rates in distance learning courses notoriously high, it is clear that individual attitudes and motivation of students are even more important

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in online courses than they are in face-to-face language instruction. But for learning to occur in online activities more than perseverance is required of students, according to research such as Hauck’s (2007) study of learning in tellecollaborative tasks in courses for French as a foreign language. French learners in the US and UK were connected with native speakers of French in France, and the tasks were rich in opportunities for learning, but success among students varied. Hauck (2007) explained the findings thus: the extent to which telecollaborative partners can draw benefit from … key moments of cultural learning also depends on their current level of multimodal communicative competence, that is their ability to make efficient use of the meaning making resources available to them online in order to engage in interculturally rich interaction. (p. 220)

Likewise for teachers, Compton (2009) emphasized the need for a particular combination of technology, pedagogy, and evaluation skills that is not gained from teacher preparation programmes focusing on classroom teaching and learning. Beyond these skills and technical knowledge, Compton notes that successful online teaching depends on teachers’ understanding of the role they play in the larger institutional context of online learning. Accordingly, Comas-Quinn’s (2011) research investigated the non-technical aspects of online teaching in terms of the teachers’ identity as an online teacher, which is constructed in a transformative process of becoming an “online teacher” rather than learning “how to teach online” (p. 230). In short, language teachers’ self-positioning relative to the social world of technology remains critical (Chapelle, 2003). The small amount of research in this important area can only hint at the issues that remain to be explored and the scope of problems to be tackled. More research is needed to identify the distinctive features of distance learning, which can encompass all of the aspects of the situation in which learners interact with other learners, with the software, and with course content, including content and social media repurposed from the internet (Hampel, 2006). Today, distance learning can also be implemented through mobile platforms that potentially offer easy access to learners to expand the reach of language learning opportunities. Distinctive features of technology-mediated distance learning may include both the affordances that are positive for language learning and the challenges, not the least of which is the teaching of oral language (Blake et al., 2008). Even while the specific affordances and challenges for language learning are being explored by researchers and teachers, in many language courses in higher education the online interventions have been deemed so beneficial as to warrant their use to replace t­ eacher-led class time. The design of ideally configured hybrid courses—where both

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instructor-led and online instruction are counted as instructional hours in the total amount of instruction time—is an active area of development in technology and language learning. In view of the scope of use for hybrid courses, their design is an issue that spans commercially developed materials, teacher designed technology-mediated tasks, evaluation methods, and curriculum design. At the core of new technology-mediated pedagogies is the idea that students are accustomed to engaging in information retrieval, representation, and communication through the use of their own devices. Pedagogy in the language classroom should be geared towards teaching students the strategies they need to take their learning out of the classroom (Chun, Kern, & Smith, 2016). The final chapter of the practice-­ oriented guide for language teachers, Tips for Teaching with CALL (Chapelle & Jamieson, 2008), portrays the learner of English who is ready to tackle new writing challenges in English by searching example texts of the appropriate genre, critically evaluating their acceptability as models, analysing the similarities of their rhetorical moves, identifying the key linguistic detail (e.g., verb tense and aspect, formulaic expressions), and composing while checking hypotheses about linguistic formulations online.

24.4  Learner-Initiated Technology Use Among the most interesting issues in language learning and technology today is learner-initiated technology use for participation in a variety of genres of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. Learners who have developed their digital literacy can take part in (a) new forms of multimodal representation based on interactive hypermedia and computer-mediated communication; (b) new kinds of joint text-making practices where remix and collaboration are common; (c) the formation of globalized, online affinity spaces where linguistically and culturally diverse participants interact.  (Hafner, Chik, & Jones, 2015, p. 1)

A revealing study published in 2000 (Lam, 2000) offered a close-up glimpse of the meaning of such participation for a learner who felt marginalized and unsuccessful in this face-to-face milieu of communication and work. This learner attributed his stagnant life trajectory to his status as an immigrant in the United States and the inadequacy of his English skills regardless of his efforts. The research demonstrated how this English learner was able to create for himself an alternative community of participation through a fan website he developed. As the website gained popularity internationally, the English learner disenfranchised in the physical world

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in the United States became an international expert as host of the multilingual site where English as an international language played a key role. The findings demonstrated the potentially transformative effect of such an online community, where interests and agency were transformative for a learner for whom traditional schooling had ceased to produce satisfying outcomes. The results of this study early in the evolution of internet websites opened an array of issues which are still unfolding today for language teaching and learning. The central question is how the success experienced by this student, who took the initiative to learn to use the technology to address his own interests, can be replicated for other language learners. Teachers may play a role in this context, but the key factor in this and other such stories is the students’ own agency in acting upon their own interests, a factor that tends not to be central in course design. Over the twenty years since Lam observed the individual, the number and variety of informal opportunities for exposure to language afforded through technology has increased dramatically. In this same period, it seems that the phenomenon of learners availing themselves of informal opportunities for learning has also grown. Where language learners go researchers follow. Classroom learners have been investigated to reveal how they take advantage of technology-mediated communication and learning outside the formal ­ classroom. A recent special issue of CALICO Journal provides a collection of studies that examine learning through various technologies used extramurally including television with subtitles, online games with verbal content, music, and videos (Sylven ´ & Sundqvist, 2017). Such research shows the affordances to which some students have access beyond the classroom, but not all students have access to such opportunities, and even if they do, they may not take advantage of the opportunities for language learning. Variation in technology use was found in one study in the United States where all high-intermediate French as a foreign language students would have had access to similar opportunities for technology use. Researchers “found that the students used a wide variety of technological tools, both those suggested by the French instructor (e.g., online dictionaries, a grammar checker) and others that the students chose to use on their own (e.g., chat, YouTube, French websites)” (Karabulut et al., 2012, p. 357). The results indicated that idiosyncratic factors seemed to affect actual selection and use of the various technologies for French learning outside the classroom regardless of access. Another larger scale study attempted to explain factors influencing technology use for self-directed language learning. Lai’s (2013) quantitative study used data from self-report indices of technology use and other variables. The data supported a model in which

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the three constructs of the attitudinal component appeared to play major roles in technology use: language learning motivation functioned as the dominant predictor, and perceived usefulness and educational compatibility served as two levels of mediating venues through which the rest of the factors exerted an influence on technology use. This finding suggests that in the context of self-directed technology use for language learning, the attitudinal component is most critical in shaping learners’ digital choices. (Lai, 2013, pp. 112–113)

In the past, the study of technology in education has focused on understanding teachers’ adoption of technology, through theories of diffusion of innovation, for example. In a review of such theories, Straub (2009) summarized as follows: Personal factors, characteristics of the innovation, and influences of the individual’s context will all shape the ultimate decision and persistence with a technology. With the exception of perhaps the innovator himself or herself, technology adoption is innately social, influenced by peers, change agents, organizational pressure, and societal norms.  (Rogers, 1995, p. 641)

As applied linguists examine informal learning environments, the individuals of interest are the learners themselves, whose decisions and persistence with technology will shape their learning experiences. As learners are studied, it is not only their choices that need to be investigated but also their actual learning in what appears to be informal learning contexts. Approaching this problem requires engaging with theoretical perspectives on second language learning that can contribute to a framework for interpretation of qualitative data. For example, Sockett (2013) sought evidence of the learning processes theorized by dynamic systems theory to promote second language acquisition in his study of informal learning. Outside of formal English language classes, students become involved in “informal target language practices such as chatting or social networking online, downloading or streaming original version television series, and choosing music in English via on-demand services” (Sockett, 2013, p. 48). Sockett investigated the informal learning activity of nine female students, with a Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) level of B2 or C1 in English, approximately the level that would indicate readiness for university studies. Over a three-month period, he asked them to write in blogs about occasions when “they were involved in online English use informally, with particular reference to skills and knowledge of the language which were gained”. From a dynamic systems theory perspective, he interpreted some of the students’ reported online activity as indicative of language learning processes. For example, one participant reported on informal English learning activity as follows:

Technology-Mediated Language Learning More than just the lyrics (that I check on different websites via Google), I am interested in understanding the meaning of the song. Although I understand the words, I find it difficult to get the real meaning behind these poetic phrases, metaphors and cultural allusions. Indeed, a song is often subjective and one can interpret it as he wants. I like to compare what I think of the song, what the other people think and what the artist actually meant. The website Song Facts offers these types of information.  (Sockett, 2013, p 54)

Sockett (2013) interpreted this report as indicating activity geared towards understanding communicative intentions and focusing on meaning, which according to dynamic systems theory (DST) indicates positive language learning activity. There is much scope for better understanding the affordances and limitations of informal language learning through technology. Progress in this area will require researchers to grapple with not only questions of how and why technologies are chosen and what learners do with the technologies but also with questions of what is actually learned through informal learning with technology.

24.5 Language, Technology, and the Changing World of Language Learning Teachers and researchers in all subject areas work to develop students’ digital literacy or multimodal competence to prepare them to excel in the world of information and communication technologies, where language is an enabling resource for achieving goals through research and collaboration. For language learners, the need to use a second language in technology-mediated environments is in itself an additional challenge—a dimension that needs to remain at the forefront for language teaching (Ware, 2017). Sauro and Chapelle (2017) signal the importance of language by referring to “langua-technocultural competence” as the targeted knowledge, skills, and abilities that students need to develop through their language education. Langua-technocultural competence denotes the integrated nature of competencies required to use another language while engaging in technology-mediated cultures. Technologies extend the reach of students beyond the classroom into different cultures in ways that other pedagogies and language use alone cannot. They hold the potential for engaging students in learning-oriented interactions, availing them to a range of multimedia language materials, providing them with tools for curating and creating new multimedia projects, and connecting them to information and interlocutors in planned learning activities and vicariously encountered events.

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Proficient use of technologies does not only refer to the technical how-to knowledge of getting the technologies to work. Rather, ­technology-mediation adds another rich dimension to the registers of language use in which communication and learning take place (Chapelle, 2003). As Thorne (2016) put it, communication tools are cultural tools that carry interactional and relational associations, preferred uses (and correspondingly dispreferred uses), and expectations of genre- and register-specific communicative activity, all of which are learned through processes of language and tool socialization via participation in particular online speech communities. (p. 185)

Langua-technocultural competence, then, refers to the social, cultural, and strategic capabilities needed to identify appropriate technologies for productive communication and to use them to succeed with interlocutors who may have different knowledge and expectations. Kern (2014) pointed out the importance of recognizing the specific features of the range of communicative events that can occur through the use of digital media: “There is thus no uniform language of electronically-mediated communication” to be learned because “the various media within the broad category of electronically mediated communication” (i.e., email, chat, texting, etc.) cannot be unambiguously associated with particular genres—in fact, each of them can support multiple genres (and consequently if one expects a particular genre to correspond to a particular medium, one may find oneself in a genre-based misunderstanding; Kern, 2014, pp. 343–344). Such misunderstandings have been richly documented in the research on telecollaboration (e.g., Thorne, 2003), which provides data for considering how students can be guided to move beyond misunderstanding to achieve communication. Such data come from communication events that are constructed within a learning context, but such data documenting learners’ communication in social media sites need to be explored further. In this context, where learners can have unfettered access to the language, conversations, and cultural artefacts of the societies of the languages they study, the teaching of culture requires serious attention in the classroom from the first year of language study. The need to engage with culture in language teaching is relatively uncontroversial in the field. However, examples of culture teaching from the language textbooks of the past provide better material for critique than ideas and models for engaging students in the cultural content and issues of the world to which technology can connect them (Chapelle, 2016). The reasons for an underdeveloped conception of languaculture pedagogy (e.g., Risager, 2007) at the beginning level are complex (Modern Language Association of

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America, 2007), but among the reasons are the many options for conceptualizing a practice-oriented culture pedagogy. Risager (2018) sketches five of the perspectives that can inform the choices made in teaching culture: national studies teaching about a country or countries including their shared history and national issues; citizenship education treating students as citizens in societies where diverse people live together; cultural studies emphasizing cultural identities; postcolonial studies presenting culture through the lens of the past colonial order and its ramifications; and transnational studies representing the student as a mobile citizen of the world without boundaries. These perspectives are not intended to be mutually exclusive, but each has implications for how the technological resources might be used for cultural learning. With technologies in the hands of learners who can potentially use them to learn new content, connect, belong, translanguage, curate, and create, a broad view of learning through tool use in context is needed to conceptualize the nexus of technology and language learning. Such a view is captured by activity theory, which conceptualizes both language and technology as tools that mediate communication and learning (Basharina, 2007; Blin, 2004; Thorne, 2003). An activity theoretical view challenges teachers and researchers to take into account the students’ life circumstances and agency, including their motivations, interests, and knowledge that drive them to engage in certain activities for language use and to choose certain technologies. This broad view of learners and learning in technology-mediated contexts fits well within the transdisciplinary view of second language learning formulated by the Douglas Fir Group (2016) to take into account the issues that arise in the real world of language learning, where language contact, mobility, and electronic communication are a normal part of the language learning processes that need to be described, explained, and improved upon. In this professional milieu, the study of technology-mediated communication and learning should figure prominently in research and teaching in second language learning. The programme of exploring innovation with new technologies for language teaching and learning seems remarkably relevant to second language research more broadly. In dramatic contrast to the 1960s picture of students at universities interacting with technology during their scheduled laboratory hours, students across the globe, in and out of school contexts, interact with their handheld technologies every day. The new pedagogies that have emerged to take advantage of the affordances of technology demonstrate some of the possibilities. However, much work remains to be done to evaluate how, when, where, and why certain pedagogies work well for some learners. Recent perspectives on evaluation of technology for language learning (e.g., Chapelle, 2017; Chapelle, Cotos, & Lee, 2015; Gruba et al., 2016) appear useful

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in addressing this need by providing a framework for hypothesizing intended complex effects of all sorts from certain characteristics of learning or communication tasks. Technology-mediation runs throughout the broadly conceived domain relevant to second language learning, and this full conception of second language learning theory should equally be integral to evaluations of technology-mediated learning. Such a transdisciplinary conception of second language learning should help to build synergies between the three strands of technology-mediated language learning—classroom-based language learning, online pedagogy, and learner-initiated technology uses.

References Abrams, Z. I. (2016a). Creating a social context through film: Teaching L2 pragmatics as a locally situated process. L2 Journal, 8(3), 23–45. Abrams, Z. I. (2016b). Possibilities and challenges of learning German in a multimodal environment: A case study. ReCALL Journal, 28(3), 343–363. Basharina, O. K. (2007). An activity theory perspective on student-reported contradictions in international telecollaboration. Language Learning & Technology, 11(2), 82–103. Blake, R., Wilson, N. L., Cetto, M., & Pardo-Ballester, C. (2008). Measuring oral proficiency in distance, face-to-face, and blended classrooms. Language Learning & Technology, 12(3), 114–127. Blin, F. (2004). CALL and the development of learner autonomy: Towards an activity-theoretical perspective. ReCALL Journal, 16(2), 377–395. Cerezo, L., Baralt, M., Suh, B.-R., & Leow, R. P. (2014). Does the medium really matter in L2 development? The validity of CALL research designs. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 27(4), 294–310. Chapelle, C. A. (1998). Multimedia CALL: Lessons to be learned from research on instructed SLA. Language Learning & Technology, 2(1), 22–34. Chapelle, C. A. (2001). Computer applications in second language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapelle, C.A. (2003). English language learning and technology: Lectures on applied linguistics in the age of information and communication technology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Retrieved from http://www .jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027295958. Chapelle, C. A. (2009). The relationship between SLA theory and CALL. the Modern Language Journal, 93(4), 742–754. Chapelle, C. A. (2010). The spread of computer-assisted language learning. Language Teaching, 43(1), 66–74. Chapelle, C. A. (2016). Teaching culture in introductory foreign language textbooks. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Chapelle, C. A. (2017). Evaluation of technology and language learning. In C. A. Chapelle & S. Sauro (eds.), The handbook of technology and second language teaching and learning (pp. 378–392). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Chapelle, C.A., Cotos, E., & Lee, J. (2015). Diagnostic assessment with automated writing evaluation: A look at validity arguments for new classroom assessments. Language Testing, 32(3), 385–405. Chapelle, C., & Jamieson, J. (1991). Internal and external validity issues in research on CALL effectiveness. In P. Dunkel (ed.), Computer-assisted language learning and testing: Research issues and practice (pp. 37–59). New York: Newbury House. Chapelle, C. A., & Jamieson, J. (2008). Tips for teaching with CALL: Practical approaches to computer assisted language learning. White Plains, NY: Pearson Education. Chun, D. M., Kern, R., & Smith, B. (2016). Technology use, language teaching, and language learning. The Modern Language Journal, 100(S), 64–80. Comas-Quinn, A. (2011). Learning to teach online or learning to become an online teacher: An exploration of teachers’ experiences in a blended learning course. ReCALL, 23(3), 218–232. Compton, L. K. L. (2009). Preparing language teachers to teach language online: A look at skills, roles, and responsibilities. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 22(1), 73–99. Cotos, E. (2017). Language for specific purposes and corpus-based pedagogy. In C. A. Chapelle & S. Sauro (eds.), The handbook of technology and second language teaching and learning (pp. 248–264). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Dooly, M. (2017). Telecollaboration. In C. A. Chapelle & S. Sauro (eds.), The handbook of technology and second language teaching and learning (pp. 169– 183). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Doughty, C., & Long, M. H. (2003). Optimal psycholinguistic environments for distance foreign language learning. Language Learning & Technology, 7(3), 50–80. Douglas Fir Group (2016). A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. The Modern Language Journal, 100(S), 19–47. Dunkel, P. (1991). The effectiveness research on computer-assisted instruction and computer-assisted language learning. In P. Dunkel (ed.), Computer-assisted language learning and testing: Research issues and practice (pp. 5–36). New York: Newbury House. Gass, S. M. (1997). Input, interaction, and the second language learner. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Golonka, E. M., Bowles, A. R., Frank, V. M., Richardson, D. L., & Freynik, S. (2014). Technologies for foreign language learning: A review of technology types and their effectiveness. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 27(1), 70–105. Gonzalez-Lloret, ´ M. (2014). The need for needs analysis in technology-­ mediated TBLT. In M. Gonz alez-Lloret ´ & L. Ortega (eds.), Technology-mediated

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25 Content-Based L2 Teaching Hossein Nassaji and Eva Kartchava

25.1 Introduction The focus of this chapter is content-based language teaching (CBLT), a type of instruction that combines the teaching of academic subjects (such as maths, science, and history) and second or additional language (L2) learning. This “two for one” pedagogical approach aims to integrate content and language by providing learners with opportunities to use their developing L2 as they advance their understanding of a particular discipline. Although CBLT emphasizes the use of content, research suggests that L2 success in content-based classrooms depends, among other things, on the degree to which instruction provides opportunities not only for content-focused communication but also for attention to linguistic forms. In this respect, there are different models of content-based approaches, which differ from one another in the degree to which they focus on ­content versus form. The goal of this chapter is first to outline the main characteristics of CBLT in general, discussing its origins, different types, and contexts of use. It will then review research in this area with a focus on the benefits and shortcomings as well as the pedagogical strategies that can address those shortcomings. The chapter concludes with further implications for both theory and practice and also for ways in which CBLT is likely to develop in the future.

25.2 Background Content-based language teaching approaches are not new, having existed in various forms since the 1960s in elementary, secondary, and postsecondary educational settings, both in the majority-language (second language, L2) and minority-language (foreign language, FL) environments.

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Because CBLT is “more a philosophy than a methodology, there is no singular formula” (Stryker & Leaver, 1997, p. 3) for how it may or should be implemented. For that reason, approaches to CBLT differ in their emphasis for the purpose of learning either content or language. Some have, in fact, plotted the various documented CBLT implementations along a continuum, with programmes focusing exclusively on language study at one end and those primarily emphasizing content instruction at the other (Lyster, 2017). Programmes that are closer to the content-driven end of the continuum include school-based immersion, dual immersion, and content and language integrated learning (CLIL) models. In these programmes, language is mainly a medium of instruction, and therefore the focus is more on content rather than on language (see also task-based instruction for a focus on meaning, e.g., Long, 2015). The assumption is that while students learn the content, they will also learn the language. Programmes that emphasize the use of themes to engage learners in the study of the contextually-relevant L2 or FL use are at the language-driven end. CBLT here does not refer to using the target language to teach a given subject matter per se but to theme-based lessons that can be used to support language learning. In the middle of the continuum are programmes that, in addition to having a regular L2 or FL instruction, offer one or two academic subjects using the target language as the medium of instruction. As a rule, these programmes are common in secondary schools and tend to offer “less than half the curriculum in the target language (often one content course and one EFL course)” (Lyster, 2017, p. 87). Another way to classify the various CBLT models in existence today is to look at the language learning opportunities they provide (Lightbown, 2014). To this end, a two-way distinction can be made. First, a distinction between second and foreign language contexts, and second, a distinction between majority and minority language students. Looking at the L2–FL distinction, the focus of CBLT in the foreign language setting is mainly on providing learners with additional opportunities to hear and use the target language in a variety of authentically relevant contexts. While the achievement goals for the four skills (listening, reading, speaking, and writing) may differ from programme to programme (with some favouring instruction in the productive versus comprehension abilities), the ultimate success of the programmes, among other things, is based on the learners being able to use the FL in everyday interactions. Yet, the situation changes dramatically when these learners move to contexts when the FL becomes the language of the majority. In these cases, the now minority-language learners are required to simultaneously learn the new (majority) language and receive education in it. To alleviate the language learning task, these students usually receive placements in submersion or mainstream and Sheltered Content Instruction. These CBLT programmes

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are required “if students are to receive an education that allows them to participate fully in the social and economic life of the wider community in which they live” (Lightbown, 2014, p. 19). Higher outcomes are expected in the majority-language and L2 contexts, however. This is because learners are expected to master both the L2, usually the majority language, and the subject matter taught in the L2. In fact, their linguistic and academic skills must match those of their majority-language native speaking peers. Among these models are immersion, CLIL, and the European Schools, all of which “are not seen as compensatory education [but] are considered enrichment programs that provide something extra [treating the students’ first and, usually, the majority language] as an important part of both their education and their identity” (Lightbown, 2014, p. 12). Whatever the implementation, CBLT models are considered superior to the traditional L2 instruction because they are seen as efficient, motivating, and able to promote advanced proficiency (Lightbown, 2014). Their efficiency lies in the “two for one” focus that allows for simultaneous integration of content and language, and also provides learners with opportunities to use their developing L2 as they advance their understanding of a particular discipline. Using subject-matter-authentic L2 materials prepared for the native speakers of the language in the study of the L2 can motivate learners to engage with the language through topics of interest and the need for meaningful (versus decontextualized) L2 use. Exposure to and active use of various genres and discourse styles in the CBLT can inevitably lead to increased L2 proficiency that may, in turn, yield academic, personal, and professional successes outside the classroom. Some of the earliest CBLT representations can be traced back to immersion programmes in Canada and the former Soviet Union, where CLIL was implemented in specialty elementary and secondary foreign (and in the case of Canada, second) language schools, with students, as early as kindergarten, learning content subjects in the FL or L2 language (Stryker & Leaver, 1997). While the Soviet programmes lasted about twenty years (closing due to an elevated demand and few qualified instructors to satisfy it; Garza, 1987, cited in Stryker & Leaver, 1997), the Canadian model continues to enjoy success both at home and around the world. Typically, students in the Canadian immersion programmes are either first or second language speakers of English who are learning French, one of the official languages of the bilingual country and the one spoken by the majority of the residents of Quebec, the country’s only officially francophone province. The Canadian model first began as a grassroots initiative of primarily anglophone parents living in Quebec to provide their children with French language instruction that would assure their prosperity and success in the province. The programme exposed kindergarten children to French from the start, with most of the subjects being taught in the language by

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a French-speaking teacher; English became part of instruction later on (as late as grade 4 in some cases), as the children moved up in grades and their French knowledge stabilized (Lambert & Tucker, 1972). Currently, several iterations of the model exist in Canada and usually include the total early, late, and partial immersion types. Total early immersion exposes children to French (their L2) as soon as they enter the school system, ensuring they enjoy extensive contact with the language and, in some cases, even become literate in the L2 before the first language (L1). Learners in late immersion, however, receive exposure to French through the core programme, which provides a limited amount of L2 instruction, and do not begin to study content in the language until late primary or early secondary school (Genesee, 1987). Partial immersion, in turn, can expose learners to either equal amounts of L1 and L2 starting in primary school or have children participate in daily communication-based L2 lessons, with CLIL being introduced at the age of nine or ten (see Lambert & Tucker, 1972; Johnson & Swain, 1997, for a detailed review). Regardless of the model adopted, all immersion programmes strive to provide content instruction using the learners’ L2, employ bilingual teachers (fluent in the students’ L1 and L2), and ensure that the participants achieve the same linguistic and academic success as their monolingual counterparts (Swain & Lapkin, 1982). The Canadian French immersion model has been exported to various corners of the world, with total immersion iterations in Finland (Swedish immersion; Bjötklund, MardMiettinen, & Savijärvi, 2013), Spain (Catalan [Arnau & Vila, 2013] and Basque [Cenoz, 2008] immersion), Hong Kong (English late immersion; Hoare & Kong, 2008), and Ireland (Irish immersion; Ó Baoill, 2007), as well as partial immersion examples in New Zealand (Maori; Reedy, 2000) and the US (Hawaiian [Luning & Yamauchi, 2010] and Cherokee [Peter, 2014]). Dual immersion programmes are closely related to the immersion programmes discussed earlier (i.e., one-way immersion) in that both language and content are taught together. The main difference, however, lies in that two languages (of similar or different societal status) are employed to deliver content instruction. To this end, these languages (e.g., Spanish and English) are used in equal proportions, without either being seen as superior, to teach some subjects in one language and others in the other as per the adopted curriculum. While for some of the students in dual immersion one of the languages of instruction may be their first, for others, it may be the dominant language of a wider community as is the case with Spanish in the US. One of the goals of dual immersion is to support the development and maintenance of the minority language among the native speakers of the language living in a majority-language context as well as the development of bilingual competence among the majority-language speakers exposed to the minority language on a regular

Content-Based L2 Teaching

basis (Baker, 2001). The overall aims are to “promote bilingualism and biliteracy, grade-level academic achievement [in both students’ L1 and L2], and cross-cultural competence for native (dominant) … speakers [of the majority language, e.g., English] and native (dominant) speakers of a minority language” (De Jong & Bearse, 2014, p. 16), which can translate into additional benefits beyond school, such as access to higher education, varied future employment opportunities, as well as the development and strengthening of one’s ethnic identity (De Jong & Bearse, 2014). While several models for dual immersion implementation exist, they generally depend on the minority-language students’ enrollment numbers since disproportionate ratios undermine the model’s ability to provide equal distribution of participants in each language group (Howard, Sugarman, & Christian, 2003). In the case when the minority-language enrollment is lower than the majority-language, the former group receives instruction primarily in the L1, with L2 content added gradually as the students mature linguistically and cognitively. While dual immersion programmes are especially popular in the US (Lindholm-Leary, 2001), documented iterations also include those in Germany (Budach, 2009), Ireland (Hickey, 2001), and Israel (Bekerman, 2005). Furthermore, these programmes have been implemented at both primary and secondary levels (e.g., de Jong & Bearse 2011; Lindholm-Leary, 2011). Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is a popular approach to the learning of language and academic content (i.e., one to two academic subjects) in Europe (e.g., Spain, Italy, Latvia, Austria, the Netherlands), particularly at the secondary level. The focus, however, is primarily on learning foreign languages (i.e., languages not spoken locally), most popular of which is English (Lasagabaster & Sierra, 2009; Llinares & Morton, 2017; Nikula & Dafouz, 2016). By the time typical CLIL students enter the programme, they have already received most of their academic instruction in the mother tongue and grasped the basics of an FL through a core programme that allots language study limited time in the curriculum. Some have argued that unlike immersion, CLIL programmes do not aim to integrate the teaching of content and language, but that they look for opportunities to intensify FL exposure in contexts largely devoid of contact with the language (Bruton, 2011, 2013). In this sense, CLIL resembles Intensive French in Canada (Netten & Germain, 2004, 2009) that aims not only to increase the time spent on language learning, but also to focus on developing primarily oral skills and using academic content as material for discussion in the FL (Dalton-Puffer, 2007). Hence, “CLIL classrooms share a great deal more with traditional language classrooms than a partisan look would make one believe and … CLIL cannot therefore be expected to prepare learners for other situational contexts in any direct way” (DaltonPuffer, 2011, p. 195). The last point is especially disconcerting considering

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that one of the reasons for CLIL popularity in Europe has been the need to provide young people with FL skills necessary to move freely within the European Union in search of suitable employment and personal development opportunities (Dalton-Puffer, 2011). Bruton (2011) argues that there are essentially three variations in CLIL implementation—(1) learning an FL on its own to subsequently learn the subject matter; (2) learning an FL through the content that has already been acquired in the L1; and (3) learning the language and content together—and that despite best intentions, options 1 and 2 dominate, calling into question the very need for CLIL. In fact, because secondary students have a choice to remain in the regular FL programmes or switch to a CLIL programme, many prefer the former, judging the latter more demanding (Bruton, 2011). Yet CLIL programmes are limited as far as the FL proficiency learners can achieve, the authenticity of available teaching materials, CLIL-trained teachers with high FL skills, students eligible to join the programme (i.e., immigrant students may be unable to enroll due to their limited competence in the majority-language), and empirical longitudinal evidence as to their effectiveness (Lasagabaster & Sierra, 2009). Still, with CLIL supporters abounding and evidence that these programmes can benefit FL learners more than the traditional classes (Lasagabaster, 2008), the CLIL approach is likely to remain and prosper with continued research and developments in implementation. Submersion or mainstream and Sheltered Content Instruction (SCI) are two types of CBLT programmes developed to assist minority-­ language immigrants to integrate linguistically and academically into the ­majority-medium school system. While submersion should not be subsumed under the CBLT-umbrella, identification of its existence sparked the need for language supports that were later realized in the mainstream and SCI programmes. Submersion is akin to the “sink or swim” situation in which the minority-language (L1) speakers are expected to learn academic content alongside fluent majority-language (L2) speakers in the L2. The learners’ L1 is neither acknowledged nor supported but is ultimately replaced by the L2. Cohen and Swain (1976) stressed that the L2-only instruction was unfair in its academic expectations and detrimental to the survival of the children’s L1, an element whose maintenance and growth is seen as important in immersion education (Lightbown, 2014). To keep the minority-language children in the mainstream, schools in the US and Canada have offered pull-out classes, during which L2 speakers work with a teacher one-on-one or in groups. While well-intentioned, these lessons are seen as “remedial” and the L2 children (due to their absence during, and overt extraction from, regular classes) as “disabled” or “limited in English” (Baker, 2001, p. 214). What’s more, these efforts have been shown to lead to the children feeling withdrawn and alienated from their

Content-Based L2 Teaching

peers, and falling behind on curriculum content (Baker, 2001). The SCI, in turn, aims to alleviate the linguistic challenge by presenting L2 learners with a grade-appropriate curriculum that is lexically simplified and presented in tailor-made level-appropriate materials. In this setting, L2 learners interact together more and engage with the material without the fear of competition or comparison with their L2 native-speaking counterparts, while the teachers develop greater sensitivity to their students’ linguistic, cultural, and educational needs (Baker, 2001). Yet, isolation from the majority-language peers and unequal learning materials may yield negative self-perceptions and academic outcomes. Whatever iteration CBLT may entail, the goal—“to master academic concepts and skills through a language in which they [i.e., individual learners] have limited proficiency, while at the same time striving to improve that proficiency” (Wesche, 2001, p. 1)—remains the same. The means to achieve the goal, in turn, may be brought to fruition through “good teaching” (Wesche, 2001, p. 1). Research that has investigated the effectiveness of the various CBLT approaches and their pedagogical benefits is detailed next.

25.3  Research on Content-Based Instruction One of the common features shared by various CBLT models is that content or subject matter is a fundamental organizing principle with the target language being the medium of instruction. CBLT also emphasizes meaning over form and hence is an instance of a meaning-focused instruction rather than instruction that focuses on language forms. CBLT is based on the assumption that language is learned more efficiently when used as a means of learning content, i.e., any information—subject matter and/ or thematic content—that learners need to acquire (Richards, 2006). The rationale for CBLT is based on the assumption that exposure to comprehensible input (Krashen, 1982, 1985), albeit insufficient, is necessary for language acquisition. CBLT is also assumed to promote motivation as it provides a purpose for learning the target language. Moreover, it creates an authentic learning context that fosters naturalistic processes of L2 learning, through which language is acquired while the focus is on communicating meaning (Lightbown & Spada, 2013). Finally, content can be used as a framework to integrate and develop different language skills (Richards, 2006). However, despite many benefits, questions have been raised about the success of CBLT with regards to language learning. For example, when learners’ primary focus is on content, they may not pay enough attention to language forms and hence may not develop accuracy in the

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target language. VanPatten (2002), for example, has argued that, due to their limited cognitive capacity, learners cannot simultaneously process form and meaning. Thus, a major question in CBLT is whether and to what degree focusing on content facilitates the acquisition of linguistic forms. A considerable body of research has examined CBLT in a variety of contexts, including various immersion contexts (e.g., Cummins, 1983; Genesee, 1978, 1987, 2004, 2007; Genesee & Jared, 2008; Genesee & Stanley, 1976; Harley, 1991; Lambert & Tucker, 1972; Lapkin, Hart, & Swain, 1991; Lapkin & Swain, 2000, 2004; Lazaruk, 2007; Lyster, 2007; Swain, 1974, 2000) as well as L2 and FL settings (Coyle, 2007; Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010; Dalton-Puffer, 2007, 2008; Klee & Tedick, 1997; Ruiz de Zarobe, 2010; Stryker & Leaver, 1997). Studies examining the impact of CBLT have overall reported many advantages for this approach over traditional approaches. A substantial amount of research, for example, has examined French immersion programmes in Canada and has reported success for these programmes in improving learners’ linguistic, content, and cognitive abilities (Ballinger, 2013; Cummins, 1983; Cummins & Swain, 1986; Genesee, 1978, 1987, 2004, 2007; Genesee & Jared, 2008; Genesee & Stanley, 1976; Lambert & Tucker, 1972; Lapkin, Hart, & Swain, 1991; Lapkin & Swain, 2004; Lazaruk, 2007; Lyster, 2007; Stern, 1978; Swain, 1974, 2000). For example, learners in immersion programmes have often been shown to achieve higher levels of L2 proficiency in general compared to students in traditional programmes (Genesee, 1987, 2004). Some of the early studies focused on children’s literacy development. These studies, which compared general reading skills in French and English, found that in the early grades, students in French immersion programmes were behind in the development of L1 literacy skills such as word recognition and reading comprehension compared to their L1 counterparts who received instruction in the L1 only. However, in later grades, immersion students achieved parity with comparison students in those areas (Genesee, 2004). They also achieved higher or comparable skills in such core content areas as mathematics or science when compared to learners learning the subjects in their L1 (e.g., Turnbull, Lapkin, & Hart, 2001). Furthermore, receiving instruction in the target language has been shown to positively affect learners’ academic success, which has often been interpreted as “the cognitive benefits of bilingualism” and explained by the research that has linked bilinguals “with heightened mental flexibility and creative thinking skills” (Lazaruk, 2007, p. 623). However, studies have also highlighted areas of concern. For example, there is evidence that although French immersion students develop a high degree of communicative fluency, they fail to master high levels of

Content-Based L2 Teaching

L2 accuracy with certain areas of L2 grammar (e.g., Harley & Swain, 1984; Lapkin, Hart, & Swain, 1991; Swain, 1985, 1993). Furthermore, greater opportunities for meaning-focused activities have not always been found to be related to higher L2 proficiency, which questions the role of communicative input as a determining factor for L2 development (Genesee, 1987). In addition, most of the advantages reported have been around receptive rather than productive skills. Studies by Swain, for example, have found important gaps in immersion students’ speaking abilities. This has been partly reattributed to learners not having enough opportunities for L2 production or not being pushed beyond their current linguistic competence. Swain argued that immersion students need to be pushed to produce output, specifically, output that is accurate, appropriate, and coherent, what she called “pushed output” (Swain, 1985, 1993). According to Swain, pushing learners to produce output forces them to process the language syntactically rather than semantically, and hence promotes greater language accuracy. A number of French immersion studies have investigated the effects of opportunities for output and reported positive results regarding learner linguistic knowledge (e.g., Kowal & Swain, 1994, 1997; Lapkin, Swain, & Smith, 2002; Swain & Lapkin, 1995). Although, to date, much of the CBLT literature concerns immersion programmes, research on various aspects of CBLT in other contexts is also growing. This is especially true of CLIL, a popular CBLT approach in Europe, which originated from North American immersion and bilingual programmes. While CLIL shares many similarities with these programmes in terms of the guiding principles and overall objectives, there are also differences. One difference is that there is more emphasis on learning the target language in CLIL than in immersion programmes (Pérez Cañado, 2012). Thus, CLIL falls more on the language-driven side of the CBLT continuum. Also, CLIL learners do not have as much exposure to the target language as in immersion programmes in which the language of instruction is often spoken outside classroom contexts (Lasagabaster & Sierra, 2009). Other differences include CLIL teachers’ lower command of the target language (in immersion programmes, the teacher is often a native speaker of the language), CLIL learners’ later starting age of instruction, and greater use of simplified rather than authentic materials (Lasagabaster & Sierra, 2009; Pérez Cañado, 2012). A number of studies have examined the effectiveness of CLIL in different settings and across a number of linguistic, academic, cognitive, and attitudinal areas, revealing findings very similar to those found in French immersion studies. For example, studies that have compared learners’ L2 proficiency in these programmes with those in traditional classrooms have often shown positive results for CLIL programmes (Dalton-Puffer,

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2007; Lasagabaster, 2008; Merino & Lasagabaster, 2018; Pérez Cañado, 2012). However, CLIL students have generally shown advantages in receptive skills including listening and reading or communicative fluency, but not in accuracy and complexity of L2 production (Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010; Dalton-Puffer, 2007, 2008; Lasagabaster, 2008; Navés, 2009; Ruiz de Zarobe, 2010). Of course, these results have not been consistent. For example, some studies with younger learners have reported no advantages in reading or listening skills for CLIL students compared to nonCLIL students (Pladevall-Ballester & Vallbona, 2016). On the other hand, some studies that have compared learners’ productive skills have found positive results (Lasagabaster, 2008; Pérez Cañado & Lancaster, 2017; Ruiz de Zarobe, 2010). Pérez Cañado and Lancaster (2017), for example, conducted a longitudinal study on the effect of CLIL on learners’ oral comprehension and production, reporting that, contrary to previous results, learners’ oral productive skills were more positively affected than their oral receptive skills. Whittaker, Llinares, and McCabe (2011) tracked the development of CLIL learners’ writing skills in a secondary school in Spain over a four-year period and found evidence for the development of complexity of written discourse. The authors concluded that CLIL programmes “provide suitable contexts in which to develop written discourse, since the students can draw on a solid knowledge base from which to create their text” (p. 343). This study, however, did not have a comparison group and therefore the findings cannot be attributed exclusively to CLIL programmes. Moreover, although CLIL students have shown greater levels of language development compared to their non-CLIL counterparts, these differences have not always been considerable (Harrop, 2012). The profile of CLIL learners has not been the same in different contexts or countries either, which could be due to differences in the implementation of the programmes and various linguistic, cultural, and educational contexts in which the programmes are used (Coyle, 2007; Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010; Lasagabaster, 2008, Nikula & Dafouz, 2016). Reviewing CLIL research in the four European countries of Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Finland, Sylvén (2013), for example, reported less favourable results in Sweden than in the other countries, citing Washburn (1997), who reported less competency in subject matter content for CLIL students than for their non-CLIL peers; similarly, Lim Falk (2008) found more limited classroom interaction in CLIL than in non-CLIL classes. Sylvén (2013) then proposed four factors to explain the differences in results: language policies to guide the practice of CLIL; teacher education; starting age of the learners; and extracurricular exposure to authentic input.

Content-Based L2 Teaching

25.4  Focus on Form in CBLT While CBLT approaches have been shown to make a significant contribution to the development of learners’ content knowledge and L2 communicative fluency through providing opportunities for meaning-focused input, they have also been shown to fail to develop high levels of language accuracy with certain grammatical forms. Shortcomings of content-based programmes for L2 accuracy have been attributed partly to the students’ ability to communicate their meaning in the target language using communicative strategies (e.g., Harley, 1998). The shortcomings have also been due to the experiential nature of such programmes and the incidental approach taken towards learning grammar (Harley, 1993; Lyster, 2007). The assumption here is that when learners are learning the content, they also incidentally acquire the language. However, many language features may not occur frequently in classroom discourse, or, if they do, they may not be salient enough to be noticed in spontaneous communication (Lightbown & Spada, 2013; Lyster, 2007). Therefore, learners may not learn those forms well. These findings have led to the suggestion that some kind of focus on form should be included in these programmes (e.g., Lightbown & Spada, 1990; Lyster, 2004b, 2007; Spada, 1997). Focus on form refers to strategies that incorporate attention to form in a communicative context. It differs from traditional grammar-based instruction that teaches linguistic forms in isolation. The notion was first introduced by Long (1991), who initially defined it as attention to form that arises incidentally in the context of meaning-focused activities. Later conceptions expanded this definition. Nassaji and Fotos (2010), for example, defined focus on form as an instruction that adheres to the principles of communicative language teaching, while at the same time attempting to maintain a focus on linguistic forms in various ways. Such a focus can be attained explicitly and implicitly, deductively or inductively, with or without prior planning, and integratively or sequentially. (p. 13)

The authors then argued that focus on form “must be a component of a broader L2 instructed learning that should provide ample opportunities for meaningful and form-focused instruction and also a range of opportunities for L2 input, output, interaction, and practice” (Nassaji & Fotos, 2010, p. 13; see also Fotos & Nassaji, 2007). To extend the notion of focus on form, some researchers have used the term form-focused instruction (e.g., Ellis, 2001; Spada, 1997). Ellis (2001), for example, defined form-focused instruction as “any planned or incidental instructional activity that is intended to induce language learners to pay attention to linguistic form” (pp. 1–2).

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This definition covers both traditional grammar-based approaches and treating linguistic forms in meaning-focused lessons. Spada (1997), in turn, defined form-focused instruction as “pedagogical events which occur within m ­ eaning-based approaches to instruction but in which a focus on language is provided in either spontaneous or predetermined ways” (p. 73). In Spada’s definition, form-focused instruction does not focus on form in isolation as is characteristic of traditional grammar-teaching approaches; instead, it refers to instruction that takes place within communicative contexts. Therefore, it is akin to the definition provided by Nassaji and Fotos (2010) for focus on form. It is this perspective on form-focused instruction that has been widely advocated in the literature and has also been supported by secondary language acquisition (SLA) research. Reviewing research in this area, Lightbown and Spada (2013) pointed out that instructions “provided within the context of communicative and content-based programmes are more effective in promoting second language learning than programmes that are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on comprehension, fluency, or accuracy alone” (pp. 196–197). There are different ways in which attention to form can occur within a communicative context (see Nassaji & Fotos, 2004; Nassaji & Fotos, 2010). One is through activities that attempt to draw learners’ attention to certain target forms separately from the communicative lesson, such as mini lessons presented either before or after a communicative activity. This is similar to what Spada and Lightbown (2008) called isolated focus on form. It can also occur through instruction that integrates attention to form within the content-based lesson, or what Spada and Lightbown called integrated focus on form. An example of the latter is interactional feedback, which is feedback that learners receive on their non-target-like forms in the course of meaningful interaction through various forms of modification and clarification strategies (Nassaji, 2015, 2016). Theoretically, this approach is based on the assumption that such strategies highlight linguistic problems and push the learner to modify his/her language, producing utterances that are more accurate or appropriate. Another kind of focus on form is textual enhancement, which refers to the various techniques used to highlight certain features of input that might go unnoticed under normal circumstances. Textual enhancement provides opportunities for processing input for meaning while, at the same time, drawing attention to form. Textual enhancement is achieved either by typographically manipulating the forms through boldfacing, italicizing, underlining, or capitalizing, or through the provision of numerous instances of the target form in input, what is called “input flood”. The assumption is that such strategies enhance the perceptual saliency of the target structure and increase its noticeability (see Nassaji & Fotos, 2010,

Content-Based L2 Teaching

for a review of research on input enhancement and examples of classroom activities). Focus on form in content-based classrooms can also be achieved through the use of structure-based communicative tasks (Nassaji & Fotos, 2010). Although communicative tasks are often considered to primarily emphasize meaning, such tasks can also take the form of grammar-focused tasks that promote learner awareness and practice of the target form (Fotos, 1993; Fotos & Ellis, 1991). In addition to the need to focus on form, another important issue in CBLT is what form to focus on. Harley (1993) proposed two principles to guide this choice: the compensatory salience principle and the b ­ arrier-breaking principle. According to the first principle, focused instruction is needed for L2 features that are infrequent or nonsalient in the input, do not have a strong communicative value, or differ from those in the learners’ L1. The second principle applies to those features that cannot be learned because of the students’ wrong, or lack of, analysis of the target form, and to those features whose use may lead to native speakers’ misunderstanding or negative attitudes towards the learner. Harley identified the following features as some of the problem areas for which French immersion students need form-focused instruction: distinctions in gender; derivational affixes; and problems related to French verb tenses, conditionals, and verb features including the two most occurring verbs in French “être” and “avoir”.

25.5  Studies of Focus on Form in CBLT Many studies examining the impact of various kinds of focus on form in CBLT have been conducted in French immersion programmes in Canada. In an early study, Harley (1989) explored the effect of functional grammar (focused input and opportunities for meaningful production) in grade 6 French immersion classes. The target form was the distinction between the French passé composé and the imparfait. Using pre-test, post-test, delayed post-tests, the study found significant improvement on the immediate post-tests for the experimental group when compared to the control group, but not on the delayed post-tests (see also Harley, 1998). Day and Shapson (1991) explored the effect of instruction on learning French conditional in grade 7 French immersion classrooms. Comparing a control group with an experimental group that completed formal and functional activities, the study found that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in writing, but not in speaking. Lyster (1994) examined the effect of functional-analytic techniques on the sociolinguistic competence of grade 8 French immersion students. Five intact classes (three experimental and two control) were used. The findings showed

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beneficial effects of integrating formal and functional approaches. There are also studies in other CBLT contexts. Valeo (2013) examined the effect of focus on form in a content-based English as a second language (ESL) programme designed to teach English to adult newcomers to Canada. Two classes participated in the study, with one receiving content-based instruction with a focus on form and the other instruction with no focus on form. While the study revealed improvements on language tests for both groups, the focus on form group also showed more improvement on the content knowledge tests. The latter results were interpreted as the effect of focus on form on facilitating content comprehension in these classrooms. The findings of these studies and a number of others in CBLT classrooms (Doughty & Varela, 1998; Grim, 2008; Leeman et al., 1995; Zyzik & Polio, 2008) all confirm the beneficial effects of integrating focus on form into content-based programmes. Studies have also examined how CBLT teachers interact with students or how they provide feedback on learner errors. They have revealed various patterns of classroom interaction and corrective feedback, depending on the context in which the data were collected. In a series of studies, Lyster (1998a, 1998b, 2004a; Lyster & Ranta, 1997) investigated the different types of corrective feedback that French immersion teachers use when interacting with learners. Lyster and Ranta (1997) identified six types of such feedback (explicit correction; recasts; clarification requests; metalinguistic feedback; elicitation; and repetition) in primary level immersion classrooms. Among the feedback types, recasts were found to be most frequently used. The researchers pointed out that recasting occurred most often possibly because of the desire to maintain a focus on meaning in these classrooms. Lyster and Mori (2006) compared student–teacher interactions in two different instruction environments (Japanese immersion and French immersion). Recasts were found to be the most frequently used type of feedback in both instructional environments, but repair and uptake patterns differed between the two settings. Prompts resulted in higher levels of repair in the French context, and recasts produced the most repair in the Japanese setting. Finally, studies have shown complex patterns in the use of the minority and the majority languages in these contexts. Ballinger and Lyster (2011) examined the use of Spanish by students and teachers in a twoway immersion programme in the US. The results showed that students preferred to use English, particularly when interacting with peers, rather than Spanish. They also identified a number of factors that influenced students’ use of the target language including learners’ language background, teaching activities, and teachers’ language use. Musumeci (1996) examined teacher–student exchanges in Italian content-based classrooms, revealing that the teachers spoke most of the time, initiated most

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of the exchanges, and asked mainly display questions. Furthermore, although teachers modified their utterances in response to students’ misunderstanding, they rarely requested modifications of the students’ speech. Similar findings were noted by Pica (2002) in a classroom study which analysed discussion activities in two L2 content-based classes in the US. Pica found few instances of modification strategies that provided learners with opportunities for pushed output. Overall, these results are consistent with studies that have found limited use of output modification strategies in other CBLT classrooms (Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Swain, 1993, 1985).

25.6  Conclusion, Challenges, and Moving Forward In summary, what we have learned from studies on CBLT is that to be effective, content-based classrooms should integrate content with systematic language instruction and focus on form. Although in the earlier approaches to CBLT, the primary goal was to acquire content with little attention to language forms, most of the contemporary approaches have emphasized the need for inclusion of form-focused instruction in such programmes. However, form-focused instruction should not focus on form to the exclusion of focus on meaning but should take place within communicative contexts. It is this perspective on form-focused instruction that has been widely advocated in the literature and has also been supported by CBLT research. Despite much progress in CBLT theory and research, a number of issues and challenges remain. A central question is how to effectively integrate content and language form in these programmes and how to strike a balance between them (Stoller & Grabe, 1997). When it comes to designing and assessing such programmes, this challenge becomes prominent as it necessitates attention to various language-related and content-specific objectives. Evidence for the difficulty in balancing content and language has been documented in a number of CBLT studies. For example, in a study with French immersion teachers, Cammarata and Tedick (2012) explored the participants’ actual experiences as they tried to strike a balance between language and content in their classrooms. The findings indicated that this experience was “a multifaceted struggle” affected by a number of factors, including “teacher identity, stakeholder expectations, and understandings regarding the relationship between language and content” (p. 251). The authors suggested that balancing language and content in such classrooms necessitate support in various forms,

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including the availability of expert curriculum coordinators to support curriculum development and instruction, increased planning time (during the summer and academic year), and the development of strong mentorship programs and opportunities for collaboration. (p. 262)

Baecher, Farnsworth, and Ediger (2014) examined how objectives for form and content are presented in the content-based lesson plans developed by practicum teachers in an MA TESOL programme. Examining 107 lesson plans, the researchers found that the teachers not only experienced difficulty in designing language objectives more than content objectives, but also that the objectives focused on the four language skills and vocabulary more than on other aspects of language, including language functions and learning strategies. Chen, Yang, and Chen (2017) examined the implementation of a Chinese immersion programme in the US. Using semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, the study identified a number of challenges faced by the teachers, including “(1) difficulty in recruiting qualified teachers; (2) insufficient professional development; (3) difficulty in balancing content and language instruction; (4) insufficient use of Chinese; and (5) shortage of external resource support” (p. 163). Another challenge is how to make the content accessible to learners who have limited knowledge of the target language. As Freeman and Freeman (1988) pointed out, an important goal of content-based classrooms is to help students acquire the necessary content knowledge while at the same time developing language proficiency. Therefore, in addition to strategies that can be used to promote linguistic development, there is a need for strategies that can enhance content learning. Freeman and Freeman outlined a number of such procedures, including using various physical activities and visual aids to help with concept learning, cooperative learning, and learning essential concepts through a thematic approach. Studies are needed to examine the impact of these and other strategies on learning both content and language. Finally, teachers’ limited familiarity and experience with effective CBLT, particularly in FL contexts, has been another challenge. This was shown in a study by Cammarata (2009) which examined teachers’ experience of CBLT in K–16 FL programmes in the US. The findings indicated that the process of changing from previous methods to CBLT, was “a professionally intimidating experience, involving a struggle to re-examine one’s own teaching identity and one’s vision of what teaching and learning ought to be” (p. 559). This study highlighted the need for professional development programmes to train and familiarize teachers with CBLT approaches.

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References Arnau, J., & Vila, F. X. (2013). Language-in-education policies in the Catalan language area. In J. Arnau (ed.), Reviving Catalan at school: Challenges and instructional approaches (pp. 1–28). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Baecher, L., Farnsworth, T., & Ediger, A. (2014). The challenges of planning language objectives in content-based ESL instruction. Language Teaching Research, 18, 118–136. Baker, C. (2001). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism (3rd edn.). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ballinger, S. (2013). Towards a cross-linguistic pedagogy: Biliteracy and reciprocal learning strategies in French immersion. Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education, 1, 131–148. Ballinger, S., & Lyster, R. (2011). Student and teacher oral language use in a two-way Spanish/English immersion school. Language Teaching Research, 15, 289–306. Bekerman, Z. (2005). Complex contexts and ideologies: Bilingual education in conflict-ridden areas. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 4, 1–20. Bjötklund, S., Mard-Miettinen, K., & Savijärvi, M. (2013). Swedish immersion in the early years in Finland. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 17(2), 197–214. Bruton, A. (2011). Is CLIL so beneficial, or just selective? Re-evaluating some of the research. System, 39, 523–532. Bruton, A. (2013). CLIL: Some of the reasons why … and why not. System, 41, 587–597. Budach, G. (2009). Multilingual education in Germany: Discourses, practices and experiences in two-way immersion. In M. E. Torres-Guzman & J. Gomez (eds.), Global perspectives on multilingualism: Unity in diversity (pp. 106–133). New York: Teachers College Press. Cammarata, L. (2009). Negotiating curricular transitions: Foreign language teachers’ learning experience with content-based instruction. Canadian Modern Language Review, 65, 559–585. Cammarata, L., & Tedick, D. J. (2012). Balancing content and language in instruction: The experience of immersion teachers. The Modern Language Journal, 96, 251–269. Cenoz, J. (2008). Achievements and the challenges in bilingual and multilingual education in the Basque Country. AILA Review, 21, 13–30. Chen, Y., Yang, T., & Chen, H. L. (2017). Challenges encountered in a Chinese immersion program in the United States. The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, 26, 163–170. Cohen, A., & Swain, M. (1976). Bilingual education: The “immersion” model in the North American context. TESOL Quarterly, 10, 45–53.

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26 Conceptions of L2 Learning in Critical Language Pedagogy Graham Crookes 26.1 Introduction A view of second language instruction that takes social justice as both major focus and aim is now quite familiar in the field of applied linguistics. Over fifty years of publishing (on a small scale, with only scattered reports of individual efforts), the area has paid little attention to mainstream psychological learning theory nor to conventional second language acquisition (SLA) theory. Its own publications have drawn on educational theory, curriculum theory, social theory (not to mention political philosophy), first language (L1) literacy instructional practices (composition and rhetoric), critical discourse analysis, and the pedagogy of adult education, among other areas and fields. It has been a stimulus to the broader development of critical applied linguistics. Its most immediate conceptual neighbour in applied linguistics, perhaps, is second language (L2) work on learner autonomy, though with little acknowledgement. This literature contains both broad-brush and narrower descriptions of what is or should be going on in critical (language) pedagogy classrooms, as well as more theoretical discussions concerning their intent. Perhaps this area could benefit from having its ideas pertinent to learning examined, or indeed formulated, for inspection and reflection.1 The first publications (mostly of the 1980s) which brought the ideas of critical pedagogy to bear on those of second language teaching (Crawford, 1978; Wallerstein, e.g., 1983; Auerbach, e.g., 1992) had little to say about second language learning as distinct from teaching. This should not be surprising, as L2 critical language pedagogy programmes began as early as 1973 (according to Wallerstein, 1983, p. iii), more or less before the beginnings of a self-aware academic sub-discipline known as Second Language 1

 A process consistent with the much more formal efforts made in the philosophy of science when recasting a theory, expressed initially in narrative form, in terms of axioms, or sentences, or models (cf. Winther, 2016).

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Acquisition. Although the individuals just mentioned were specialists in second language learning and teaching, as critical language pedagogy adherents they were more concerned, in publications, to explain and develop the theoretical and conceptual bases of their work in the theory of adult education and the philosophy of education of Freire (e.g., 1973).2 In addition, learning theory in critical language pedagogy (insofar as it can be distinguished) is not just concerned with language understood narrowly, but also with conceptions of the development of other key aspects of learning valued under this perspective, most obviously the development of critical consciousness, a major objective of critical language pedagogy. To some degree these are not seen as separate. The 1990s found the literature of critical language pedagogy reflecting a period of intellectual ferment that had appeared earlier in the social sciences, and arrived belatedly in applied linguistics, in which “emancipatory modernist orientations” were supplemented by “Foucauldian poststructuralism” (Kubota & Miller, 2017, p. 6). But still, the concepts of learning implicit in this work are tied up with the overall intent of critical pedagogy and the conception of the learner that it implies. After first extracting a few points from meta-theoretical ideas about the nature of critical social science, critical theory, and the critical, I consider conceptual elements in psychology and anthropology which might also be sources for critical L2 learning ideas and critical language pedagogy. After a look at core older critical language pedagogy both within English language teaching (ELT) and outside it, I briefly review what some recent sample critical language pedagogy reports, as well as what some older studies use as their (presumably critical) conceptions of second language learning. Key concepts in use by critical language pedagogy, relating to L2 learning and the language that is learned (and the purposes to which this is to be put), are not specific to this area, but are shared with or borrowed from, particularly, the social turn in SLA (and, noted in passing, learner autonomy in applied linguistics). I do not suggest that critical language pedagogy has entirely separate and distinct conceptions of practice and theory from any other lines of work in L2 instruction (cf. Gore, 1993). However, for those interested in emancipatory, values-based perspectives on second language learning, a focus on the concepts involved may allow a more deliberate building on them, and seeing where they are shared may allow a future, more deliberate exploration of conceptual material of relevance, perhaps as yet not fully capitalized upon by critical and other related perspectives in L2 teaching. With that optimistic objective in mind, I conclude by attempting to indicate possible lines of future research.  Applied linguistics has likewise rarely engaged with curriculum theory (Megyes & Nikolov, 2002, p. 267, citing Stern,

2

1983; but see Clark, 1987) nor philosophy of education (cf. Crookes, 2011).

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26.2 Critical Social Science Versions of Key Concepts: Understandings of Criticality Scientific work that is critical should have the capacity to be deployed so as to assist with the practical improvement of human life in the domain theorized (Fay, 1987), based on emancipatory values. (That implies a sensitivity to power particularly as it has resulted in inequality concerning race, class, and gender, and a favouring of democracy in the pursuit of solidarity and liberty.) This intent is more easily to be found in the social sciences than in other parts of science. We could explore critical social science with the hope of finding critical concepts, or critical versions of them, because of the importance of consistency in theorizing. Fay’s (1987) overview of what he calls “the critical social sciences” provides an initial starting point. It is notable that for our field, critical discourse analysts Chouliaraki & Fairclough (2002) also use Fay’s term, “critical social science”, to describe the context of their work (though they are less explicit than Fay concerning the criteria that would determine in what respects critical social science is critical). This is an indication that critical language pedagogy specialists need to be on the look out for ways that language, as well as learning, can be or has been theorized in ways that will be useful for their project. (I will focus mainly on learning, bringing language theorizing in in less detail in the later part of the paper.) It is in the nature of theories that they have a metaphysics (Agassi, 1964; Harré, 1985). Fay (1987) takes up this point and agrees with Harré: “in general, any metatheory presupposes an implicit ontology” (p. 46). Philosopher of science Bunge (1998, p. 448) states that concepts in a theory should belong to the “same semantical family”; thus, critical language pedagogy should be associated with critical versions of its central concepts. What are its central concepts? Society, education, schools and classrooms, students or learners, language, teaching, and learning are the concepts that come to mind in answer to that question. Critical language pedagogy (and critical applied linguistics) needs critical versions of those concepts, tuned towards or focused on language (and second languages), or to put it slightly differently, it needs versions of those concepts that lend themselves to being deployed in studies which have critical foci or intent. For the purpose of this paper, I mainly focus on critical concepts of learning and language, though I should point out that a critical conception of society is the context for them. That is, ordinary society is subjected to critical analysis (and usually seen as inadequate in terms of values such as equality, solidarity, and freedom); a preferable version of society is to be aimed at and is implied when we refer to a critical view of learning, or of concepts of language, which lend themselves to critical action (through critical language pedagogy) and so on.

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Part of what is needed here is conceptual analysis of the term “learning”. Conceptual analysis is a task usually undertaken by philosophy (Foley, 1999) in the area in question.3 This should include considering the concept under inspection in regard to its significant boundary conditions (Busse, Kach, & Wagner, 2017) and relations, because a theory of learning, while drawing on a particular conception of learning, will at least, to some extent, also concern itself with who learns what, by what means, with whom, under what circumstances, and for what purposes.4 Making one of those terms have critical theoretical specification or content would be enough to label a theory “critical”, or, for example, if the “person” who learns is a term interpreted by feminist theory, we must be in the domain of feminist learning theory (a subdomain of feminist psychology). Critical theories of learning will not always be explaining success; if the focus is “children of poverty”, then they may be helping us to understand failure (see below, section 26.3.3, with reference to the work of Panofsky, 2003). Fay’s (1987) analysis of the ontology of critical social science (a key part of its meta-theory) leads him to focus on the idea that the consciousness of human beings is very important for social change (the final end-goal of this kind of theory). “It therefore follows that what lies behind the critical model of social science is an ontological picture of humans which portrays them as self-interpreting beings who partially create themselves on the basis of their own self-interpretations” (p. 46). Fay refers to such a conception as an “activist” conception of human beings, which “can best be explicated in terms of four fundamental dispositions: intelligence, curiosity, reflectiveness, and willfulness” (p. 48). In this case, the “learning” identified, focused on (and to some extent constituted, perhaps) by a critical theory of learning will be associated with persons thus conceptualized, and not with persons conceptualized in other, non-active ways (i.e., as capable or primarily engaged in unconscious learning, or as behavioural ensembles, or as modelled on information-processing systems). It might also focus on those dispositions, which at least imply theories developed in terms of an active and goal-oriented learner or suggest an instructional intent which builds on this conception or which attempts to create conditions within which such individuals could develop. Finally, although Fay does not say this, particularly with recent developments of distributed learning, not to mention activity theory, the individual is not the sole possible focus, as groups and organizations of people can also be said to learn. Fay’s analysis of what is needed for a social science to be critical is valuable for many reasons, including that it explicitly departs from the 3

 Unfortunately, philosophy of learning is a less-than-active field (Fridland and Strasser, 2011; cf. Winch, 1998).

4

 Cf. Lankshear’s (1994) analysis of empowerment, in turn drawing on Feinberg (1973).

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understanding of “critical” associated with soi-disant critical theory from the 1930s (e.g., Horkheimer, 1937/1972) and identifies what Fay feels are theories which are critical but not particularly dependent on the work of Marx or the revisionist neo-Marxists who coined the term “critical theory”. It nevertheless emanates from an intellectual milieu and timeframe that had not been affected by the significant intellectual developments associated with the later tradition known as post-structuralism. Understandings of what is critical social science have been extended or rethought (in some cases re-affirmed), for example by Habermas (1968/1971), and more recently as a result of the impact of poststructuralism (for a survey, see Morrow & Brown, 1994). And for our field, Pennycook’s (1990) articulation of the “critical” in critical applied linguistics is very explicitly indebted to Foucault and to a post-structural, discoursal vision of disciplines and the phenomena they both investigate and constitute. It may be noted that Foucault regarded himself as a Kantian (that is, there is a link between this revisionist discourseoriented theorist of the history of ideas, and the first most famous critical theorist, the most prominent early proponent of critique; cf. Foucault, 1964/2008, 1984).5 A constitutive understanding of discourse portrays it as something that calls into existence the objects of (among other things) scientific inquiry. The skepticism that Foucault has been charged with is a natural concomitant of critique. In Pennycook’s hands, it is also strongly attached to reflexivity, learning a (negative) lesson from the way critical theory, for example, became to some extent just another regime of truth, because it failed to examine the extent to which it was itself an exercise of power and was insufficiently self-critical. Pennycook (1999), as paraphrased by Lynch (2001), indicates two other aspects of the term “critical” in our field. One is its areas of interest. These are extensive: gender; class; sexuality; race; ethnicity; culture; identity; politics; ideology; and discourse are all involved, and according to Lynch, this line of work is concerned with how these areas are constituted, through disciplinary power, within applied linguistics. Nevertheless, at the same time, critical applied linguistics “embraces a transformative pedagogy [of languages]” (quote from Lynch, 2001, p. 356; Pennycook, 1999). The latter is another way to name the critical in both “critical language pedagogy” and any understandings of learning associated with it, where the transformation is (still) intended to work against forms of oppression with regard to those main terms of interest to critical applied linguistics.  Foucault’s (1964/2008) introduction to his own French translation of an important work of Kant on anthropology

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was one of two theses he defended to obtain his doctorate. As Olssen (2003, 2006) notes, he regarded himself as thinking in the area that Kant had opened up (“the Kantian critique … still forms the immediate space of our reflection” [Foucault, 1970/2005, p. 419]). His 1984 essay “What is Enlightenment?” has the identical title to Kant’s own prize-winning essay and draws directly on Kant to address the same question.

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26.3  Seeking Critical Conceptions of Learning Critical conceptions of learning are present in, and to be found as investigated by, different parts of academia, namely different disciplines. Learning has generally been seen as a topic belonging to psychology (though this is disputed: Winch, 1998). If there is a critical psychology, it should contain a critical conception of learning, as should its associated subareas, if they exist, like (critical) educational or social psychology. Other disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology, have also investigated learning. When, or if, these disciplines (and their subdisciplines) articulate a critical position, this should also shape their presentations of learning. It is unlikely that a critical perspective will lead to the identification of fundamentally different forms or processes of learning. It is more likely that it will direct our attention to the ways in which one level of theory affects another. Or, it may be a form of negative theorizing: theory directs research attention, after all, and given that critical implies (among other things) attention to effects of power, then failures to learn, if attributable to power, may become of greater interest and easier to investigate as a result of critical theorizing. We also need to hold open for consideration the several ways that learning, or especially the learning of languages, has been conceptualized. First, concerning language, there are all the various conventional levels of language structure, functions of language, genres of discourse, and so on. There are even more holistic terms to describe what is the object of L2 learning, such as a task (conceived as an integrated entity with associated goals, interactive patterns, and discernible language forms). Beyond that, there are patterns of interaction and relationship mediated by language; there could be the conscious use of feedback on individual forms or entire productions such as essays; there is the active use of learning strategies, and the conscious choice of this and not that language form for inspection, reflection, and practice. There are internal elements of identity conceptualized as personal narratives and their change; the taking up of positions in discourse; and change of identity in general as something that follows inseparably from, or may be deliberately sought, through altered patterns of language use. All of these exist; probably most could be deployed in support of critical language pedagogy.

26.3.1  Critical Psychology Psychology as a recognized and distinct field of study developed in nineteenth-century Europe, especially Germany. Separate wings, on the one hand focusing on the individual organism in laboratory contexts, as

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a more or less isolated individual, and on the other hand focusing on the person as located in society and with a cultural and historical thrust, can both be found in the oeuvre of Wundt (often referred to as the father of psychology), who did both physiological psychology and cultural psychology. After Wundt, however, these lines of theorizing and inquiry were generally pursued by separate specialists and sub-disciplines. Early educational psychology (e.g., James, 1899/1983) did not have much of a cultural or social dimension. The beginnings of a shift can be seen in the educational psychology of Vygotsky (important in recent SLA studies). His early work (e.g., 1926/1997) was influenced by the behavioural emphasis of Pavlov; he referred to mind as merely a reflex of reflexes. His later work, for which he first became known in the West (e.g, 1962), brought in materialist and social ideas from Hegel, Marx, and Engels, to develop a psychology in which learning is mediated by cultural artefacts and takes place in interaction among learners, or between one who knows less and one who knows more (see e.g., van der Veer & Valsiner, 1988). Given the time period and location of his work, it might be assumed that Vygotsky’s psychology is critical. But perhaps surprisingly, Vygotsky’s theorizing has been challenged for its lack of attention to inequities associated with class (not to mention race, gender, and other sites of oppression; Panofsky, 2003). However, later developments of his work are better able to resist this charge. While Vygotsky’s work was hardly known in the West until the 1970s, that of his students, especially Leontiev, was, and it was partly this (and also constructivism, and direct reading of classical Marxian writings) which influenced the separate, explicitly critical version of psychology developed in Germany from the late 1960s, beginning about 1968, under Holzkamp (cf. Tolman, 1994; Holzkamp, 2013). This line of work informs clinical and psychotherapeutic practices, but engages little with education, unfortunately (cf. Prilleltensky & Nelson, 2002). However, Holzkamp’s work (almost none of which was available in English until very recently) does provide a little conceptual material for a critical theory of learning in schools, a critical educational psychology perhaps (Holzkamp, 2013). Holzkamp’s conception of the individual who learns seems quite similar to Fay’s. In Schraube’s (2000) summary: we, in comparison with other creatures, can always create a changing relationship to the world which we inhabit. Humans do not live immediately within a natural environment, where meanings dictate the activities of living beings, but rather in a mediated social world, where meanings reflect possibilities of action and allow for a consciousness of the world. It is this unique relationship that creates our awareness of being a subject. Regardless of how determined given conditions in life may be, the individual subject always deals with them in a relationship of possibilities. We humans are subjects who can always act. (p. 49)

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Holzkamp’s (2013) understanding of learning is set in, but opposed to, the kind of learning he believed was usually to be found and administered in school. For him, the desired form of learning (and the kind that he was primarily interested in theorizing and researching) was “expansive learning [in which] the increased influence upon the conditions of one’s life/life quality is immediately aimed at as a deepened world access to be gained by learning” (p. 124), which is “mediated by objectified collective experience” (Holzkamp, 2013, p. 128). While the term “expansive learning” could be understood many ways, in this case, it is intended to mean a form of learning that is primarily directed towards acting upon the conditions of a learner’s life so as to improve them. Holzkamp suggests that this requires that the things, or content, that is to be understood through learning undertaken in school should be developed through a particular kind of communication with others, in which “objectified collective experience” is brought to bear.

26.3.2  Conceptions of the Mediated Learner, for Critical Use Developments of Vygotsky’s position became known as cultural historical activity theory. “At the core was the notion that human nature, is a socio­ historical project and a collaborative achievement by people acting in collectivities … People become human as they create and come to know themselves” (Sawchuk and Stetsenko, 2008, pp. 342–343). Its emphasis on tools and artefacts allows for culture, not to mention class (race, etc.), to enter into the theoretical context of learning. In this view, there is not a subject who cognizes and whose cognition has no particular effect on his subjectivity or self. Rather, subjectivity arises out of “practical collaborative activities—in phylogeny, ontogeny, and the history of civilization” (Sawchuk & Stetsenko, 2008, p. 343). The idea is of the individual as emerging from and constituted by their relations with others and society as a whole, through “activity”—actions on and with people involving rules, roles, expectations, and outcomes. This requires a formulation of the outcome of learning as the development of subjectivity arising out of, embedded in, and transforming practical activity. This is one step closer to the question, “How is learning conceptualized critically?” The transforming practical activity, for the critical individual, would be that of improving the world (as Fay has already indicated), and the critical learning is a form of shift in identity, largely not separable from action in the world (Engeström, e.g., 1987, 1993). Critical human learning is theorized in terms of a fundamental conception of the person, indicating that humans learn in order to act, so as to improve matters.6  Cf. Thorne (2004, p. 63): “The goal of activity theory is to define and analyze a given activity system to diagnose

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possible problems, and to provide a framework for implementing innovations.”

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Expounding activity theory for second language specialists, Thorne (2005, p. 396) explicitly links cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) with critical pedagogy, and also to more recent (sociocultural) understandings of SLA: outcomes of a local action [should] enhance an individual’s capacity to perform relevant and competent identities. This is one aspiration that activity theory shares with critical pedagogy—not only to cultivate developing expertise at the level of communicative performance, but also to support one’s continued development as a person.

The relevant and competent identities that are to be learned to be performed here must be consistent with those dispositions of Fay: “intelligence, curiosity, reflectiveness, and willfulness”. However, this is not just any, or a generic form of, intelligence (or Fay’s other terms)—this is a form of intelligence considering, critically, the problems facing society with the intention of improving them in light of values such as equality, solidarity, and freedom. It is not simply a second language, even as a set of practices, that is implied, but rather, specified holistically, conscientization: a different way of thinking about the world, mediated by language, oriented towards change.

26.3.3  What Mediates Learning: The Oppressed Learner Understanding learning through a critical lens requires including culture as a mediator viewed critically. Ratner (2000) breaks culture into the following: “Cultural activities such as producing goods … Cultural values … [such as] Youth, old age [understood differently across cultures] … Physical artifacts … Psychological phenomena such as emotions, …, memory, mental illness, …, language … Agency” (pp. 8–9). Using Ratner’s categories, Vygotskian scholar Panofsky (2003) identified the numerous ways in which children from different social classes are treated differently by schools and their personnel. Given the emergence of (cognitive) psychological matters from sociocultural interaction, she presents these views in a concrete formulation. For Panofsky the differential treatment of students of different social class actually constitute[s] specific cultural activities and cultural values …. These, in turn, contribute to differentiation in psychology, particularly motivation …, and produce significant differences in students’ sense of agency. … Similarly the differential access to the activity of self-presentation … contributes to differential development of language, memory, and related cognitive processes … as well as to sense of agency. (p. 422)

For this reason, she notes that if “social being determines consciousness” (Marx, 1859/1978, p. 4; Williams, 1977) then these differential experiences are indeed producing different results, at the level of consciousness,

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identity, agency, and so on. According to class, then, in particular, students bring different kinds of personal culturally mediated psychological development (as Vygotsky [1981, in Panofsky, 2003] says) or start with different forms of “embodied history, internalized as second nature” (Bourdieu, 1990, cited by Panofsky, 2003, p. 425), both equally the result of students’ experiences of learning (or not learning; for some these personal forms of consciousness will be the result of having been subjected to “symbolic violence” [Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2002, p. 167]) in that institution of so-called learning, the mainstream school. The teacher who is operating out of a critical pedagogy will be capable of a relevant theoretical understanding of such individuals’ learning, which will support the teacher in beginning at a very different place and seeking alternative styles and means of teaching than would otherwise be the case.7

26.3.4  Towards Critical Social Learning Theory Insofar as critical orientations begin with social critique, and locate the individual always in a social context, social theories of learning can lend themselves to critical purposes. The most well-known social theory of learning derives from the work of Lave (cf. Lave & Wenger, 1991). In her understanding, to learn is to take up a social role, often through some form of apprenticeship or recognized approximation to the role—through legitimate peripheral participation. The role is understood as having features shared by its associated “community of practice”. Learning is, then, a social process of gradually developing capabilities and eventually carrying out successfully the various duties, practices, and tasks associated with the role. In its original formulation this paid little attention to power, but asking “what resources, what power, is needed for legitimate peripheral participation, or for full membership in a community of practice?” allows for its development in critical directions. Wenger (1998) specified three definitional features: mutual engagement; joint enterprise; and shared repertoire. These are built on in the example below, which moves this concept into use by critical pedagogy specialists. Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2008), teachers in US inner city schools, worked with both the regular curriculum and in co-curricular activities (coaching basketball). Their critical perspective emphasizes a critical race view of society. In the process of critically extending the concept of a community of practice they bring in the term “counter-culture”. They (p. 11) first state what might be involved in a counter-culture community of practice: 7

 Freire has more than one story of how, in working with peasants, he had to persuade them that they were capable of learning. Just as significant, the initial phase in his literacy instruction was intended to help them see themselves as agents in society, capable of altering culture (Freire, 1973).

Conceptions of L2 Learning in Critical Language Pedagogy [C]ommunities of practice can be defined as follows: ••

•• •• ••

Who: groups of people who share a common concern or a passion for something they do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better What is it about: it’s a joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members How does it function: mutual engagement that binds members together into a social entity What capability does it produce: the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time …

Then they summarize how they see this developing and what some foci are for the instruction, the developmental processes, and, by implication, the learning that must go on for “urban students” to develop such a community or become part of such a community: A counter-cultural community of practice recognizes the existence of a dominant set of institutional norms and practices and intentionally sets itself up to counter those norms and practices. In urban classrooms, a countercultural community of practice responds directly to structural and material inequalities in the school and the larger community. The developing counter-cultural community of practice intentionally targets alienation, intellectual disenfranchisement, despair, and academic failure to be replaced with large quantities of community, critical conscious(p.11) ness, hope, and academic achievement.

If we know what is involved in a “counter-culture community of practice”, we can draw upon the developmental aspects of Lave and Wenger’s theory to hypothesize concerning what would be needed for a critical social theory of learning of this kind. Probably the same kind of development, the gradual alteration of participation patterns, development of shared vocabulary, new identities and their recognition, would characterize the progress of a second language learner towards participation in a counter-culture community of practice as does the progress of any individual towards participation in a community of practice. Note that Duncan-Andrade and Morrell strongly imply that the learners in this conception are not the unmarked learners of generic learning theory. These learners are likely to be alienated, to have suffered “intellectual disenfranchisement” and “academic failure”, and be experiencing “despair”. The pedagogy associated with this critical social learning theory is problem-based: To develop these critical counter-cultural communities of practice in our own work with urban youth, we attempted to employ the … steps of the cycle of critical praxis … identify a problem, research the problem,

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develop a collective plan of action to address the problem, implement the collective plan of action, evaluate the action, assess its efficacy, and re-examine the state of the problem.  (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008, pp. 11–12)

However, the special conditions and long-term research of Duncan-Andrade and Morrell are yet to be found in critical language pedagogy studies.

26.4  Critical Language Pedagogy: ESL and Beyond The work of Freire (e.g., 1973) was the major impetus for critical language pedagogy. In some places, it identifies critical understandings of learning in general, or of language learning (as Freire was originally a literacy instructor). However, working out the implications of Freire’s philosophy of education for second language teaching and learning contexts was done by his followers. As a literacy teacher and teacher educator, he had both specific and general ideas about what was needed, through instruction, to help develop first language literacy, and a perspective on it that would be consistent with conscientization, the development of critical consciousness and its use to improve society. Learners were to be provided with the opportunity to see themselves as “inserted into history”, changing their view of themselves towards being agents, indeed cultural workers (like the teachers also). This meant presenting even illiterate students with aspects of their culture, upon which to reflect. Freire’s (1973) early work describes his original literacy programmes in some detail, referring to the initial orienting pictorial material (for illiterates), the ethnographic needs analyses done by literacy teams in residence in villages, the selection and teaching of vocabulary items of local and general analytic significance, the special role of dialogue understood theoretically and practically, and the interactive role of the teacher. A central conception of learning, for Freire, is as a process of reflection in which distancing oneself from society and being supported in analysing its contradictions, then one’s role in it, is crucial. For Freire, more than for any other critical theorist of education, it is language which is central. When these ideas were introduced into US contexts, they did so in contact with or as part of adult basic education, and were used by those engaged in immigrant education. Immigrants are among those learners most likely to be involved in struggles against unequal power relations. Wallerstein (e.g., 1983) and Auerbach (e.g., 1992) extended Freire’s ideas for immigrant English as a second language (ESL) contexts. During the same period, Shor (1980, 1992, 1996), in a series of detailed practical books, developed (L1) critical literacy for the US postsecondary classroom. In terms of concepts used or developed, Shor, as a teacher of US freshman composition from the

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late 1970s on, took existing concepts concerning the development of first language writing skills, as well as more curricular concepts, and extended them critically. Again, it is or was a matter of note that the person who was conceptualized as learning literacy was not (in Shor’s classrooms) a generic or middle-class individual with conventional understandings of agency, resources, and so on, but rather, in Shor’s accounts, a working-class individual, facing unemployment, and already seriously negatively affected by past adverse experiences of school and the alienating effects of an increasingly materialistic culture presented aspirationally but yet realistically out of reach. They are also persons conceptualized socio-politically—entitled to attain their full potential and contribute to the improvement of democratic society. The critical understanding of these students that Shor brings to bear, and his critical response to the curriculum he must present to them, are all consistent with the critical perspectives on agency, motivation, and identity that Panofsky derived from her critical engagement with the Vygotskian tradition discussed earlier. Immigrant learners are in a minority when compared with the vast numbers of world language learners around the world. Does critical language pedagogy have anything to offer them? The answer depends, of course, on whether there is an initial sympathy or agreement with any part of the values base of critical pedagogy. However, if concepts such as democracy, equality, liberty, or even social justice are valued in a particular school, or within a national education system, then a perspective on learning and teaching such as that advocated by critical language pedagogy ought to be of interest. The answer to the non-immigrant category can in practice be divided into two parts. The use of this perspective for world language students in the US has been advocated (see the following paragraphs). Attempts at trying out this perspective for English as a foreign language (EFL) students around the world have also been reported (Crookes, 2013). In particular, the increased interest in critical thinking in East Asian education systems is fostering engagement with the matter (see, e.g., Huh, 2016). Crawford-Lange (1981) reformulated Freire’s ideas for what was then called the “foreign language” classroom in the US. Areas she addressed in that programmatic account were curriculum, classroom-level needs, and interests assessment (leading to “content definition” in terms of “cultural themes” and “linguistic content”), “learning strategies and materials”, teacher and student planning, “teacher and learner roles”, and (classroom-based, participatory) evaluation. Critical language pedagogy, in her depiction, has a broad acceptance of techniques (Crawford-Lange refers to “grammar explanations, charts, and the several types of written and oral drills” [p. 265]), but more importantly, the role of the instructor is to “expose the students to various means and resources” and then “Students

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… as well as the teacher, choose which of these tools to utilize in language learning, thus providing for their own learning needs and desires for variety” (p. 265). Here it may be said that critical language pedagogy shares with learner autonomy a belief in the ability of the learner to choose and evaluate appropriate and personally relevant tools, and select or modify learning activities accordingly. A difference of emphasis (from learner autonomy) is to be found in its group orientation; it extends to assessing, as a group, both the overall philosophy of the course (existential or humanistic), as well as “evaluation of linguistic competence” (p. 267). Although Crawford-Lange resists pre-specification of goals for such a course, she does allude to a major theme being communication against miscommunication and the importance of culture in foreign language learning. Many world languages specialists since then (e.g., Reagan and Osborn, 2002) have from time to time also advocated or speculated concerning the application of critical language pedagogy ideas to the world of the foreign language classroom. If the question is, “What do world languages learners have to gain from this perspective?”, Brenner (2012), reviewing a number of sources in this area states that “the model of critical pedagogy … is uniquely capable of assisting students to increase their capacity for understanding others … including Others’ suffering and/or their perceived lack of accountability for their problems, issues, or crises” (p. 126). He joins this to (US) Modern Language Association reports that call on students to reflect on a world that sees them as foreign to others, a reflection that he says should include what is “conventionally held to be knowledge, experience and power in various sectors of society” (p. 126). Writing decades after Crawford-Lange, he notes that more (now than then) that is of use to critical pedagogy is to be found in apparently conventional textbooks. As a teacher of German, he is able to access and present challenging material on, for example the World War Two period, so even very difficult subject matter can be brought into the classroom even at the introductory level, connecting students with new ways of seeing the new culture and themselves beyond the usual skills-based, communicative settings characteristic of many foreign language classes. (p. 137)

26.5 Conceptions of Second Language Learning in Recent Critical Language Pedagogy For some brief illustrations of conceptions of L2 learning that come up from the actual current literature in this area, I have consulted recent issues of the journal most dedicated to critical language pedagogy, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies (CILS). Here I address both language and learning.

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26.5.1 Second Language Learning The understanding of “language” in these various accounts and explorations is, as might be expected, not confined to an understanding of language as grammatical structures. This understanding is not excluded, but in more theoretically probing work is to be understood as the result of repeated use, or repeated engagement with needs of discourse and communication in social contexts—forms of sedimentation (see review and associated references in Miller, 2012). Nevertheless, there have been repeated allusions to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as the theory of language most likely to be useful to critical pedagogy (e.g., the influential early work of Wallace [2003, original research actually conducted 1988–1993], who nevertheless used it only in a stripped-down way). A noteworthy recent case is Simmons (2016), who first remarks that “SFL does not automatically lead to a critical analysis of language” (p. 184). She then goes on to provide a substantial account of high school students being trained in critical discourse analysis (CDA) and SFL jointly and shows how they use it to “critically analyse how language functions in society and texts” (p. 186). SFL, supplemented by CDA, enables the detailed documentation of how language functions at a level that is not available to the unaided user or investigator.8 Simmons, like others, is talking about the acquisition of “critical literacy”. What that means includes (to take one recent CILS study, Lau, JubySmith, & Desbiens, 2017) “reading (and writing) the word and the world … [so that students become able to] deconstruct social stereotypes, promote respect for diversity, and cultivate self-reflectivity and [understand] complicity in social injustice” (p. 100). Similarly, another CILS study, conducted with EFL students in Korea (Huh, 2016) adopts a well-known, highly influential model (Freebody and Luke’s, eg., 1990, “four resource model”) to “conceptualize literacy as a social practice”. What is to be developed includes not only the mainstream ability to understand “conventions of reading texts” but also the non-mainstream ability to conduct “critical analysis of ideological construction” in such texts (Huh, 2016, p. 212). Within this version of literacy is still, also, a range of genres and texts. A notable unusual but highly defensible understanding supportive of critical literacy, identified in a recent CILS article (McKinley, 2015), is “critical argument theory” (e.g., van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992; cf. van Eemeren et al., 2014). By “argument”, here is meant a probing and collaborative exchange of views, consistent with the theoretical and practical  Relatedly, a prominent understanding going beyond language as structures (however arrived at) is of language

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as social practices; and of course as soon as a “practice” understanding of language is adopted, context, again understood critically, comes in. Closely associated with this (and less easy to find), we also have the possibility of language as performance (Miller, 2012; Pennycook, 2001).

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significance of dialogue in critical language pedagogy established by Freire (and arguably important for the development of democracy). That is, critical language pedagogy (and critical literacy within it) needs students to be able to construct and engage in—learn, acquire—the logical and persuasive elements of this special kind of dialogue, in writing (as well as speech) which van Eemeren’s work provides analysis of.

26.5.2  Second Language Learning I noted earlier, in passing, the shifts in central concepts of the social sciences that had taken place over the course of the period of time implied by an inquiry into critical language pedagogy. This applies to the concept of identity, or subjectivity (increasingly regarded as reflecting social position and at the same time to some extent both fluid and the subject of power, exerted by the combinations of language as discourse and social processes). It applies also to language itself, increasingly seen as only partially (for analytic purposes) separable from the workings of power and again, as discourse processes tightly bound to powerful social processes, itself offering places, roles, and spaces that could be taken up by individuals through developmental processes or stages. In a major overview of critical applied linguistics (Pennycook, 2001, p. 144), Pierce (e.g., 1995) was identified as a principal critical applied linguist who “takes SLA research to task for the unhelpful dichotomization between learners and contexts, the uncritical theorizing of social contexts, and the failure to look at questions of power and access”. For Pennycook, Norton’s understanding of second language learning is that of taking up a position in a discourse. In a subsequent presentation of part of this work (Toohey & Norton, 2003, interestingly, published in a collection on learner autonomy), Norton describes her focal subject, Eva (an immigrant to Canada working in a fastfood restaurant) as being aware of the importance of becoming part of a social network, but initially unable to do so because of her employment location, her low status in it, and believing her fellow employees thought her stupid. For these specialists, “language learning [may be considered as] increasing participation in communities of practice” (p. 59). The learner’s autonomy, which Norton sees as being exercised here, is not “individualized performance” but rather “socially oriented agency” (dependent on drawing on, in the case in question, an auxiliary social network partly distinct from that of her work). While mainstream SLA of course emphasizes the importance of interaction, the critical view of this is emphasized by Chao (2016) on L2 service learning. In this study, a simple but crucial point emerges from a critique of conventional English for academic purposes (EAP) practice: that real-world circumstances, most of which have a power dimension,

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often prevent international students (not to mention other L2 users and would-be learners) from having adequate or productive language-based interactions with the target language community. The key difference in how interaction is regarded in any critical view of L2 learning is that it is not taken for granted as naturally emerging in contact situations; far from it, as sources cited by Chao (e.g., Ortactepe, 2013) separate the early optimism of SLA from the perspective of the early twenty-first century. Chao (2016) emphasizes the importance of “the sociocultural approach to language [that] implies that L2 learning is grounded in social interactions … in the classroom and beyond” (p. 292). However, she goes on: the social turn in L2 learning argues for a critical approach [to their learning, in which] students … gain greater control and agency of their learning by questioning life, experience, and society …. [resulting in] L2 learners’ personal transformation …. L2 learning [is then] “a practice in (Chao (2016), p. 292) reading the world” (Pennycook, 1996, p. 170).

Reference to a role for discourses as a way of conceptualizing what develops in critical L2 learning or through critical language pedagogy is also not unusual; critical researchers in general may refer to an individual as taking up a position in a discourse (cf. e.g., Bloor & Bloor, 2013). However, explicit reference to Foucauldian discourse-based understandings are rare. We nevertheless should expect to see understandings of learning that are consistent with J. Tolman’s (2006) exposition of Foucault: What learning takes place under these conditions of struggle and inequity, self-reflection and its sustaining pathologies? Basic principles of critique first drawn from the discourse theory of Michel Foucault explain what it means to learn. The self emerges in the condition of repression and is inextricable from discourses of power. However we speak to mend a divided world, speech is constructive of self and productive of meaning within a disciplinary apparatus. Resistance exists in the condition of, and is not a solution to, the regimes of power it opposes. (p. 192)

From a critical point of view, it is significant that particular groups or categories of learners learn a second language under conditions, often institutional, of inequitable access to resources, surveilled, experiencing, or exercising both power and resistance. In a Foucauldian view in which power is all-pervasive, an individual learns (or maintains) a second language both so as to exercise power and to have the ability to resist power, particularly as it is exercised through language. Finally, we have begun to see the body and the emotions brought in. Thus, in a recent CILS discussion of critical pedagogy (in language teacher education), Khatib and Miri (2016) state that critical pedagogical ideas in our field result in what they call a “critical cognitive approach”, while researchers such as Darder (2015), following Freire (1972), have, in the

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words of Khatib and Miri, “emphasized the role of other faculties of human beings such as heart, body, and imagination in education” (p. 107). They suggest we view “students as whole persons having a mind, body, heart, and imagination and [think about] how to engage them in language learning process” (p. 107). For an extended discussion of the emotions in L2 learning from the point of view of a major exponent of critical English for academic purposes pedagogy, see Benesch (2017).

26.6 Is CLP Different from Other Approaches in its View of Learning and Teaching? Histories in this area (e.g., Kelly, 1969; Wheeler, 2013) have long made it clear that, despite the sales pitches of Methods proponents, very little is new in our area. So-called innovations appear usually to be repackaging or (to be more generous) differences of emphasis, along with a tilt in one or other direction along the formal–functional scale. Critical language pedagogy hopes to develop (as does, say, the learner autonomy perspective: Benson, 2001) a highly active, agentive learner. It shares an interest in culture with other perspectives on language teaching, but for critical language pedagogy, teachers are cultural workers and students are learning so as to alter their own cultures. With critical language pedagogy, as opposed to most other perspectives on second language learning and teaching, a key difference of emphasis plays out at a number of levels in the relations that involve learning. Who learns is particularly important in critical studies of education and of learning within that. A focus is on the social location of learners and their identities, as possibly manifesting conditions of oppression. Thus, it is not just anyone who is the focus of critical conceptions of second language learning. Critical inquiries into second language learning are interested in how class, race, and gender affect the processes and the trajectories of learning, and their scholars regard themselves as righting an imbalance on the part of previous work in this area that has failed to delineate the learner in regard to those aspects of identity, and thereby overlooks the ways in which power plays out possibly negatively to those who are more subject to oppression than others in this world. With regard to teaching, a critical language pedagogy classroom might not, at first glance, be seen as so different to any other language classroom. It certainly shares that interest in active use of the language for personally meaningful reasons and goals that would characterize many language classrooms that reflect what one reviewer of this manuscript has called “any worthwhile L2 pedagogy”, or is certainly consistent with postMethod pedagogy (Kumaravadivelu, 2001) practices. One major difference

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of emphasis in the classroom may be the target of a high degree of student participation in areas more traditionally seen as the preserve of the teacher or curriculum developer. That is, the idea that the student should develop a high degree of agency through full participation in as many aspects of the class as possible leads to shared materials development, to the student having a role to bring in issues, to bring in and work with realia. The students are encouraged to participate in curriculum development, nominating themes. From the teacher’s perspective, it is the teacher’s responsibility to foster the negotiation of the syllabus. (Again, this is not exclusive to critical language pedagogy, and at least one valuable collection on this aspect of curriculum practice has been developed with almost no reference to critical pedagogy within it: Breen & Littlejohn, 2000.) At its most challenging, this participatory pedagogical practice envisages students themselves having an active role in test development (Shohamy, 2001), though this is as yet rarely documented. Even here we may note that this is in some respects parallel to the further shores of learner autonomy, where self-assessment has been advocated for since Oskarsson (1978). The difference in emphasis is here in regard to the collaborative versus individual nature of what is encompassed.

26.7  Possible Future Research It should be clear by now that the perspective sketched here is a very marginal one. Although we can document its regular appearance in our literature over fifty years, the challenges it makes to established values, and the challenges it places on teachers, for that matter, make it unlikely to become particularly popular. On the other hand, as underdeveloped as it yet is, it is wide open for and continuing to be very much in need of research. At the level of learning, critical studies of language learning, and of failures to learn or of obstacles to second language learning, associated with individual statuses concerning class, race, gender, and so on, continue to be needed, though we are past the failure to see the middle-class nature of many studies of SLA (cf. Block, 2014). For that part of critical language pedagogy which is interested in seeing learning as altering positions in discourses, a researchable tension still exists, identified by Pennycook (2001, p. 149): Does it make sense to talk of choice in taking up a discursive position when the argument is also that discourses construct our subjectivities? How can we talk about subject positions without reinscribing subjectivity into a fixed form of identity? How is it that students learn discourses in the process of learning a second language? How is it that students come

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to take up subject positions in discourses in a second language? How can we actually oppose discourses? According to Price (1999), Discourse acquisition is a matter of engagement in a productive process rather than a mastery over and reproduction of constitutive discourse properties. This production is performative in that subject, discourse, and its reality are produced in the moment of instantiation. (p. 589)

Here, then, we have a highly challenging proposition that discourse acquisition has to do with engagement and performativity in the moment of production. It is a shame that the pursuit of such questions has so long been held back by the shackles of mainstream SLA research. Critical consciousness itself, a core concept of critical pedagogy, can and should be explored in more detail. Critical second language studies can build on the scale development work of Diemer et al. (2017) to ask how, under what conditions, and perhaps through what stages it develops in second language contexts. To come back to the long-established tradition of concern with immigrant second language learning: if democracies really want their immigrants to play an active role in the political life of their societies (and not just be the young workers that their aging economies need) then critical applied linguists should be looking at political socialization over the lifespan to see what will aid this sort of thing. Quite specifically, what language is needed and learned for anything like the above to occur? The concept of a critical vocabulary exists and can be deployed in regard to the study of the sort of (L2) discourse that is needed to develop and explore one’s identity and agency in a second language. This can be seen as the pre-requisites for critical L2 literacy. The ability to understand the viewpoint of an author and the exercise of power in a text needs some key concepts and vocabulary more than others, perhaps. We need to know more about this, including in more diverse (especially EFL) contexts (see Huh, 2016). The development of critical interpretations of social theories of learning has been suggested before. It is not conceptually difficult; researchers simply need to have their critical spectacles on and look for or even perhaps bring the power dimension into their studies of L2 learning and identity change that are planned. As much here is shared with the social turn in SLA, there is reason to be optimistic.

26.8 Conclusion Because of its distinctive values base, a critical approach in second language teaching and learning is arguably different at some level from most other perspectives or approaches in this area, whether “alternative” (e.g., Atkinson, 2011) or mainstream. Also, because of its

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intellectual inheritances and their intent, namely, to improve the world, this perspective in second language studies has an unusually high degree of interest in praxis—in the integration of theory and practice. If any language learners or teachers recognize from a democratic values standpoint how ill this world is, yet are interested in doing something ethically desirable with or through a second language in it, then critical conceptions of second language learning and teaching should be important to them. Actually, given the common conception of applied linguistics as concerned with practical problems in the world (“the theoretical and empirical investigation of real world problems in which language is a central issue”; Brumfit, 1997; cf. Grabe, 2002), critical conceptions of second language learning ought to be more central to applied linguistics as a whole. Also, the aspirations of critical language pedagogy may offer us a spur to think ahead and seek out further conceptions of second language learning that, through facing up to the inequitable realities of an unfair world, will aid the real-world practicality and utility of the field as a whole.

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27 Bilingual Education and Policy Christine Hélot and Ofelia García

27.1 Introduction Bilingual education is a simple label for a complex phenomenon (Cazden & Snow, 1990). Implemented all over the world, bilingual education (BE) has been a cutting-edge field of research and practice for the past fifty years. Linked to research on bilingualism (and multilingualism) in its interdisciplinary dimensions, the field of BE continues to grow exponentially in the twenty-first century as globalization, migration, and hyperconnectivity among people mean that we use language(s) differently. When most people in the world today use more than one named language to communicate in their everyday life, when so many children come to school with so many different language practices, and when the past fifty years of research have shown the various benefits of BE, it is surprising that BE is not offered more widely. Where do the obstacles lie? Who does BE serve and to what purpose? Which languages are favoured and which are not? How have all the different frameworks and types of programmes been researched? How has the field moved forward to propose more dynamic and transformative pedagogies of BE? BE is a highly ideologized domain of research and practice where different conceptualizations of language and bilingualism have played a major part in the way programmes have been implemented in schools in different parts of the world. It is also a highly contextualized field of study because of the very large number of settings in which it has developed. This means that BE does not look the same in Europe, the US, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Sometimes it even looks different in different places within these countries. There is no one-size-fits-all model. It is a highly politicized issue because it serves many students at different levels in different languages with different societal goals. In some contexts,

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BE reinforces existing social hierarchies; in others, it serves the educational need of minoritized speakers; yet in others it helps to revitalize languages of communities in danger. Today, some children attend bilingual day-care centres from the age of three months, attesting to the growing commodification of BE in developed, as well as less developed, countries. Yet nowhere is BE safe from politicians, one-language only movements, or policy makers who regiment which languages are included or excluded out of curricula, which kind of bilingualism should be supported or not, and whose language practices are valorized and whose are stigmatized. Even BE in signed language for the deaf community is being challenged by medical advances such as implants, arguing deaf children should be made to hear. BE has been defined as a specific form of language education where two languages (or more), rather than one language only, are used as a means of instruction (Baker, 2001; García, 2009). It can concern learners who are already bilingual when they start their schooling, or children who speak only one named language and who are exposed to an additional language as a medium of instruction. Instruction through two languages has taken so many forms, that such a definition falls short of the complexity involved in describing and analysing the many different types of BE. More comprehensively, García (2009) defines BE “as a way of providing meaningful and equitable education as well as an education that builds tolerance towards other linguistic and cultural groups” (p. 6). One could argue that traditional foreign or second language teaching programmes (where the language is taught as a subject) also aim for intercultural understanding and some form of bilingual competence, but the difference with BE is substantial: using two languages of instruction in school often questions the hegemony of the dominant language; it can challenge national language borders and fashion multiple identities. Therefore, the general goals of BE are far broader than those of second language teaching: BE focuses not only on the acquisition of additional languages but on helping students to become global and responsible citizens as they learn to function across cultures and worlds, that is beyond the cultural borders in which traditional schooling often operates. (García, 2009, p. 6)

Today, scholarly work on BE has moved the field forward from seeing BE simply as the use of two languages in education and bilinguals as two monolinguals in one person (Grosjean, 1982). Many researchers have challenged the monoglossic ideology of bilingualism (García, 2009; Gogolin, 2002; Heller, 2007) which views monolingualism as the norm, and the languages of bilingual speakers as separate and whole. More recently, research on bilingualism has taken a new path regarding the

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conceptualization of language and languages as no longer bounded autonomous systems (Blackledge & Creese, 2010, García & Li Wei, 2014; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007; Martin-Jones, 2007; Weber & Horner 2012; among others). This has led to the development of a heteroglossic perspective on language and languages that better reflects the fluid practices or languaging of bi- or plurilingual speakers. Such a perspective has then given rise to a “reimagining” of bilingual pedagogy no longer centred on languages but on the practices of bilinguals, on their languaging as normal modes of communication. The concept of translanguaging, that is, the idea that bilinguals deploy linguistic features that are part of their unitary language system, has gained some ground in the education of bilinguals (Blackledge & Creese, 2010; García & Li Wei, 2014; Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015). This research (for the most part published in English) is transforming approaches to BE, suggesting that language use in instruction can be more flexible, more dynamic, and socially transformative because the main aim is greater equality and equity. Several recent comprehensive publications on BE and multilingual education illustrate how these new perspectives better reflect the reality of bi- and multilingualism in our globalized societies and push theory forward as far as our understanding of language is concerned. They include the 2009 volume by García Bilingual Education in the 21st Century; the 2012 Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism edited by Martin-Jones, Blackledge, and Creese; the 2015 Handbook of Bilingual and Multilingual Education edited by Wright, Boun, and García; the 2017 5th volume of the latest edition of the Encyclopedia of Language and Education, entitled Bilingual and Multilingual Education and edited by García, Lin, and May; and the 2017 6th edition of Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism by Colin Baker and Wayne Wright.

27.2  Categorizing Languages in BE The different conceptualizations of BE throughout the world cannot be understood outside of the historical, political, and social processes at work in the hierarchization of languages. These processes are reflected in education language policies that categorize languages with different labels according to their official status at the national or supranational levels. Generally speaking, BE either involves learning through two dominant languages that have the same power within a polity, for example French and English in Canada, or two languages of unequal status, like English and Spanish in the US, Spanish having gone through a process of minorization (Flores & Rosa, 2015) because of policies of assimilation. BE can also include indigenous languages which have been marginalized by

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colonization and have become so endangered their survival depends on BE. Many indigenous languages in formerly colonized contexts have acquired a new legitimacy through BE programmes, such as those implemented in Hawai’i, New Zealand, and South Africa for example, and Basque, Irish, or Welsh in Europe, but BE can also be used as a scaffold to a dominant language, as is the case of some BE programmes in Africa, Asia, and the US. Deaf communities around the world have also clamoured for bimodal BE in an effort to include signed languages, many times without success. In other words, BE has developed differently in the case of dominant, immigrant, indigenous, or signed languages. Sometimes the label “heritage” language is used to refer to the languages of immigrant (for example Spanish in the US), indigenous, and even deaf communities. The term “heritage” has been questioned by several researchers (García, 2005; Wiley, 2007; Kupisch & Rothman, 2016) because it hides the bilingual identity of its speakers and because of the way the competence of adult heritage speakers has been analysed in terms of incomplete acquisition. Kupisch and Rothman (2016) argue that the difference in heritage speakers’ languaging is not incompleteness but differentiated acquisition and that a bilingual perspective should be adopted to understand both their language practices and learning needs. While the term heritage is used in the UK alongside the term community languages, it is rarely used in other European countries where languages are labelled as “foreign”, “regional”, or “immigrant”, these denominations also reflecting the different power of their speakers. Hélot and Erfurt (2016), in their volume on BE in France, explain how this labelling allows for BE in some languages but not in others. For example, languages referred to as “regional”, like Breton or Corsican (among others), qualify for immersion education; English and Spanish as “foreign languages” qualify for content and language integrated learning (CLIL) education; but Arabic or Turkish as immigrant languages do not qualify for either. As explained by Sierens and Van Avermaet (2017) for Europe, “BE in migrant languages has nowhere been able to establish itself as a fully valued teaching model” (p. 489). Because of an ideology centred on the acquisition of national languages as the main path to integration, and in spite of discourses on inclusive educational policies, BE in migrant languages is not envisaged as a way to participate in European identity, national cohesion, or even better educational achievement for the people concerned. On the other hand, BE in dominant languages is very strongly supported by European institutions that are stressing the economic advantages of bi- and multilingualism, and the value of linguistic and cultural diversity for European identity. The support for BE in regional minority languages, or “national” minority languages, as they are sometimes referred to in European policy documents, can therefore be understood in relation to

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the incorporation of these groups in a European identity. In contrast, the marginalization of migrant languages is a reflection of exclusion policies. A further point should be mentioned regarding the hegemony of the English language. English dominates foreign language instruction all over the world. The growth of BE programmes throughout the world is also a direct result of the way in which English is being constructed as essential for participation in the global economy. As a result, BE programmes in minoritized languages can be at risk because of the demand for English as social and cultural capital (Cenoz & Gorter, 2015).

27.3  Differentiating Learners in BE Generally speaking, BE has been developed to serve the needs of various kinds of learners, and often, its development has to do with the social position of its speakers in the economic, racial, and national hierarchies of power that exist. On the one hand, there are the children of the elite schooled in several dominant languages in private schools and some international schools whose bilingual schooling is unquestioned. On the other hand, there are those who are lower in the social hierarchy—immigrants, indigenous peoples, the deaf—for whom BE is often out of reach, despite its promises. BE programmes for the elite, especially in countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where English is not the dominant or national language, are commonplace. In contrast, BE programmes for children who are seen as inferior because they are said to speak immigrant, indigenous, regional, and/or signed languages are questioned and are often underresourced. Often these BE programmes are transitional in nature—what Baker (2001) has called “weak forms” of bilingual education. In the US, for example, inequities in educating language-minoritized children in the form of under-resourced and under-funded schools plague even bilingual education programmes that have been developed supposedly to educate them (García & Kleifgen, 2010, 2018). Speakers of languages considered as “immigrant languages” are rarely viewed as bilinguals or multilinguals by education systems that have problematized their language needs within a deficit perspective and compensatory approaches that erase their plurilingual and pluricultural repertoires. Consequently, the linguistic needs of immigrant students are for the most part underserved and their educational path characterized by discriminatory practices. There are still classrooms or playgrounds in Europe, for example, where bi- and multilingual children are forbidden to use their family languages and punished or silenced during pedagogical activities designed for monolingual learners (Agirdag, 2010). In these subtractive times (as described by Bartlett & García, 2011), the bilingualism of

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immigrant students is for the most part made invisible, denied, unfairly assessed, problematized negatively, and, as expressed by Flores and Rosa (2015), the expression of raciolinguistic ideologies. These racialized representations of bilingualism are, for example, very present in the continuous media discourses in Europe blaming immigrant students for the poor results in the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) evaluations and those in the US blaming them for the “achievement gap”. Indigenous children, that is, those who are autochtonous to a geographical territory and who have been conquered or colonized, seldom have opportunities to be educated bilingually, despite the fact that many of them are bilingual to begin with. The many indigenous children are also placed differently in the social hierarchy of privilege and power that makes BE possible. At the top of the hierarchy are children considered indigenous to a territory within a nation-state that has incorporated them and considered to speak “regional languages”. Then, there are those who have been colonized by a “foreign” power, as is the case of many African and Asian children, who are said to be multilingual, speaking many languages that are often considered merely “dialects”. Finally, there are indigenous children of colour who have been conquered or colonized within their own territory and are said to speak “indigenous languages” that have been mostly lost. These categories, of course, have been externally imposed and are not historically accurate, but they have resulted in different privileges and unequal access to bilingual education. Indigenous children of colour, attending schools in what were formerly colonies in Africa and Asia, are in many cases multilingual. However, they are usually instructed monolingually through a colonial language that is constructed as “second” and as not really theirs. Sometimes they receive a transitional form of bilingual education, with one of their more dominant languages used in the first three to four years of school until the shift is made to the former colonial language––usually English or French. Their learning needs are often conceptualized in terms of mother tongue support, not necessarily integrating a bi- or multilingual perspective where all their languages are used as languages of instruction to access curriculum content. Skutnabb-Kangas and McCarty (2008) explain that without such an understanding of mother tongue education, the students do not benefit from the cognitive and social benefits of BE. The issue here is that these children are being discriminated against through language use in school that does not meet their educational needs. There are, of course, BE programmes in former colonial contexts, but in most instances, these are experimental programmes, and their success always depends on the ability to document progress in the former colonial

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language. This is, for example, the case of the three-year BE experiment in French Polynesia in which children were taught through Tahitian, as well as French. The researchers had to prove that BE did not have a negative effect on the acquisition of French (Paia et al., 2015). What the research showed, however, like in other contexts of indigenous BE, was the crucial role of the indigenous language in the cultural, identity, and academic development of Tahitian students. There are also children of indigenous people whose language practices were silenced by conquerors and colonizers within their own territory as “natives” were constructed as “savages” and “primitive”. This is the case, for example, of Native Americans in the US and of Māoris in New Zealand. Their efforts with BE are brave attempts at language revitalization. For example, the Kōhanga Reo early childhood centres in New Zealand, where members of the community, including elders, immerse very young children in Māori language and cultural practices, has been most influential with other threatened communities around the world in developing what are called “language nests”. Perhaps just as invisible as indigenous people, but now also silent to the hearing world, are deaf students. For a long time, the deaf were obliged to acquire oral speech and categorized as deficient because of a medical condition, rather than offered the possibility of BE through a signed language (Swanwick, 2017). Technological advances, such as cochlear implants, have further problematized the value of BE for the deaf. Yet, BE for the deaf can do much to leverage their bimodal capacities for learning, bringing forth the interrelationships between signed languages and written languages. The advocacy of deaf communities shows great disparities throughout the world, but the legitimation of signed languages in many countries has led to signed languages becoming languages of instruction. Today, with deaf youth increasingly immigrating to contexts with different signed and spoken languages, deaf bilingualism is becoming more multifaceted, and yet this complexity is hardly recognized even in the few BE programmes for deaf students. Minoritized speakers have always had little access to effective and productive education programmes, and especially to BE. A growing body of research argues that BE, in their case, is a matter of social justice and linguistic human rights (Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 2017; Weber, 2014). At the other end of the spectrum, children of the international elites have long benefited from private education and instruction in not only two, but several languages. Their desire to become bilingual has been seen as a given in order to become transnational multilingual elites in present day globalized societies. Whether financed by corporations or the governments of powerful nations (as in the case of French schools abroad, for example), these learners’ plurilingual competence in prestigious

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languages is highly valourized at home, supported at school, and seen as highly desirable in contemporary society. Finally, the children of the middle classes who attend state schools also need to develop a wider range of linguistic and intercultural competences to function in globalized societies. Because traditional models of language education have shown limited outcomes in the development of bilingualism, middle class parents are learning to navigate educational systems and find BE programmes that will increase their children’s linguistic and cultural capital (see, for an example in the US, Jaumont, 2017). It has also become quite common for such families to resort to informal BE outside of schooling through the recruitment of au pairs (Bouchés, 2017) or through language immersion summer camps.

27.4  Differentiating Types of BE The scientific literature on BE has provided a detailed analysis of many different models, types, and frameworks (see Baker, 2001; Baker & Wright, 2017; and García, 2009, for comprehensive reviews). Various typologies (Genesee et al., 2006; Hornberger, 1991) have been drawn up according to the goals of the programmes, for example maintenance, transitional, or enrichment aims; some are mainstream models, others are not; some serve minoritized students and others majority students. A general overview of research shows a proliferation of denominations for BE programmes with different levels of erasure of the adjective bilingual or, at the other end of the spectrum, promotion of hegemonic languages such as English. Like the labelling of languages, the labelling of BE programmes hides the complexity of the factors involved in their implementation, aims, and outcomes in very different contexts. Transitional BE only supports BE for a limited time and ends up being discontinued once learners can access knowledge in the school language. Developmental BE aims for the continuous support of home language practices by continuing instruction through the medium of two languages. Substantial research has shown the greater effectiveness of types that fit within a developmental framework over those that are transitional in nature. Yet, this has not necessarily convinced policy makers to support these programmes further. Although developmental BE is the type preferred in the education of elites, it is the object of attacks when it is practised with minoritized populations. In the United States, for example, BE that served minoritized students came under repeated attacks from English-only pressure groups at the turn of the century, even when they were transitional in nature. These groups were instrumental in the legal banning of all types of BE in

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California, Arizona, and Massachusetts in 1998, 2000, and 2002, respectively. The attack on bilingual education resulted in the elimination of the term “bilingual” from all federal legislation and even from branding as “bilingual” the bilingual education that was being forged as a globalized neoliberal economy was coming into being—what was designated as dual language education (DLE). Sometimes also referred to as two-way immersion or two-way dual immersion, “dual language education” was conceived as being two-way, that is, made up of both English-speakers, as well as learners of English, who are instructed in two languages while developing both of them. These programmes are a strong form of BE with the noteworthy ethical aims of social cohesion. Present day researchers (Baker & Wright, 2017; García, 2009; García et al., 2018; Menken & Avni, 2017; Sánchez, García, & Solorza, 2017) are reintroducing the term bilingual to describe them (thus, Dual Language Bilingual Education or DLBE) in order to combat the delegitimation of BE in the US and to disrupt the very strict guidelines of two categories of students and strict language compartmentalization. Furthermore, many scholars have warned that DLBE programmes run the risk of supporting the bilingualism of white majority families, while continuing to view the bilingualism of minoritized families of colour with suspicion, a caution first exposed by Valdés (1997) and expressed by many others (Gort, 2015, 2017; Gort & Sembiante, 2015; Palmer et al., 2014; Sánchez, García, & Solorza, 2017) Varghese & Park, 2010). Nevertheless, two-way dual language bilingual programmes in the US are meeting a growing demand from parents who are advocating for BE in the public sector and for languages other than Spanish (Jaumont, 2017). Recent research by Collier and Thomas (2017) in the US has shown that DLBE has had a clear positive impact on both kinds of learners—English-speaking and Spanish-speaking—and that they allow those classified as “English learners” to achieve as well as their monolingual English language peers. Faced with a globalized economy, as well as the failure of English-only programmes to educate emergent bilinguals, even states that had previously outlawed bilingual education have started to advocate for DLBE. In 2016, voters in California lifted restrictions on BE, with the support of 73% of the total population. The Massachusetts Legislature also approved a bill in 2017 that reinstated a bilingual education option. The tension inherent in dual language bilingual education programmes has to do with their potential as a way of educating all students bilingually regardless of where they fall in the bilingual continuum, and the strict ways in which they are implemented as “dual language”, allowing little flexibility of language practices. Because of the ways in which many times it has been implemented, DLBE has been and is in many cases “a promise unfulfilled” (García et al., 2018).

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Immersion is another well-known denomination in BE research and better understood by the wider public because of the success of French and English programmes for Anglophones in Canada (Swain, 2000). Immersion means students are fully or partially learning curriculum content in French at no cognitive cost to English, the language first acquired. Thoroughly researched and shown to be very efficient, Canadian bilingual immersion programmes have had a huge impact on BE in many other countries. In Europe, for example, immersion BE was the model chosen to support the revitalization of regional languages such as Irish, Welsh, Basque, and Catalan, among others. The most successful and widely researched immersion programme in Europe has been implemented in the Basque Autonomous Region of Spain, where the regional government has made the revitalization of Basque a priority and allowed substantial funding for its implementation and for teacher education (Cenoz, 2009). In Europe, one finds a widely implemented type of BE programme under the denomination content and language integrated learning (CLIL). The main goal of CLIL is concerned with devising more efficient teaching approaches of additional languages in mainstream education, for the most part dominant European languages; CLIL is not concerned with the specific language needs of learners who are already bi- or plurilingual, which is somewhat paradoxical because these learners are in fact in a situation similar to CLIL, learning content and the language of instruction at the same time. For this reason, Hélot and Cavalli (2017) are critical of CLIL because it focuses on languages (and dominant ones) rather than on speakers of languages, and therefore does not truly challenge the monoglossic ideology of mainstream schooling. That said, the conceptualization of CLIL by the researchers who conceptualized it first (Mehisto, Marsh, & Frigols, 2008; Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010) opened real didactic potential to rethink second language acquisition through its integration into content teaching. Dalton-Puffer (2011) sums up the objectives of CLIL in the following terms: The primary motivation for using CLIL is the desire to improve language skills by broadening the scope of traditional foreign language teaching, while at the same time achieving the same level of specialist knowledge as would be attained if the lesson were taught in the students’ first language. However, in many cases additional expectations are associated with CLIL: that it will deepen the degree of subject learning through cognitive stimulation; offer access to knowledge repositories available in other languages; better prepare students for a professional career in an era of globalization; deepen intercultural understanding and language awareness; provide a more learner-centred and innovative didactic approach; overcome traditional subject boundaries, to name but a few.  (p. 183)

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However, there has been such a range of different implementations of CLIL in so many diverse educational contexts that Dalton-Puffer (2011) concludes that these aims rarely stand up to empirical review. The same conclusion is reached by Cenoz, Genesee, and Gorter (2014), who argue that CLIL is an umbrella term that lacks conceptual clarity because, among other reasons, research in Europe tends to set itself apart from the substantial body of knowledge developed on BE in the US and Canada. It is mostly the diversified implementation of CLIL across so many European countries that makes it difficult to evaluate the model and its effect on learners and teachers. Wicke and Haataja (2015) review CLIL in Germany and distinguish between “hard CLIL” and “soft CLIL”. In hard CLIL, subject content is taught by subject teachers in a second language, and the primary goal is subject content, whereas in soft CLIL, the content is taught by language teachers and the main goal is second language learning. This of course is linked to the professional status and identity of teachers who, in Germany, teach several subjects, whereas in France they are monodisciplinary, which means content teachers must be educated to feel secure enough in their linguistic competence to teach their subject through an L2. Dalton-Puffer (n.d.) summarizes a study from Hong Kong (Kong, 2009) that showed clearly that the professional identity of the teacher has a considerable bearing on the design of the language and content components of the CLIL lesson: when language teachers teach CLIL, there is evidence of a clear tendency to trivialize the subject content, whereas teachers with qualifications in the subject tend to react with little sensitivity to the lin(para. 11) guistic needs of the learners.

This means that CLIL teacher education would benefit from the latest research on bilingual education (García, 2009), specifically on translanguaging pedagogy (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017) or the use of both languages throughout content lessons. As researchers in the field of bilingual education for many years, we have always argued that the labelling of various models of bilingual education should not erase their bilingual dimension, which is perhaps one of the reasons why CLIL remains on the whole a weak form of BE. Another point made by researchers on CLIL in Germany (Dalton-Puffer, 2011) and in France (Hélot and Cavalli, 2017) is that because English is the most widely offered language in these programmes in Europe, evaluating CLIL in English should include a reflection on the popularity of English in terms of linguistic and cultural capital for adolescent learners. A further point concerning CLIL is the fact that in most countries it is not offered to all learners but chosen by the most motivated students (and parents) who see the added value of this language learning model. Thus, despite the positive experiences of CLIL among students who can avail of it across

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Europe (Coyle, 2013), and the support for CLIL in European language policy documents, it should not be forgotten that in the countries where CLIL is selective, it participates in the reinforcement of educational inequality and social hierarchies. A useful distinction in the scientific literature was made by Baker (1993), who classified BE models as promoting either strong or weak forms of bilingual education. His analysis shows clearly how weak forms of BE are the preserve of language-minoritized communities: most common are submersion approaches, for example, placing students in monolingual classrooms with students who speak the dominant language without any support. There are some submersion approaches that offer some measure of support to students. For example, in the US, there are structured English immersion or Sheltered English programmes where English-only is used in instructing those who are learning English, but where the instruction is adapted in some ways. There are also English as a New or Second Language programmes, where in some of which a small group of students classified as “English learners” are offered special instruction for some period of time (known as “pull-out ESL”), and others where a specialized ESL teacher offers emergent bilinguals support in their mainstream class (known as “push-in ESL”). Transitional BE programmes that have monolingualism as an outcome and assimilation as a social aim are another weak form of BE. Strong forms of BE on the other hand, have been developed mostly for majority children, in dominant languages, and aim clearly for bilingualism and biliteracy, pluralism, and enrichment. They include all the developmental BE programmes where instruction is carried out through two dominant languages, for example, CLIL in Europe and the immersion programmes developed in French and English in Canada. Strong forms of BE can also be made available to both minority and majority children together, as in the two-way DLBE programmes in the US, where English speakers and speakers of the other language are instructed bilingually together and access all curriculum contents through the two languages. Further strong forms of BE programmes are those which aim at the development and maintenance of indigenous or heritage languages of minoritized communities in which emphasis is in developing and leveraging the home languages of the learners, and bilingualism and biliteracy is the expected outcome. Another dichotomy extensively used in research on BE since the work of Lambert and Tucker (1972) is the difference made between additive and subtractive bilingualism. The distinction points to the varied societal and educational conditions in which BE develops. Cummins (2001) defined additive bilingualism as referring “to the form of bilingualism that results when students add a second language to their intellectual tool-kit while continuing to develop conceptually and academically in their first language” (p. 163). Subtractive bilingualism, on the other hand, develops when the second

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language has more power than the first and gradually replaces the first language. Subtractive bilingualism happens in the context of submersion education, such as when emergent bilingual students are educated through the dominant language of instruction with no effort on the part of the school to support their other language(s). The constructs of additive and subtractive bilingualism have proved very useful to understanding the relationship between societal power relations, institutional racism, and the under-achievement of minoritized learners. Throughout his publications, Cummins (1986, 2001) has insisted on the positive role played by schools and teachers who contest these coercive societal power relations in both monolingual and BE programmes. When minoritized students are schooled in additive bilingual contexts, they have been shown to acquire a high level of competence in both languages (August & Shanahan, 2006). In a recent review of BE, Flores and Baetens Beardsmore (2015) go beyond Baker’s classification of strong or weak BE programmes to distinguish between BE that either challenges or reinforces societal hierarchies. In doing so, they question the notion of additive bilingualism because it projects a conception of languages as distinct and compartmentalized in a first language (L1) and second language (L2), for example. This is the case of CLIL programmes in Europe, French/English immersion in Canada, and DLBE programmes in the US that support dominant language speakers to increase their linguistic capital through separate or additional instruction in an additional language. Flores and Baetens Beardsmore propose an analysis of BE programmes based on the socio-historical conditions that made them possible, with a view to exposing the possibilities for social change embedded in the structure of BE programmes. Their analysis is based on the distinction made by García (2009) between a monoglossic and heteroglossic understanding of bilingualism.

27.5 Recent Conceptual, Policy, and Programmatic Turns in BE Because there are so many forms of BE, and so many different understandings of what constitute BE, recent research has moved away from using typologies to describe BE models. As shown by García (2009), they do not capture the linguistic complexities of multilingualism in the twenty-first century. However, it has taken a long time for research on BE, and even more for policies and practices in BE, to free themselves from the domination of a monoglossic ideology surrounding bilingualism. Structured by a dichotomous interpretation of languages as either L1 or L2, and therefore on bilingualism being simply additive or subtractive, and consequently on

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a pedagogy of language separation, the scholarly field of BE has begun to question its assumptions in the twenty-first century as many of the programmes and policies that are being developed continue to reflect the earlier conceptualization. In the twentieth century, BE had two goals—either it served the cultural interests of the elite who wanted access to a “foreign” language, or it was seen as a way to “remediate” the language deficits of minoritized speakers, as they learned a “second” language. In the 1960s, during a shortlived period of defence of civil rights and a struggle for independence and autonomy of minoritized people all over the world, BE was organized by communities who wanted to educate their children with cultural and linguistic practices that they considered their own. BE was a source of pride. Through struggle and community resistance, some measure of success was achieved, but the BE movement soon became coopted by the interests of the global neoliberal economy that needed flexible multilingual workers (Flores, 2013). To build on the tropes proposed by Duchêne and Heller (2013), BE for pride has been today substituted by BE for profit (see Flores & García, 2017, for the shortcomings of both ideologies in the US; the same analysis could be applied to the European context). That BE is important for children of all kinds is a given. The problem, however, is that although more inclusive, many of the recent types of bilingual programmes (for example, DLBE in the US and CLIL in Europe, as we saw above) rely on outdated conceptualizations of bilingualism that favour only the interests of nation-states, and not necessarily those of minoritized communities. In the early twentieth century, bilingualism was most often sequential, that is, learners came into classrooms with one language and acquired a “second language” that they would not necessarily appropriate as their own. Educators in foreign language education programmes, as well as in bilingual education programmes, thought then of bilingualism as the simple addition of two languages. Today, however, more and more children are growing up as simultaneous bilinguals, a product of the greater movement of people in a globalized world fuelled by a neoliberal economy, but also by war and growing inequality. This has led many scholars to talk about bilingualism as first language (De Houwer, 2009). Multilingual people cross physical and virtual boundaries every day, and their dynamic bilingualism (García, 2009) has become more visible to us all. As the complexity of language practices that accompany multilingual users became more visible, BE acquired another responsibility—to impose linguistic order and to control the language practices of the multilingual students in their midst. At the same time, as a neoliberal globalized order was imposed, BE assumed a separate responsibility, that of responding to the growing marketization and commodification of bilingualism. The two

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seemingly contradictory goals of control of multilingual practices of communities and commodification of bilingualism for profit are smoothed over in the newer types of BE programmes, which although open to minoritized multilingual speakers are poised to benefit only language majorities, unless their policies and practices become more flexible. This is the case, for example, of some DLBE programmes in the US. One educational authority that we know of demands that an imaginary line be drawn in each classroom, with everything on one side of the room in one language, and everything on the other side in the other. This educational authority requests that the “dual languages” be mirror images of each other, negating the dynamic nature of all bilingualism. One of the functions of schools has always been to develop children’s use of the standardized dominant language of the state, but in adopting more than one language of instruction, BE has the potential to also foster equity among social groups, that is, racial, gender, and labour justice. However, the focus on languages as entities of nation-states, and not on the language potential and practices of all human beings, can drive BE to constrain educational opportunities for minoritized communities and to not provide any measure of equity. The policing of separate use of two languages as if they were spoken by two monolinguals in two different national contexts disregards the dynamic practices of bilingual people. A very long time ago, one of the most perceptive and early scholars of bilingualism, Einar Haugen (1972), argued that for a language to be sustained in a community where the dominant language was another, “it is better to bend than to break.” There is little bending in many of the dual language programmes recently instituted in the US, as well as in CLIL programmes in Europe, or even in many of the BE programmes institutionalized in supposedly multilingual nation-states like Luxembourg. The question for us is why? Could it be that language, bilingualism, and even BE as presently implemented are being used as proxies for racism and xenophobia and to further institutionalize inequities? This is the position of many scholars who study the effects of raciolinguistic ideologies (see, for example, Rosa & Flores, 2017). What can then be done to act on the potential of all types of BE programmes? If the starting point of BE became the children, families, and communities that want and need BE to educate their children meaningfully, we would start by recognizing language to be simply the users’ full semiotic repertoire to make meaning. This is the perspective taken by the concept of translanguaging, a term first coined by Cen Williams in Welsh to describe a bilingual pedagogical practice where English and Welsh were used in the same instructional space, one for input, the other one for output (Baker, 2001; Lewis, Jones, & Baker, 2012a, 2012b). Recent translanguaging theory focuses on speakers’ capacity to deploy features (or signs)

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from their semiotic repertoire as the most suitable hint to communicate a message (García & Li Wei, 2014; Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015). Although a translanguaging capacity is present in all speakers, multilingual users of language are different from monolingual ones in two ways: they have more features in their semiotic repertoire, and they have more experience with selection of features to communicate. That is, multilinguals have more features in their semiotic system because they live socially in two or more worlds and through two or more named languages. In addition, they have more experience selecting suitable features (from their linguistic or communicative repertoire) to fit different communicative situations, since they often have to communicate with those whose semiotic repertoire reflects only one world. These differences mean that multilingual users are often perceived by monolinguals as “making errors”, but it is important to understand that this is a social judgment, not a cognitive nor a linguistic one. Many researchers are using the construct of translanguaging to challenge the restrictive linguistic policies and practices of always using only one or two languages separately to learn at school. The entrenched bilingual pedagogy of language separation is giving way to a new pedagogy of multilingualism and multiliteracies no longer focused on two languages, but on the full linguistic and semiotic repertoires of learners and on their heteroglossic practices, now seen as central resources for learning (Blackledge & Creese, 2014; Cenoz & García, 2017; Cummins, 2007, 2008; Weber, 2014). The construct of translanguaging has also been helpful in acknowledging that BE in its traditional interpretation falls short in educating all groups equitably and for bilingualism. More and more researchers (see Wright, Boun, & García, 2015) are analysing the way a translanguaging pedagogy is transformative for children, teachers, and education in general, because it demystifies so many traditional representations of language learning, of bilingualism, and even of language: notions such as the native speaker, balanced bilingualism, L1 versus L2, code-switching, additive bilingualism, heritage language, etc., are all being revisited in order to put the linguistic practices of multilingual children first (Weber, 2014). Such theoretical advances are groundbreaking because they answer the very questions teachers are asking all over the world when they have children in their classrooms with a multiplicity of language practices with which they have no familiarity. García, Johnson, and Seltzer (2017) identify three components of a translanguaging pedagogy—stance, design, and shifts. Teachers who leverage bilingual students’ translanguaging have a stance, a deep belief that all their students’ language practices are a resource that transcend the standardized language of schools and can be used to make meaning of academic

Bilingual Education and Policy

tasks and to learn. Besides having a stance, these teachers also design units, lessons, instruction, and assessment that leverage their students’ linguistic and cultural practices and develop in them a critical multilingual consciousness, that is, an awareness of how named standardized languages have been socially constructed and used to exclude some and include others. However, beyond the translanguaging design, a translanguaging pedagogy also relies on teacher shifts, the moment-by-moment decisions teachers make to respond to learners’ needs. Translanguaging pedagogy is a tool for social justice, disrupting the linguistic hierarchizations that schools have created. Translanguaging in BE lives in the tensions, in what the lesbian Chicana scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) calls “the borderlands”, a space of complexity, situatedness, and connection that “springs from inside the crevices that separate social worlds” (Ayala, 2009, p. 72). Translanguaging has been theorized “from the flesh” (Anzaldúa, 1987) and the voices of multilingual people who live in borderlands, in the in-between spaces where worlds and words leak into each other, and where language is neither one nor the other, but both and beyond, with all of it belonging to people. To incorporate translanguaging into BE, spaces will have to be created within the strict language allocation policies of the present. Working in the tension present in the space between educational authorities that demand rigidity in language allocation and that of the practices of multilingual speakers that do not clearly fit into one or the other space, some educators are beginning to propose ways of introducing translanguaging in-between spaces that are not simply a scaffold or support, but that are transformative for people and society. For example, Sánchez, García, and Solorza (2017), in collaboration with other CUNY-NYSIEB colleagues, have proposed reframing the strict language allocation policy of DLBE. The reframing clearly preserves the spaces for the two named languages in BE, since there is recognition that learners must add new linguistic and other semiotic features to their repertoire and they must practise selecting those that can produce the most success when one or another language is called for in the interaction. Within those instructional spaces for one or the other language, teachers are encouraged to use translanguaging lifesaver rings to ensure that students are making meaning of the lesson. This use of translanguaging is considered a scaffold, and teachers put these translanguaging lifesaver rings on students and take them off depending on the task. However, Sánchez, García, and Solorza (2017) also propose two other translanguaging spaces that are more transformative in recognizing the in-between spaces in which bilingualism is developed. One, a translanguaging documentation space, encourages students to use their full language repertoire during specific times in order for educators to be able to properly

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assess what students know and how they know it. This space not only validates and authorizes bilingual translanguaging practices in school, but also enables teachers to assess bilingual students holistically. In this way, for example, teachers can differentiate between students’ knowledge of features of language (what teachers see as knowledge of English, French, Spanish, etc.) and knowledge of use of language (for example, ability to narrate, to argue, to find text-based evidence, to write argumentative texts, etc.). In addition, and most importantly, the proposal includes a translanguaging transformative space that encourages language users to become agentive in their selection of features. Instead of being required to use features associated with one named language or the other by teachers, the students themselves make those decisions. Thus, multilingual speakers have the opportunity to develop the transformative capacity of language to make meaning for themselves and their lives, outside of the bureaucratic policing of language that takes place in schools. The proposal to introduce translanguaging spaces into DLBE has not been without controversy, as even scholars of bilingualism and bilingual educators fear that without strict control, the space for the minoritized language, Spanish in most cases in the US, will be ceded to English.

27.6 Conclusion Bilingual education is not new, and it is spreading throughout the world, but there are tensions in the ways it is often enacted and the plurilingual practices of bilingual people in the twenty-first century. For BE to fulfill its promise of educating all children equitably, some adjustments need to be made to programmes and practices. This chapter offers some ways in which this might happen. The question for us, two scholars who have spent a lifetime working on BE, is precisely that raised at the end of the musical, Hamilton. The story, about the founding fathers of the US, played by actors of colour and written by a Latinx playwright, Lin-Manuel Miranda, ends with a song that raises the question: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Will BE let minoritized people live and tell their story? Will BE continue to be simply the story told by educational authorities that wish to control the people’s plurilingual practices and commodify them for others, or will the story be written by bilingual people themselves? If so, then their complex language practices, and not simply the named languages of nation-states, have to be part of the story we develop in the future. It is possible to work in the in-between spaces, and simultaneously to toil in the many separate spaces in which we all lead our lives, but it is important to make room in schools for the many who live “entre mundos”, in the

Bilingual Education and Policy

borderlands. To do so, language has to be seen first and foremost as an ability of all to make meaning, and not simply as a regulatory mechanism to sort people, or nations. The extent to which we address the tension of these two representations of language in schools will tell the future story of BE.

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Otheguy, R., García, O., & Reid, W. (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review, 6(3), 281–307. Paia, M., Cummins, J., Nocus, I., Salaün, M., & Vernaudon, J. (2015). Intersections of language ideology, power, and identity: Bilingual education and indigenous language revitalization in French Polynesia. In W. E. Wright, S. Boun, & O. García (eds), The handbook of bilingual and multilingual education (145–163). Malden, MA: John Wiley. Palmer, D. K., Martínez, R. A., Mateus, S. G., & Henderson, K. (2014). Reframing the debate on language separation: Toward a vision for translanguaging pedagogies in the dual language classroom. The Modern Language Journal, 98(3), 757–772. Pérez-Cañado, M. L. (2015). CLIL research in Europe: Past, present, and future. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 15, 315–341. Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language and Society, 46, 1–27. Sánchez, M.T., García, O., & Solorza, C. (2017). Reframing language allocation policy in dual language bilingual education. Bilingual Research Journal, 41, 37–51. Sierens, S., & Van Avermaet, P. (2017). Bilingual education in migrant languages in western Europe. In O. García, A. Lin, & S. May, Bilingual education. Encyclopedia of language and education (Vol. 5, pp. 489–504). Cham: Springer. Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & McCarty, T. (2008). Key concepts in bilingual education: Ideological, historical, epistemological, and empirical foundations. In J. Cummins & N. Hornberger (eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education (2nd edn., Vol. 5, pp. 3–17). New York: Springer. Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & Phillipson, R. (eds.) (2017). Language rights. London/ New York: Routledge. Swain, M. (2000). French immersion research in Canada: Recent contributions to SLA and applied linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 20, 199–212. Swanwick, R. (2017). Languages and languaging in deaf education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valdés, G. (1997). Dual-language immersion programs: A cautionary note concerning the education of language-minority students. Harvard Educational Review, 67, 391–429. Varghese, M. M., and Park, C. (2010). Going global: Can dual-language programs save bilingual education? Journal of Latinos and Education, 9(1), 72–80. Weber, J.-J. (2014). Flexible multilingual education. Putting children’s needs first. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

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28 Heritage Language Instruction Kim Potowski and Sarah J. Shin

28.1  Introduction: What is a Heritage Language? The concept of a heritage language is broad and highly dependent on context, making it impossible to offer a generalizable account in a chapter such as this. Instead, we present specific contexts to illustrate the concept, focusing principally on the United States but also including other contexts with which we are familiar. The term heritage language emerged in Canada in the late 1970s in the context of the Ontario Heritage Languages Programs (Cummins, 2005). It was used to refer to any language other than English and French, the country’s two official languages, and included languages spoken by Canada’s First Nation people or by its immigrants (Cummins, 1991). In the Australian context, heritage languages were defined as languages other than English (also known as LOTEs; Clyne, 1991). In the United States, the term has been used synonymously with community language, native language, and mother tongue to refer to an immigrant, indigenous, or ancestral language that a speaker has a personal relevance and desire to (re)connect with (Wiley, 2005). In Europe, the term minority language has been used more frequently than heritage language, and a further distinction has been made between languages of immigrant and refugee groups—immigrant minority (IM) languages on the one hand, and languages of indigenous groups (regional minority (RM) languages) on the other (de Bot & Gorter, 2005). Heritage language and heritage language speakers can be defined in two major ways. In the broad definition, a heritage language is part of a person’s family or cultural heritage, regardless of the person’s functional proficiency in the language and whether the language may have been spoken in the home (Wiley, 2014). Van Deusen-Scholl (2003) refers to these individuals as “learners with a heritage motivation” (p. 221). who “seek

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to reconnect with their family’s heritage through language, even though the linguistic evidence of that connection may have been lost for generations” (p. 222). An example of a learner with a heritage motivation is a fifth generation Chinese American who grew up in an English-speaking home but decides to take Chinese lessons as an adult to reconnect with his family’s heritage. Such learners exercise their agency in determining whether they are heritage learners of that language (Hornberger & Wang, 2008). In the narrow definition, a heritage language is one in which the learner has some measure of competence through early exposure to the language in the home and the community (Carreira & Kagan, 2011). It is often the language that was “first in the order of acquisition but was not completely acquired because of the individual’s switch to another dominant language” (Polinsky & Kagan, 2007, p. 369). Valdés (2001) defines a heritage language speaker as “someone who is raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken and who speaks or at least understands the language and is to some degree bilingual in the home language and in English” (p. 38). These narrower definitions of heritage language and heritage language learners are more useful for planning heritage language curriculum and instruction, including assessment of learner needs and programme placement. This is because teaching a language to heritage learners with a familial connection to, but zero proficiency in, the language is, linguistically speaking, practically the same as teaching it to second language learners. While the term heritage language has gained popularity since the late 1990s, particularly in the US, its use has not been without problems. Some think that the term contributes to perpetuating negative stereotypes about minority languages and their speakers. In such thinking, children in heritage language classes are relegated to their historic pasts (García, 2005). Baker and Jones (1998) caution that: The danger of the term “heritage language” is that, relative to powerful majority languages, it points more to the past and less to the future, to traditions rather than to the contemporary. The danger is that the heritage language becomes associated with ancient cultures, past traditions and more “primitive times”. This is also true of the terms “ethnic” (used in the US) and “ancestral”. These terms may fail to give the impression of a modern, international language that is of value in a technological society. (p. 509)

Wiley (2014) points out that deciding what constitutes one’s heritage language may be problematic if it is assumed that one should have a single heritage language. For example, there are ethnically Japanese people raised in South America who then return to Japan; are both Japanese and Spanish their heritage languages? Many ethnic Chinese speak other

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Chinese “dialects” or languages in addition to Mandarin, and there are Chinese heritage speakers in Singapore and many other locations. Some Chinese immigrant families in the US enroll their children in Mandarin heritage language schools even though Mandarin is not their home or community language. In such cases, Wiley (2014) states, Mandarin may function as a “surrogate” (p. 24) heritage language, which can connect ethnic Chinese children with Chinese culture. A similar argument can be made about immigrant parents from India who enroll their children in Hindi classes in many parts of the world, out of a desire to connect their children to their cultural heritage even though Hindi was not their native or regional language in India prior to immigration. In recent years, the heritage language construct, and the concept of bilingualism more generally, have come under significant criticisms from scholars who have adopted a poststructuralist view on languages. According to this view, languages are not static “codes” with fixed boundaries and rules but, rather, fluid resources in meaning-making practices (Pennycook, 2010). Many new terms have emerged in the bilingualism literature that reflect this view, such as code-meshing, crossing, translanguaging, heteroglossia, and flexible bilingualism (see Shin, 2018, for a review). The key difference between this set of terms and some of the earlier investigations of bilingual speech is that whereas the earlier studies were focused on how bilinguals shuttle between distinct languages with rigid boundaries, the later research is based on a more flexible view of bilingualism and fluidity between languages. Strict separation of languages, as has been the prevailing goal in educational settings including many heritage language education programmes, is neither desirable nor warranted in this more holistic view of the bilingual. The term translanguaging, for example, refers to students’ use of their entire language repertoire to demonstrate what they know and can do with language (García & Li, 2015). In a translanguaging classroom, language minority students are encouraged to write and speak with whatever resources they have at their disposal and not wait until they have fully acquired the language of the school. Translanguaging treats multilingualism as the norm rather than the exception and empowers students to contest the “one language only” ideologies of monolingual classrooms. Indeed, it challenges the very notion of “speech community,” as García, Zakharia, and Otcu (2013) argue: Language and ethnicity are not simple reflections of “heritage speech” communities, or of “practice communities”. The social action and networks in which individuals are involved in the here-and-now juxtapose multiple linguistic and cultural identities from which we select features at different times to perform our identities. (p. 34)

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Thus, there are many complexities within the notion of “heritage” language in an age of increasingly mobile and multilingual populations. Despite these difficulties associated with the use of the term heritage language, heritage languages nonetheless have significant meaning for the populations that speak them and an education system that supports their learning and development. In the following section, we discuss some of the major heritage languages around the world and why it is important to promote them.

28.2 What are the Major Heritage Languages Around the World, and Why is it Important to Promote Them? In this section, we sketch just some heritage language contexts; many interesting places necessarily have to be omitted. According to the European Commission (2017), the European Union has twenty-four official languages and about sixty regional minority languages. Increased mobility has resulted in more migrants in EU countries in recent years, and at least 175 nationalities are present within the EU’s borders that have brought a wide range of languages with them. Recent immigration to Europe introduced substantial communities of speakers of non-European languages, including Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, Berber, and Kurdish. In addition, Chinese, Filipino, and various languages of Africa and India form numerous smaller diaspora communities within the EU. However, despite major efforts of the Council of Europe to raise the status of minority languages, many remain endangered (De Bot & Gorter, 2005). According to the European Commission (2015), significant achievement gaps have been reported between children of migrants and nativeborn children in European countries. The European Commission report states that helping students to learn their mother tongues alongside the language of instruction in school enhances not only their mother tongue proficiencies but also their competences in the language of instruction, leading to better school and social outcomes. Other stated longer-term benefits of heritage language instruction include enhanced selfconfidence and cultural awareness, and increased employment opportunities. Overall, the report makes strong recommendations for providing both formal and informal opportunities for students to learn their heritage languages. What also should be explored is how the immigrants relate to local minority languages. For example, how do Nigerians in Ireland relate to Irish, and how do Guatemalan speakers of a Mayan language relate to Catalan in Barcelona, Spain? In any case, studies of heritage languages in Europe include Albanian speakers in Greece (Gkaintartzi et al., 2016); Chinese, Italian, and Spanish in the UK (Lu, 2013; Di Salvo, 2016;

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Guardado, 2018, respectively); Portuguese and Spanish in Germany (Melo Pfeifer & Schmidt, 2012; Ramos Méndez-Sahlender, 2018, respectively); and Spanish in Italy, Switzerland, and Sweden (Bonomi & Sanfelici, 2018; Sánchez Abchi, 2018; Neilson Parada, 2018, respectively). Australia is also linguistically very diverse. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016), about twenty-one per cent of the Australian population speak a language other than English at home. In total, more than 300 languages are spoken in Australia, including Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Italian, Greek, Hindi, Spanish, and Punjabi, as well as Australia’s Aboriginal languages and Torres Strait Islander languages. Following the National Policy on Languages, which established a framework for an explicit pluralistic language policy (Lo Bianco, 1987), the Australian Curriculum has included development of the language curriculum in a variety of European and Asian languages, Aboriginal languages, classical languages, and Australian Sign Language. Curricula are being developed in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Modern Greek, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Aboriginal languages (Scarino, 2014). But many other heritage languages (e.g., Khmer, Polish, Tamil, Turkish, and Hindi) have not been included in the plans for development, and speakers of these languages are signalling the need for their languages also to be developed and included in the Australian Curriculum (Scarino, 2014). Although Australia has a national commitment to education in languages other than English, Scarino (2014) notes that heritage language communities face a continuous struggle for legitimacy. She observes that despite immense activity on the part of all those involved and interested in promoting linguistic diversity, language education remains fragile, and that there has been a constant move towards reducing the diversity and complexity of provision of languages in education. Liddicoat (2018) documents indigenous and immigrant languages in Australia, and Jones Díaz and Walker (2018) explore Spanish as a heritage language in both Australia and New Zealand. Other linguistically diverse nations have seen recent work on heritage speakers and their languages, including Cuban Spanish-speakers in Russia (Yakushkina, 2016) and the chapters in Seals and Shah (2018) that include heritage languages in Argentina and Ireland, and specifically Indigenous languages in Canada; Kven in Norway; Finnish, Meänkieli, Yiddish, Romany, and Sami in Sweden; Amazigh in Morocco; German in Namibia; Luganda in Uganda; Ryukyuan languages in Japan; Jejueo in South Korea; Gujarati in Singapore; Te Reo Māori, Samoan, and Ukrainian in New Zealand; and Hindi in Fiji. The US is arguably the nation that in recent history has received the largest number of immigrants. The US Census Bureau (2015) reports that at least 350 languages are spoken in homes throughout the country.

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Number of Languages Spoken in the 15 Largest Metro Areas Number of languages Population in millions (M)

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Source: 2009-2013 American Community Survey For more information, see www.census.gov/acs

Figure 28.1.  Number of languages spoken in the fifteen largest metro areas in the United States.

These include some of the more widely spoken languages such as Spanish, Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Filipino, Vietnamese, German, Korean, French, Arabic, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, and Japanese, but also less widely spoken languages such as Pennsylvania Dutch, Ukrainian, Turkish, Romanian, and Amharic. Also included in the total are 150 different Native American languages, collectively spoken by more than 350,000 people, including Yupik, Dakota, Apache, Keres, and Cherokee. The Census report reveals a remarkable language diversity, especially in the country’s large urban centres (see Figure 28.1). For example, in the New York metro area, close to 200 different languages are spoken, and one in three people speak a language other than English at home. Despite this great linguistic diversity, the condition of many heritage languages remains tenuous. Although twenty per cent of the US population age five or older speak a language other than English at home, according to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2016), only about half

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that number, or ten per cent of the US population, speaks it proficiently. And most of these are heritage language speakers—the overwhelming majority (75.5%) of US adults who reported they could speak a language other than English acquired that language at home. Since much of the learning of languages other than English takes place in the home through intergenerational transmission, promoting these languages should be a priority in increasing national language capacity. The American Academy of Arts & Sciences report also shows that language shift is prevalent among heritage language families and communities across the US. While heritage language speakers are well positioned to develop bilingualism, language proficiency falls quickly in each generation after the first to enter the country, and by the third or fourth generation very few can communicate in their heritage languages. Rapid language shift is indeed a major issue facing virtually all heritage language communities, including Spanish, a language spoken by nearly two-thirds of those who speak a language other than English in the US (Potowski, 2014). The US has often been described as a “language graveyard” because of its history of receiving millions of immigrants and extinguishing their mother tongues within a few generations (Portes & Rumbaut, 2006). In his review of more than three hundred years of language education in the United States, Fishman (2001) observed that: We desperately need competence in languages—to become “a language competent society”, in Tucker’s phrase (1991)—and our huge and varied heritage language resources have a definite role to play in achieving such competence. (p. 95)

Fishman argued that these languages are a national resource that should be treasured and promoted for society’s benefit. However, a decade and a half later, the US has made little progress towards achieving a language competent society. By several measures, languages other than English have been generally neglected in the country’s education, social policy, and international strategies. While more than sixty million Americans (one in five) age five and older speak a language other than English at home (Camarota & Ziegler, 2015), very few of the English-speaking population develop proficiency in a language other than English, and the numbers of school language programmes and qualified language teachers are decreasing (American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2016). Meanwhile, US businesses have reported a critical need for employees who can communicate effectively with the international community (The Language Flagship, 2013), and the US federal government continues to struggle to find representatives with enough language expertise to serve in diplomatic, military, and cultural missions around the world (United States Government Accountability Office, 2017). Since 2002, the United

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States Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a series of reports on two key aspects of foreign language capabilities across the federal government—(1) the use of foreign language skills and (2) the nature and impact of foreign language shortages at federal agencies, particularly those that play a vital role in national security. The 2017 GAO report states that twenty-three per cent of overseas language-designated positions were filled by Foreign Service officers who did not meet the positions’ language proficiency requirements. While this represents an eight-percentage-point improvement from 2008, the Department of State still faces significant language proficiency gaps, which have affected its ability to communicate with foreign audiences, address security concerns, and perform other diplomatic duties. As Fishman and other scholars have argued, the country’s foreign language needs can be addressed in part by tapping a largely underutilized reservoir of language competence that already exists in the US, namely heritage language speakers (Peyton, Ranard, & McGinnis, 2001). Although the range of language proficiencies possessed by heritage language speakers varies widely, individuals who have used a language regularly at home since birth typically have skills that would require non-native speakers hundreds of hours of instruction to acquire (Brecht & Ingold, 2002). Such skills include native pronunciation and fluency, command of a wide range of grammatical structures, extensive vocabulary, and familiarity with implicit cultural norms essential to effective language use (Valdés, 2000). Supporting heritage language speakers from childhood through adulthood to develop advanced proficiencies in their languages, then, is a logical step in addressing the nation’s critical shortage of individuals with foreign language capabilities. Dual language elementary school programmes, to be described ahead, can go a long way in assisting in this endeavour. Apart from a purely utilitarian view of languages that justifies support of heritage languages mainly in terms of serving the economic and military interests of mainstream society, however, fostering heritage languages is important for other reasons. First, it can help improve our approach to teaching languages other than English. For example, a good portion of Spanish language students in the US (as high as twentyfive per cent) already understand and speak Spanish when they show up in mainstream classrooms (Fishman, 2001). Unlike students from nonheritage backgrounds, many heritage Spanish speakers speak Spanish fluently (albeit non-prestige varieties) and bring a great deal of cultural and pragmatic knowledge from informal interactions in their homes and communities. However, heritage learners experience a variety of difficulties when placed in Spanish as a foreign language classes, including vocabulary and grammar used in formal communication, and reading and

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writing (Carreira & Kagan, 2011). Efforts have therefore been made to prepare curricula, lesson plans, and course materials that are tailored specifically to heritage Spanish speakers, with the goal of helping these students develop advanced proficiency that will enrich their personal lives as well as contribute to the intellectual and cultural life of the community and the nation as a whole (see, for example, Beaudrie & Fairclough, 2012; Montrul, 2011). In addition, in US primary schools, there is abundant evidence that children acquire stronger levels of English and also achieve better academically when they are educated in their home or heritage language (Lindholm Leary, 2018). Another important reason for promoting heritage languages is that it honours the country’s heritage language communities and the cultural values that they represent. Vastly multilingual well before the time of the founding of the republic, the United States has a history of rich linguistic diversity (Wiley & Lee, 2009). However, the use of languages other than English in education has been controversial since the early eighteenth century, marked by alternating cycles of acceptance and rejection of those languages (Gándara et al., 2010). The current heritage language movement has grown out of a deeply felt desire on the part of immigrants and indigenous peoples to preserve their languages and cultures (Peyton, Ranard, & McGinnis, 2001). While this grassroots development is encouraging (since language maintenance depends in large part on the communities where the languages are spoken), promoting the nation’s linguistic resources should not be the sole responsibility of the communities involved.

28.3 How are Heritage Language Learners Different from Second or Foreign Language Learners? We stated earlier that heritage language learners who comply with the narrower definition of the term—that is, they have some degree of proficiency in the heritage language—are different from second language learners. We describe here three general ways in which this is true: linguistically, affectively, and academically. Linguistically, we can summarize the differences between a heritage language (HL) and a second language (L2) thus: their path to acquiring the language is different. For example, second language learners almost always learn the grammatical terminology of the forms they are acquiring and have experience conjugating verbs. They typically employ books and other written materials in their study of the language. Most of them begin study of the second language in young adulthood (between twelve and sixteen years of age), and the variety of the language they study is a prestigious one. On the other hand, heritage speakers by definition begin

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learning the language from a very early age and generally do not learn grammatical terminology. Many of them have no exposure to literacy in the heritage language. In addition, it is not uncommon that the variety they acquire is stigmatized because it is associated with rural locations, low levels of formal education, and/or lower socioeconomic classes. On the positive side, heritage speakers typically have more fluid listening and speaking abilities, a larger vocabulary (particularly for everyday items), a more developed understanding of sociolinguistic appropriateness such as when to use polite forms of address, and a more native-like pronunciation. For all of these reasons alone, it is entirely justified and preferable to separate heritage speakers from second language learners at the early stages of instruction. While second language learners need to acquire basic vocabulary, grammar, and communicative abilities, many heritage speakers have a stronger starting base in the language. However, we must keep in mind that heritage speakers are far from a homogenous group. It is certainly true that not all second language learners are identical in their ability and motivation, either. However, the field can generally make assumptions about, for example, what students know in “second semester Arabic” and of what the curriculum should consist, but “second semester heritage speaker Korean” on one campus might need to look entirely different than a course with the same title on another campus. This is due to the very different experiences that students can bring with them. Table 28.1 explores some of the differences that can have major repercussions on the proficiency in the heritage language. Having examined some of the linguistic differences between heritage speakers and second language learners, we turn now to affective considerations. Heritage speakers have a familial connection to the language that is usually absent among second language learners. However, this personal tie can have several unexpected outcomes. Although they may feel more Table 28.1.  Factors related to heritage language (HL) proficiency. Characteristic

Situation where HL is typically stronger

Age of arrival to the country or number of generations the family has been there

The older the individual is when arriving to new country, the more recent the immigration

Schooling and literacy experiences

Bilingual or dual language education

Birth order

First or second born

Age of onset of the mainstream language

The mainstream language is learned later

Presence of monolingual HL speakers (grandparents, etc.)

Such individuals live in the home and/or have frequent contact

Travel to family’s place of origin

Sustained visits

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personally and emotionally connected to the heritage language, many say that their own family members sometimes chastise or mock them for the way they speak it. In addition, when they are being raised in countries that do not appreciate linguistic diversity, they may experience ethnolinguistic bullying (see http://potowski.org/resources/repression for examples in the US). This combination of the subordinate status of their home language in wider society, plus rejection and derision from their families, can lead to a low sense of linguistic self-esteem. Many will say they “don’t really speak” their heritage language—even when, objectively, they have much higher levels of proficiency than their second language counterparts. Cultural experiences can be considered another dimension of affective considerations. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) defines culture in terms of “three Ps”: products, practices, and perspectives. Products are what many people think about when considering culture. These include authors, artists, typical foods, how to celebrate holidays, ways of dressing, and music, but products are just the tip of the iceberg; see Figure 28.2. The next ACTFL layer involves practices, which refer to “what to do, when, and where”—that is, expected patterns of social interaction. For example, when and how is food eaten? How is public space used? How and when does one address elders? Finally, perspectives are the meanings, attitudes, values, and ideas that underlie both products and practices and are often outside of conscious awareness. Heritage speakers vary widely in their exposure to cultural aspects of their heritage, and thus also vary significantly vis-à-vis their second language learning counterparts.

Literature Language Flags Dress Games Religion Fine arts Cuisine Festivals Music Values Religious beliefs Expectations Perceptions Attitudes towards Importance of social status space Etiquette Gender roles Norms Assumptions

Notions of cleanliness

Rules

Notions of ‘self’ Approaches to problem-solving Attitudes towards age

Body language Nature of friendship

Ordering of time Notions of beauty

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Figure 28.2.  The cultural iceberg model (adapted from Hall, 1976/1989).

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Finally, academic considerations are important because lower levels of preparedness and achievement among some groups of heritage speakers can affect their schooling. In particular, immigrant groups motivated by economic scarcity in their home countries tend to arrive in the new country with lower levels of formal academic preparedness and cultural capital, which can affect their children’s academic performance in many important ways. For example, at least one study has found a correlation between parents reading to children and the reading levels of those children when they grow older, yet only fifteen per cent of Latino Spanishdominant parents reported reading to their children every day (Kuo et al., 2004), very likely due to low parental levels of literacy, long work days, and/or lack of disposable income for books. Given these linguistic, affective/cultural, and academic differences between heritage speakers and second language learners, how should instruction differ for the two groups? After accounting for the potential heterogeneity of heritage speakers, it is generally recommended that educators draw as much as possible from the field generally known as language arts. Language arts are understood to comprehend a range of activities including reading (non)fiction literature and other texts; writing in a range of genres such as argument, narration, and exposition; and visual literacy. Some heritage speakers will do well with a language arts curriculum with minimal linguistic support, while less proficient speakers will need a greater amount of linguistic support. The proportion of each will vary according to the group, and of course individual differences require a fair amount of differentiating instruction (Carreira & Chik, 2018). In addition to a language arts base, some of students’ affective and academic needs can be supported via a curriculum that encourages critical pedagogies and ethnographic community self-study (Beaudrie, Ducar, & Potowski, 2014).

28.4 Where do Heritage Speakers Study their Languages and How are their Needs Being Met? What Resources are Available for Educators Working with Heritage Language Speakers? This section explores options at the elementary, secondary, and postsecondary levels for heritage language students to enroll in coursework specifically designed for them. It concludes by presenting several resources at local and national levels. In Europe, there are several programmes, including various initiatives in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, to help elementary school-aged children of Spanish-speaking immigrants maintain their Spanish (Oliviero,

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Potowski, & Sanfelici, 2013; Ramos Méndez-Sahlender, 2018; Sánchez Abchi, 2018). In addition, the European Schools system provides multilingual and multicultural education to the children of the civil servants working for the European Community. European Schools form a network of thirteen schools in six countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Luxembourg) with a total enrollment of 27,000 (Schola Europaea, n.d.). As a system, the European Schools offer twenty different language sections (Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, German, English, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, and Swedish) representing the native languages of the students. Young children entering the programme are taught in their native language but also receive compulsory second language instruction during primary school. Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s in the United States, foreign languages were offered at approximately thirty per cent of K-5 schools and seventy-five per cent of middle schools (grades 6–8; Rhodes & Pufahl, 2009). However, the No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2002 primarily focused educational outcomes on reading and maths. As a result, by 2008, the number of K-5 schools offering world languages dropped to twenty-five per cent and those in middle school decreased to fifty-eight per cent (Rhodes & Pufahl, 2009). There is no data on how many of the students enrolled in these programmes are heritage speakers of those languages, nor whether the instruction is adjusted for their strengths and needs. However, several publications and groups have addressed this issue via the concept of native language arts, that is, developing a set of standards (including those known as the Common Core) for home speakers of different languages (New York State Department, 2014; WIDA, 2012; Potowski et al., 2008). Other K-8 programmes include the French Heritage Language Program, now operating in five states in the Eastern United States (FACE Foundation, n.d.), as well as two-way immersion and dual language programmes around the US in Arabic, French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish (Center for Applied Linguistics, 2016). At the high school level, although no recent national survey data exist, it is common to find heritage speaker courses in Spanish, despite the fact that very few teachers receive any kind of training or professional development (Potowski & Carreira, 2004). For example, Potowski and Domínguez-Fret (in preparation) found that of thirty-three universities in the state of Illinois that grant licenses for teaching non-English languages, only one of them offers a course on teaching heritage speakers. A brief aside about two-way immersion and dual language schools is warranted. These are K-5 or sometimes K-8 programmes that teach anywhere from fifty to ninety per cent of the day in the heritage language. Some

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of them combine heritage language speaking children with monolingual English speaking children, while others have only one of these two groups of students. Dozens of large-scale quantitative studies conducted over the past few decades have shown that these schools lead to higher levels of English and of overall academic achievement for language minority students (Lindholm Leary, 2018), but much less work has focused on students’ proficiency in the heritage language. Potowski and Marshall (in preparation) find that students in a dual immersion programme score statistically significantly higher on various measures of Spanish proficiency than their peers in the same school building who attend an all English programme. Community-based schools emerged from efforts of families who wanted their children to preserve their heritage languages and cultures. According to Fishman (1985), there are over 6,000 heritage language community schools in 145 different languages in the US. There are approximately 1,200 Korean community language schools in the US with a total student enrollment of about 60,000 (Lee & Shin, 2008). The Center for Applied Linguistics has compiled a searchable database of community-based language programmes in the US (Center for Applied Linguistics, 2017). Community programmes vary by goals and structure, including after-school programmes and weekend school programmes, but many share challenges in gaining public support, finding materials and designing an appropriate curriculum, and training teachers (Compton, 2001). Indeed, at least one study found that better learning outcomes may obtain when the curriculum has direct connections to US-raised youth rather than importing materials and teachers with a purely “home country” focus (Lee & Shin, 2008). Carreira and Rodriguez (2011) note that community language schools should pool resources and involve other community organizations and parents to gain recognition by public education systems and gain prestige and visibility. Community-based heritage language schools are also known as complementary schools in the UK. These consist of three main groups that differ in terms of their histories and objectives: (1) Afro-Caribbean schools set up to address community concerns that mainstream education was failing Black children; (2) religious schools, particularly Muslim schools, arguing for separate provision; and (3) complementary schools set up by immigrant communities to maintain linguistic and cultural heritage (Li, 2006). Finally, at the university level, a survey by Beaudrie (2012) found that sixty per cent of all four-year postsecondary institutions in the US with at least five per cent Hispanic enrollment offered a separate Spanish-forheritage-speakers programme. While this represents a twenty-two per cent growth from a study conducted ten years earlier, it still reveals that many campuses (forty per cent of them) that could conceivably offer such a programme do not do so. There are also university heritage language programmes in languages including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese,

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Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian (see the searchable Heritage Languages Database maintained by the Center for Applied Linguistics, 2017). But again, a critical issue with these programmes is that instructors are often hard pressed to find research-supported training methods to prepare them to work successfully with these learners. We conclude this section with several important resources for educators who work with heritage speakers (Table 28.2). What would greatly benefit the field would be a college credit-bearing online course about teaching heritage languages, much like the methods course offered by Weber State University in conjunction with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and which was funded by a grant from the US Department of Education (see https://www.actfl.org/professional-development/online-courses/ Table 28.2.  Resources for heritage language educators. Resource

Description

National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC) http://nhlrc.ucla.edu/ nhlrc

Heritage Language Journal; many workshops and conferences.

STARTALK http://startalk.nhlrc.ucla.edu/ startalk/lessons.aspx

Free online modules about teaching heritage speakers.

Center for Applied Linguistics’ Alliance for Heritage language briefs; searchable the Advancement of Heritage Languages database of programmes. http://www.cal.org/what-we-do/ projects/heritage-alliance http://potowski.org/resources

Focused on Spanish. Tables of contents of textbooks; various online & print resources; list of conferences.

New York State Education Department, Office of Bilingual Education and World Languages http://www.nysed.gov/program-offices/ office-bilingual-education-and-worldlanguages-obewl/

The complete text of The Teaching of Language Arts to Limited English Proficient/English Language Learners: Learning Standards for Native Language Arts can be downloaded from this site.

ACTFL’s Special Interest Group – Spanish A resource site for ACTFL’s Spanish for for Native Speakers http://actflsigsns.org Native Speakers special interest group. .uic.edu/ Asset Languages Assessment Scheme http://www.setsa.info/ uploads/1/5/0/4/15043266/asset_ languages.doc

Developed by Cambridge Assessment, as part of a National Languages Strategy in the UK, the Asset Languages assessment scheme is for language learners of all ages and abilities. It helps language learners move through an innovative system of qualifications and encourages native speakers of languages to develop their proficiency to high levels.

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foreign-­ language-teaching-methods-online). This would grant teachers the opportunity to earn credit towards their programmes of study while receiving the professional development they very much need to teach heritage speakers effectively. Potowski and Domínguez-Fret (in preparation) argue that state licensures or certifications should be specially tailored for teaching heritage languages. Their argument, using a US-based analogy and Spanish as the example language, is as follows: when college students decide they want to become “English teachers”, they must decide whether they wish to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) or native English language arts (ELA). These are two different certifications, with entirely different curricula, often housed in different colleges—the former in Education, the latter in English—and with entirely different qualifying examinations. When students graduate with one of these teaching licences, they are not authorized to teach the other subject. Thus, a high school principal is legally prohibited from placing ESL-certified teachers in charge of ELA classes, because such teachers do not have ELA certification. The authors’ argument is that teachers with state certification in teaching Spanish as a second language (SSL) should not be placed in charge of a heritage language Spanish course, which must be more like an SLA (Spanish language arts) class. The authors are working towards creating an endorsement in teaching Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) in the state of Illinois. An endorsement is a statement appearing on a teaching licence that identifies additional specific subjects that the licence holder is authorized to teach. It is typically earned through completing an additional two to four specialized courses which, for Spanish teachers, could include a general heritage language theory and pedagogy course; a language arts and literacy development course like those commonly offered in Colleges of Education, with a focus on differentiated instruction; a Latino Studies course; or a course in sociolinguistics. The authors’ goal is that for Illinois high school teachers to be placed in an SHL classroom, they would be legally required to hold the heritage teaching endorsement.

28.5 Conclusion Achieving a language competent society should be everyone’s concern, and doing so requires a fundamental shift in societal attitudes towards heritage languages and speakers of those languages. As discussed above, heritage languages play a vital role in achieving a language competent society. So what needs to be done to promote heritage language development? Given that most proficient speakers of languages other than English learned those languages at home, parents should be encouraged to speak the heritage language to children and have them respond in that language. As Fishman (1991) argued, the foundation of language maintenance is

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intergenerational transmission of the language. At the centre of Fishman’s work on language revitalization is his “Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale” (GIDS), which characterizes the extent to which a language is endangered. A crucial point on the scale is Stage 6, intergenerational transmission, in which the threatened language becomes the everyday language of informal, spoken interaction in the family. This stage, according to Fishman (1991), cannot be skipped in language revitalization efforts. If parents do not speak the heritage language at home, children will most likely never learn it. In addition to the family, however, there needs to be concerted effort on the part of educators, researchers, policy makers, and members of the broader community to raise awareness of the importance of heritage languages. One way to do this is for heritage language communities to collaborate with school systems to offer introductory language and culture classes for school teachers as part of their professional development (Shin, 2006). Another way is to formally recognize the value of proficiency in languages other than English. One example of this is the Seal of Biliteracy, developed by Californians Together, a coalition of parents, teachers, advocates, and civil rights groups committed to improving education. The Seal of Biliteracy is an award given by a school, school district, or county office of education to recognize students who have attained proficiency in two or more languages by high school graduation (Seal of Biliteracy, 2017). A gold seal that appears on the transcript or diploma of the graduating senior shows the student’s accomplishment to future employers and college admissions. Legislation creating a Seal of Biliteracy was passed in California in 2011, and other states followed suit. As of November 2017, twenty-eight states and Washington, DC have approved a statewide Seal of Biliteracy. This is a splendid example of a collaborative effort that explicitly recognizes the value of being proficient in multiple languages. Researchers need to continue to document which kinds of school and community programmes lead to strong levels of linguistic proficiency and student and family satisfaction with the heritage language. Policy makers and government entities can also collaborate with communities and professional organizations that value heritage languages. The European Union celebrates the European Day of Languages every year, in collaboration with the Council of Europe, the European Centre for Modern Languages, language institutions, and citizens around Europe to promote linguistic diversity and language learning (European Commission, 2017). One of the EU’s multilingualism goals is for every European to speak two languages in addition to their mother tongue. Similarly, the Year of the Languages, a national public awareness campaign organized by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) in 2005

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advanced the concept that every person in the US should develop proficiency in at least one language in addition to English. Apart from offering a heritage language as a subject, a more effective method may be to integrate it more fully into the regular school-day curriculum. Two-way immersion education, described briefly in the previous section, is one form of developmental bilingual education in which English-dominant and heritage-language-dominant students are placed in the same classroom for all or most of the instructional day, and are given content and literacy instruction in both languages (Christian, 2008). Two-way programmes benefit English-dominant students by giving them extensive opportunities to develop functional literacy in the target language and interact socially with native speakers of that language. An excellent documentary on this topic is Speaking in Tongues which describes efforts in San Francisco schools. As a society, we need to recognize that the languages spoken by ethnic and linguistic minorities are a national asset, a resource that must not be wasted. Students who come from homes where languages other than English are spoken should be supported to maintain those languages while learning English. And students who speak English natively should be supported to learn another language not in a superficial way, but deeply enough to develop functional competence. We need to think of bilingual proficiency not as a luxury, dispensable when there are more pressing needs, but rather as a requirement in an increasingly global world.

References American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2016). The state of languages in the US: A statistical portrait. Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016). Cultural diversity in Australia, 2016. Retrieved from http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by Subject/2071.0~2016~Main Features~Cultural Diversity Article~60. Baker, C., & Jones, S. P. (1998). Encyclopedia of bilingualism and bilingual education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Beaudrie, S. (2012). Research on university-based Spanish heritage language programs in the United States: The current state of affairs. In S. Beaudrie & M. Fairclough (eds.), Spanish as a heritage language in the United States: State of the field (pp. 203–221). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Beaudrie, S., Ducar, C., & Potowski, K. (2014). Heritage language teaching: Research and practice. New York: McGraw Hill.

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Beaudrie, S. M., & Fairclough, M. (eds.) (2012). Spanish as a heritage language in the United States: The state of the field. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Bonomi, M., & Sanfelici, L. (2018). Spanish as a heritage language in Italy. In K. Potowski (ed.), The handbook of Spanish as a heritage language (pp. 479– 491). Abingdon: Routledge. Brecht, R. D., & Ingold, C. W. (2002). Tapping a national resource: Heritage languages in the United States. Retrieved from https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/ pkg/ERIC-ED464515/pdf/ERIC-ED464515.pdf. Carreira, M., & Chik, C. (2018). Differentiating instruction for heritage learners. In K. Potowski (ed.), The handbook of Spanish as a heritage/minority language. Abingdon: Routledge. Carreira, M., & Kagan, O. (2011). The results of the National Heritage Language Survey: Implications for teaching, curriculum design, and professional development. Foreign Language Annals, 44(1), 40–64. Carreira, M., & Rodríguez, R. M. (2011). Filling the void: Communitiy Spanish language programs in Los Angeles serving to preserve the language. Heritage Language Journal, 8(2), 1–16. Camarota, S. A., & Ziegler, K. (2015). One in five US residents speaks foreign language at home. Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies. Retrieved from http://cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/camarota-language-15 .pdf. Center for Applied Linguistics (2016). Directory of two-way immersion programs. Retrieved from http://webapp.cal.org/DualLanguage/ProgramSearch .aspx. Center for Applied Linguistics (2017). Heritage language programs database. Retrieved from http://webapp.cal.org/Heritage/Default.aspx. Christian, D. (2008). School-based programs for heritage language learners: Two-way immersion. In D. M. Brinton, O. Kagan, & S. Bauckus (eds.), Heritage language education: A new field emerging (pp. 257–268). New York/ London: Routledge. Clyne, M. G. (1991). Community languages: The Australian experience. New York: Cambridge University Press. Compton, C. (2001). Heritage language communities and schools: Challenges and recommendations. In J. K. Peyton, D. A. Ranard, & S. McGinnis (eds.), Heritage languages in America: Preserving a national resource (pp. 145–165). McHenry, IL: Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems. Cummins, J. (guest ed.) (1991). Heritage languages [Special issue]. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 47(4). Cummins, J. (2005). A proposal for action: Strategies for recognizing heritage language competence as a learning resource within the mainstream classroom. The Modern Language Journal, 89(4), 585–592.

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de Bot, K., & Gorter, D. (2005). A European perspective on heritage languages. The Modern Language Journal, 89(4), 612–616. Di Salvo, M. (2016). Heritage language, identity, and education in Europe: Evidence from the UK. In P. Trifonas & T. Aravossita (eds.), Handbook of research and practice in heritage language education (pp. 1–16). New York: Springer International Handbooks of Education. European Commission (2015). Language teaching and learning in multilingual classrooms. Brussels: European Commission. European Commission (2017). Linguistic diversity: What is it about? Retrieved from: https://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/multilingualism/ linguistic-diversity_en. FACE Foundation (n.d.). Overview. Retrieved from http://face-foundation .org/french-heritage-language-program/index.html. Fishman, J. A. (1985). Ethnicity in action: The community resources of ethnic languages in the USA. In J. Fishman (ed.), The rise and fall of the ethnic revival: Perspectives on language and ethnicity (pp. 195–282). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations for assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Fishman, J. A. (2001). 300-plus years of heritage language education in the United States. In J. K. Peyton, D. A. Ranard, & S. McGinnis (eds.), Heritage languages in America: Preserving a national resource (pp. 81–97). McHenry, IL/ Washington, DC: Delta Systems/Center for Applied Linguistics. Gándara, P., Losen, D., August, D., Uriarte, M., Gómez, M. C., & Hopkins, M. (2010). Forbidden language: A brief history of US language policy. In P. Gándara & M. Hopkins (eds.), Forbidden language: English learners and restrictive language policies (pp. 20–33). New York: Teachers College Press. García, O. (2005). Positioning heritage languages in the United States. The Modern Language Journal, 89, 601–605. García, O., & Li, W. (2015). Translanguaging, bilingualism, and bilingual education. In W.E. Wright, S. Boun, & O. García (eds.), The handbook of bilingual and multilingual education (pp. 223–240). Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. García, O., Zakharia, Z., & Otcu, B. (2013). Introduction. In O. García, Z. Zakharia, & B. Otcu (eds.), Bilingual community education and multilingualism: Beyond heritage languages in a global city (pp. 3–42). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Gkaintartzi, A., Kiliari, A., Tsokalidou, R., & Adamson, B. (2016) Heritage language maintenance and education in the Greek sociolinguistic context: Albanian immigrant parents’ views. Cogent Education, 3(1), 1–17. Guardado, M. (2018). Spanish as a minority/heritage language in Canada and the UK. In K. Potowski (ed.), The handbook of Spanish as a heritage language (pp. 537–554). Abingdon: Routledge. Hall, E. (1976/1989). Beyond culture. New York: Anchor.

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Hornberger, N. H., & Wang, S. C. (2008). Who are our heritage language learners? Identity and biliteracy in heritage language education in the United States. In D. M. Brinton, O. Kagan, & S. Bauckus (eds.), Heritage language education: A new field emerging (pp. 3–38). New York: Routledge. Jones Díaz, C., & Walker, U. (2018). Spanish in the Antipodes: Diversity and hybridity of Latino/a Spanish speakers in Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand. In K. Potowski (ed.), The handbook of Spanish as a heritage language (pp. 463–478). Abigdon: Routledge. Kuo, A., Franke, T., Regalado, M., & Halfon, N. (2004). Parent report of reading to young children. Pediatrics, 113(6), 1944–1951. Lee, J. S., & Shin, S. J. (guest eds.) (2008). Korean as a heritage language [Special Issue], Heritage Language Journal, 6(2). Li, W. (2006). Complementary schools: Past, present, and future. Language and Education, 20, 76–83. Liddicoat, T. (2018). Indigenous and immigrant languages in Australia. In C. Seals & S. Shah (eds.), Heritage language policies around the world (pp. 251–263). Abingdon: Routledge. Lindholm Leary, K. (2018). Developing Spanish in dual language programs: Preschool through twelfth grade. In K. Potowski (ed.), Spanish as a heritage/minority language (pp. 433–444). Abingdon: Routledge. Lo Bianco, J. (1987). National policy on languages. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Lu, Wei (2013). An Ethnographic Study of Teaching Chinese as a Heritage Language and Foreign Language in Three Educational Contexts in the United Kingdom. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham. Retrieved from http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/4723/1/Lu13PhD.pdf. Melo Pfeifer, S. & Schmidt, A. (2012). Linking “heritage language” education and plurilingual repertoires development: Evidences from drawings of Portuguese pupils in Germany. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 12, 1–30. Montrul, S. (ed.) (2011). Special issue on Spanish heritage speakers: Bridging formal linguistics, psycholinguistics and pedagogy. Heritage Language Journal, 8(1), i–iv. New York State Department (2014). New York State bilingual common core initiative. Retrieved from https://www.engageny.org/resource/new-yorkstate-bilingual-common-core-initiative. Neilson Parada, M. (2018). Chilean Spanish speakers in Sweden: Transnationalism, trilingualism, and ling systems. In K. Potowski (ed.), The handbook of Spanish as a heritage language (pp. 517–536). New York: Routledge. Oliviero, C., Potowski, K., & Sanfelici, L. (2013), La enseñanza del español como “lengua de herencia” en Génova. In D. Carpani & P. L. Crovetto (eds.), Migrazioni, Lingue, Identità (pp. 655–98). Genoa: Ecig. Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. London: Routledge.

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Peyton, J. K., Ranard, D. A., & McGinnis, S. (2001). Charting a new course: Heritage language education in the United States. In J. Peyton, D. Ranard, & S. McGinnis (eds.), Heritage languages in America: Preserving a national resource (pp. 3–26). McHenry, IL/Washington, DC: Delta Systems/ Center for Applied Linguistics. Polinsky, M., & Kagan, O. (2007). Heritage languages: In the “wild” and in the classroom. Languages and Linguistics Compass, 1, 368–395. Portes, A., & Rumbaut, R. (2006). Immigrant America: A portrait (3rd edn.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Potowski, K. (2014). Spanish in the United States. In T. G. Wiley, J. K. Peyton, D. Christian, S. C. K. Moore, & N. Liu (eds.), Handbook of heritage, community, and native American languages in the United States: Research, policy, and educational practice (pp. 90–100). New York/Washington, DC: Routledge and Center for Applied Linguistics. Potowski, K., & Marshall, M. (in preparation). Dual immersion vs. English program outcomes: Spanish performance across four grade levels in one school. Potowski, K., Berne, J., Clark, A., & Hammerand, A. (2008). Spanish for K-8 heritage speakers: A atandards-based curriculum. Hispania, 91(1), 25–41. Potowski, K., & Carreira, M. (2004). Teacher development and national standards for Spanish as a heritage language. Foreign Language Annals, 37(3), 427–437. Potowski, K., & Domínguez-Fret, N. (in preparation). Spanish as a heritage language in Illinois high schools: Availability, teacher preparation, and why it matters for the rest of the US. Ramos Méndez-Sahlender, C. (2018). Spanish as a heritage language in Germany. In K. Potowski (ed.), The handbook of Spanish as a heritage/minority language (pp. 492–503). Abingdon: Routledge. Rhodes, N. C., & Pufahl, I. (2009). Foreign language teaching in US schools: Results of a national survey, executive summary. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Sánchez Abchi, V. (2018). Spanish as a heritage language in Switzerland. In K. Potowski (ed.), The handbook of Spanish as a heritage/minority language. Abingdon: Routledge. Scarino, A. (2014). The place of heritage languages in languages education in Australia: A conceptual challenge. In P. P. Trifonas & T. Aravossitas (eds.), Rethinking heritage language education (pp. 66–88). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schola Europaea (n.d.). Mission of the European Schools. Retrieved from https:// www.eursc.eu/en/European-Schools/mission. Seal of Biliteracy (2017). Frequently asked questions. Retrieved from http:// sealofbiliteracy.org/faq. Seals, C. & Shah, S. (eds.) (2018). Heritage language policies around the world. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Shin, S. J. (2006). High-stakes testing and heritage language maintenance. In K. Kondo-Brown (ed.), Heritage language development: Focus on East Asian immigrants (pp. 127–144). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Shin, S. J. (2018). Bilingualism in schools and society: Language, identity, and policy (2nd edn.). New York/London: Routledge. The Language Flagship (2013). What business wants: Language needs in the 21st century. National Security Education Program. Retrieved from https:// thelanguageflagship.org/content/reports. United States Government Accountability Office (2017). Foreign language proficiency has improved, but efforts to reduce gaps need evaluation. Retrieved from https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/683533.pdf. US Census Bureau (2015). American community survey. Detailed languages spoken at home and ability to speak English for the population 5 years and over: 2009–2013. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2013/ demo/2009-2013-lang-tables.html. Valdés, G. (2000). Introduction. In L. A. Sandstedt (ed.), Spanish for native speakers: AATSP professional development series handbook for teachers K–16 (Vol. 1, pp. 1–20). Orlando, FL: Harcourt College. Valdés, G. (2001). Learning and not learning English: Latino students in American schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Van Deusen-Scholl, N. (2003). Toward a definition of heritage language: Sociopolitical and pedagogical considerations. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2, 211–230. WIDA (2012). Spanish language arts standards. Retrieved from https://www .wida.us/standards/sla.aspx. Wiley, T. G. (2005). The reemergence of heritage and community language policy in the US national spotlight. The Modern Language Journal, 89, 594–601. Wiley, T. G. (2014). The problem of defining heritage and community languages and their speakers: On the utility and limitations of definitional constructs. In T. G. Wiley, J. K. Peyton, D. Christian, S. C. K. Moore, & N. Liu (eds.), Handbook of heritage, community, and Native American languages in the United States: Research, policy, and educational practice (pp. 19–26). New York/Washington, DC: Routledge and Center for Applied Linguistics. Wiley, T. G., & Lee, J. S. (2009). Introduction. Inv T. G. Wiley, J. S. Lee, & R. W. Rumberger (eds.), The education of language minority immigrants in the United States (pp. 1–34). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Yakushkina, M. (2016). Language use and identity in the Cuban community in Russia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 38(1), 50–64.

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29 Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation Aline Ferreira, Viola G. Miglio, and John W. Schwieter

29.1 Introduction Nearly all societies are bilingual (Appel & Muysken, 2006), a fact which places monolingualism in the minority. Multilingual individuals who live within the same national borders use the official language of the country in addition to their own to survive socially and economically. Globally, the position of English as a lingua franca has compelled people to learn it (Ur, 2010), which might suggest that in most cases, bilingualism is really understood as proficiency in English plus another language. In immigration contexts, families have to learn the dominant language—normally the most prestigious language—to be integrated to the new community, usually suppressing their minority language. According to Ferreira et al. (2016), the learners’ attitude towards the more prestigious linguistic group might have a positive impact on learning the new language, but maintaining the heritage language and culture seems to be an arduous task, even though the maintenance of heritage culture has benefits for first language (L1) literacy skills in addition to cognitive-linguistic variables, favouring a bi-dimensional model of acculturation (Berry, 1990).

Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation

Montrul (2015) broadly defines heritage languages1 as languages that are culturally or ethnolinguistically minority languages that develop in a bilingual setting where another socio-politically majority language is spoken. Heritage speakers are child and adult members of a linguistic minority who grow up exposed to their home language—the heritage language—and the majority official language spoken and used in the broader speech community. (p. 2)

Kelleher (2010) explores in depth the concept of heritage languages as it has been recently framed in the United States based on multilingual language studies. According to her, the incorporation of the term “heritage” into the American Council of the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) standards “marked a step forward in recognizing that not all learners of languages other than English are ‘foreign’ language learners in a traditional sense” (p. 20). Those who speak a “culturally or ethnolinguistically minority language(s)” (Montrul, 2015, p. 2) go through a process of socio­ cultural adaption that includes the ability to successfully interact with and fit into the mainstream culture (Jia, Gottardo, & Ferreira, 2017). This results in learning another language, which is an important part of their acculturation process. Acculturation, similarly to enculturation, refers to the process in which newcomers “come to participate in the normative practices of a cultural community” (Kirshner & Meng, 2012, p. 1148). During an enculturation process, the newcomer—oftentimes a child—is a new member of the cultural community, whereas during the acculturation the newcomer—usually an immigrant—is not a member of the cultural community. Changes in the pattern of affiliation to one or both cultures that results from intergroup contact refers to an acculturation process (Berry, 1990; Jia, Gottardo, & Ferreira, 2017), which includes psychological and sociocultural adjustments. Those adjustments are done intrinsically along with language development and competence. Language competence is critical not only for school readiness but also for emotional and psychosocial adjustment (Cohen, 2010). Along with the psychological and cognitive adjustments individuals face when learning a second language (L2)—within their own

 We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that heritage language is a term most often used

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in the United States. In the context of Europe, there are “national minority languages” and “immigrant minority languages” with the main difference between both being that the former are protected legally by the EU and the Council of Europe European Charter for the Protection of Minority Languages. Some researchers today prefer the term minoritized to refer to both categories. Although it is difficult to compare heritage languages in the United States and minority languages in Europe, heritage languages are similar to immigrant minority languages and there is far more educational provision for immigrant speakers in the US than in Europe, whether to learn English or to maintain their L1. In Europe it is mostly dominant European languages which are supported, along with regional minority languages. Migrant minority languages remain marginalized.

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country or in the new country—they also face social and cultural challenges to adapt to a new environment that is not always quick to welcome differences or adapt to a more progressive society. In this chapter, we will focus on the roles that education and acculturation play in relation to language learning and maintenance, comparing the results in historical minorities in their own countries and heritage language speakers abroad. We review some of the main perspectives on minority language learning and maintenance in a global context. As detailed examples, we focus on heritage languages such as Spanish and Chinese in the US and Canada, and on minority languages in historical communities in Europe, specifically on Basque, Catalan, and Galician spoken in Spain. Even though challenges are faced everyday by speakers of a minority language (e.g., lack of prestige leads to language loss), some alternatives have helped immigrants to maintain their language abroad. In the case of minority speakers within their own country, new policies are decisive in keeping languages alive in places where they have a secondary and inferior legal status compared to the language of the majority.

29.2  Minority Languages: Prestige and Suppression A minority language is a language that has been historically present in the region or country where its speakers are born and raised, but it is not the language of the majority.2 A heritage language, as used in this chapter, and generally in the US, is a language spoken by immigrants and their children in a foreign country, where the main language is another (other uses of the term also exist, see Fishman, 2001, p. 115). In this chapter, we group together minority languages and heritage languages because, since they are something other than the main linguistic norm, they are often stigmatized and discriminated against.3 As a consequence of lack of prestige, their speakers encounter similar difficulties in learning them and few incentives to maintain them: whether they are Spanish speakers in the US (where Spanish is a heritage language), or speakers of indigenous languages in Mexico and Canada (where they are minority languages). Heritage and minority language speakers do not only share negative features, but they also share a certain degree of bilingual and

2

 Following the definitions used by the Council of Europe in their conventions (the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML), https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventions/ rms/0900001680695175), what we call minority languages correspond to their “regional and minority languages” and our heritage languages are their “languages of migrants” (see article 1 of the ECRML, for instance).

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 wa Thiong’o (1993) speaks of “minoritized languages”, not minority languages, similar to Luna Alonso’s (2013) use in literary translations into Galician.

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bicultural competence, which also warrants grouping them together. The scope of this chapter will limit coverage of a literature that has increased considerably over the last twenty years.4 By concentrating on language learning itself, we will have to forego equally important discussions on politics and education, immigration, cultural identity, and assimilation (Adams & Brink, 1990; Baron, 1990; Valdés, 2001). Ideology also permeates the discourses on linguistic and cultural rights, of course, and while we are aware of these issues, we will mostly focus on the (socio)linguistic aspects of minority and heritage language learning and acculturation.

29.3  Heritage Language Speakers in Foreign Countries The flow of immigration to countries ostensibly offering a better future than the country of origin has produced pockets of speakers of languages different from the majority language in the speech community around them. Heritage language speakers are the children of those immigrants, who either speak both the community language and the language of origin at home or, more typically, the language of the home is the language their parents imported from their country of origin, and the children learn the language of the wider community at school. Situations are different depending on the country in which the heritage speakers grow up. In the US, for instance, schooling is typically carried out in a monolingual context where after a period of typically one to three years of adaptation (if entering the school system at kindergarten) in which the children learn English, they are then mainstreamed into the general monolingual English population before completing primary school (California Department of Education, 2002). The goal of English learning programmes for speakers of other languages is to “ensure that English learners acquire full proficiency in English as rapidly and effectively as possible and attain parity with native speakers of English” so as to achieve “within a reasonable period of time, … the same rigorous grade-level academic standards that are expected of all students” (California Department of Education, 2016; emphasis added). Reasonable is, in practice, one to three years. In a state like California, these educational policies affect a large population given the state’s demographics. According to the California Department of Education (2016), English learners constitute 21.4 per cent (roughly 1.3 million students) of the total number of children enrolled in California public schools. Furthermore, children who speak a language other than English at home represent 42.6 per cent (a little over 2.6  See the detailed state-of-the-science volumes by Beaudrie and Fairclough (2012) and Montrul (2015) for heritage

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languages; see Hogan-Brun and Wolff (2003), and Hogan-Brun and O’Rourke (2018) for minority languages and the extensive bibliographies cited therein.

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Table 29.1.  The top ten languages, after English, spoken at home in California. Language Spanish

Per cent 83.1%

Vietnamese

2.1%

Mandarin

1.6%

Arabic

1.4%

Filipino

1.3%

Cantonese

1.2%

Korean

0.8%

Hmong

0.7%

Punjabi

0.7%

Russian

0.6%

million students). As shown in Table 29.1, 93.5 per cent of English learners in California speak one of the ten most spoken languages in the state. However, among these languages, the percentage of Spanish speakers is significantly higher than all the other nine home languages combined. While the statistical disclosures of the California Department of Education provide some useful demographics, they fail to underscore the cognitive advantages of being bilingual. If anything, for students with limited English, not knowing the majority language is simply an obstacle to be overcome, in order to access the mainstream monolingual English classes. The US, and California in particular, despite its demographics, seems to be a place where bilingualism can be seen as an impediment, a disadvantage instead of the pragmatic, economic, and cognitive advantage recognized in the European Union, where according to the Eurobarometer Report on Europeans and their Languages, the official stance of the EU is for its citizens to be trilingual, and where nineteen per cent of the population in 2012 was bilingual, and twenty-five per cent was trilingual (Piller, 2012). However, the official stance of the EU vis á vis multilingualism most likely reflects the view of liberal elites, whereas there is an increasing number of Europeans that “support political parties that contest the concept of multiculturalism and the idea of the ‘unions of citizens’ with diverse cultural and linguistic practices” (Hogan-Brun & Wright, 2013), undoubtedly as a reaction to increased immigration and to some of the impacts that this has had on many European countries in recent years. The connection between immigration and intolerance towards linguistic diversity was also reflected in the rise of the English-only movement in the US and the repeal of bilingual education in several states with high numbers of

Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation

Spanish-speaking immigrants: California in 1998;5 Arizona in 2000; and Colorado in 2001 (Montrul, 2015, p. 120). While, at least in California, there seems to be a newly found recognition of the importance of bilingualism as attested by the 2016 vote in favour of reintroducing bilingual education, the current political climate is unlikely to bring about any positive changes encouraging bilingual schools at the federal level in the US. In fact, even in California, where forty-three per cent of public school students start off as bilingual, the most common outcome is language attrition by the third generation of heritage speakers, as Fishman (1967) reported decades ago. Language shift in cases of heritage language is irreversible as the immigrants, even those that value their cultural heritage, face enormously adverse odds against the economic and social advantages of fluency and acculturation in the majority language (Baker, 2001; Harrison, 2007; Saydee, 2014). Some researchers are more positive and suggest that there is a correlation between the immigrants’ perception of their native language and its maintenance (Zhang, 2008), but usually this perception is offset by the fear that children speaking the heritage language will cause them social and economic disadvantages. Efforts towards maintenance are thwarted by limited access to media and other speakers of the heritage language, as well as the inherent prestige of the majority language, which encourages its pervasive use among the younger generations (Mucherah, 2008). Studying the representations of the languaging practices of immigrants is an important area of work in which dialogues can occur on how education systems can adapt their needs, rather than blaming learners for inadequate proficiency levels. Ongoing work by García and colleagues (García, 2009; García & Wei, 2014; García, Lin, & May, 2017) has made significant strides in this area (see also Hélot & García, Chapter 27 in this handbook). However, socioeconomic factors clearly influence issues of linguistic maintenance and acculturation. Studies on heritage Spanish as early as the 1980s found that when acculturation in English, with its concomitant English language fluency, did not in fact improve the chances of socioeconomic mobility for second and third generation Hispanics, they reverted to a re-appropriation of their Spanish heritage, including Spanish language use, as a negative reaction to discrimination suffered at the hands of the English-speaking majority (Sánchez, 1983/1994, Klee and Lynch, 2009). In these cases, Spanish acquired a symbolic value as a cultural commodity indicating solidarity to the community and cementing group identity. Other studies discussed in Klee and Lynch (2009) found that the  California’s proposition 227 of 1998 was repealed by a seventy-four per cent majority on 8 November 2016 and

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substituted by proposition 58, which implements the California Multilingual Education Act (https://www.ballotpedia .org/California_ Proposition_58,_Non-English_Languages_Allowed_in_Public_Education_(2016)).

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father’s income correlated with Hispanic college students’ likelihood of having Spanish as their first language (Amastae, 1982). The study carried out in the Rio Grande valley in Texas showed that the higher the father’s income, the less likely the student was to speak Spanish as his/her first language. The same study also found that the mothers’ income correlated with the children’s linguistic ability in heritage Spanish, but in a different way. Children of mothers in the lowest (annual income equivalent to or below ca. $18,000 in 2017) and the highest income bracket for the population in the study (annual income equivalent or exceeding ca. $36,000 in 20176) were the most fluent in the heritage language. Related to socioeconomic and ideological factors are also personal choices and attitudes affecting one’s own identity: conformism and the pressure to assimilate and “not stick out like a sore thumb” push the most vulnerable age groups, primary school children and teens, to abandon the heritage language, a symbol of being (negatively) different, instead of being a badge of diversity, marking a cognitive and pragmatic advantage. The result is usually attrition of the heritage language, or incomplete development (Montrul, 2008, 2010), or at best language shift towards a different Spanish dialect, as with young Salvadoran Spanish speakers growing up in Los Angeles (MacGregor Villarreal, 2014). The influence of the dominant culture and language creates a typical pattern in siblings of first generation immigrants in the US whereby the oldest child still has some (at times high) degree of oral proficiency in Spanish, but the younger children have only a passive knowledge, and they all typically communicate with one another in English.7 This in turn creates a gamut of very different skill levels among heritage speakers who could be (1) third- or fourth-­ generation US-born English-dominant Hispanics with limited speaking skills in Spanish; (2) first- and second-generation bilinguals displaying very different degrees of fluency in either language; or (3) recent young immigrants whose dominant language is Spanish (Rodríguez Pino, 1997; see also Montrul, 2015; Asher, 2011, who refers to this as “generation 1.5”).8

6

 The original values of $6000 and $12,000 respectively (Amastae, 1982, p. 270, reported in Klee and Lynch, 2009, p. 214) were converted using the CPI index, which produces the historic standard of living, similar to the value obtained comparing average labour wages. The equivalent economic power value that uses a share of the GDP in the calculation would be $39,000 and $78,100 respectively (using the indices at https://www.measuringworth .com/).

7

 The importance of language competence and use in siblings was highlighted in Lambert and Taylor’s (1996) study of children of Cuban immigrants in Miami (discussed also in Klee and Lynch, 2009). The study found that the competence and use of Spanish by the first-born child positively correlates with Spanish competence and use by the younger siblings.

8

 This also depends on the definition of first generation, which counterintuitively can be applied both to the adults emigrating from their country of origin to a new country and to the children of said adults born in the new country. In the latter case, then, the recent young immigrants whose dominant language is that of the country of origin of their parents would be defined as generation 0.5.

Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation

The diverse variety of linguistic abilities, in turn, creates problems in addressing the educational needs of immigrants’ children populations. This is true in the state-funded US K-12 school system, where education is carried out through a mostly monolingual English curriculum, and these children have different levels of English skills. However, those heritage speakers who want to maintain their heritage language, for instance Spanish, and decide to study it formally at school and later at university also have problems, because their Spanish is non-standard. The increasing separation and hyper-specialization of academic fields makes it difficult for researchers in education to be aware of the relevant advances in linguistics, social psychology, and language policy. This in turn may prevent education practitioners from offering a multi-pronged and data-oriented solution, informed by these different disciplines and mindful of the needs and desires of local communities. Consequently, only a fraction of the relevant scientific literature seems to inform the linguistic policies of local boards of education, which typically adopt an assimilationist model of acculturation9 in which the heritage language is ignored or disparaged and stomped out early on. There is a stark divide between the strictly assimilationist linguistic practices of state and municipally funded education in the US10 and the scientific literature on cognition, bilingualism, heritage language, and successful integration of immigrants. Furthermore, one must take into account that not all heritage language speakers necessarily want to maintain their heritage language by studying it formally, which leads to a further distinction between heritage language speakers (HLSs) and heritage language learners (HLLs; Montrul, 2015). Polinsky (2008) called heritage speakers the “missing link” between L2 learners and native speakers, displaying features of both groups (see also Montrul & Bowles, 2010; Miglio & Gries, 2015). Linguists and foreign language researchers and practitioners have only recently started to treat them as a very specific population, with distinct and separate needs from other L2 learners. Even heritage speakers who are frequently the majority of the students enrolled in Spanish degree programmes in the southwestern US often feel as though their Spanish is criticized and demeaned by their teachers who may have little or no knowledge of sociolinguistic concepts. Miglio and Miranda (2012) analysed some university-level Spanish textbooks 9

 This term is taken from Bolger and Zapata (2011).

10

 Private education is probably not any different in this respect. The Center for Applied Linguistics (http://cal .org) states that only twenty-five per cent of public and private primary schools in the US offered any form of L2 teaching in 2010, although newspaper articles such as the one published on 22 July 2017 in USA Today tout an increase in immersion programmes in US schools (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/22/ schools-expand-foreign-language-offerings/103584518/). Moreover, non-immersion L2 learning in K-12 in the US provides no proficiency standards by the time students leave high school, although classroom hours spent teaching a foreign language is, according to our calculations, comparable to the number of hours of L2 teaching in a European high school.

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and noted that they all had a very superficial treatment of language areas which heritage speakers might consider problematic and worth studying, other than different registers and academic written Spanish. For instance, Spanish heritage speakers have problems with common verbs such as gustar “to like”, which in English takes a normal direct construction with the experiencer subject in the nominative as in (1). In contrast, Spanish builds inverse constructions where the subject is not the experiencer but rather the stimulus and is most commonly placed after the verb as in (2): (1) I like (2) Me gustan To-me are-pleasing “I like bats.”

bats. los murciélagos. the bats

Despite the fact that educators who have experience with heritage learners are aware of this challenge, most textbooks aimed at HLLs do not overtly address it (Miglio & Miranda, 2012). However, over the past fifteen years, a number of sophisticated sociolinguistic, corpus, and experimental studies have shown that HLLs often differ in very subtle ways from both native speakers and L2 learners of Spanish (Bruhn de Garavito, 2002; Bullock & Toribio, 2004; Miglio & Gries, 2015, in press; Mikhaylova, 2012; Montrul, 2008, 2015; Montrul & Bowles, 2009; Toribio & Nye, 2006). Results from these studies and from current work will hopefully trickle down into the applied linguistics literature and benefit future HLLs.

29.4  Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation As is well-known, an important factor in language learning and maintenance is motivation. The literature has shown that different types of motivation are fundamental in reaching L2 proficiency (Gardner, 1985; Masgoret & Gardner, 2003), although there are also many other factors that can affect the outcome.11 In the case of heritage learners, studies in acculturation have shown, perhaps not surprisingly, that the more assimilated immigrants are (i.e., when they have adopted an assimilative strategy of acculturation which privileges the mainstream culture and language to the detriment of the heritage language and culture; Schumann, 1978), the more proficient they are likely to be.12 The opposite side of the coin is relevant for the purposes of this chapter. Since for immigrants and their children, acculturation and proficiency in the majority language of the 11

 A few other factors which can affect L2 learning include the critical period, the difference between the L2 and the learner’s native language, the duration of immersion, and formal training, as well as psychological factors such as flexibility and openness towards other cultures, Krashen’s (1982) “affective filter” (originally conceptualized by Dulay and Burt, 1977), and others (for a summary, see Jia, Gottardo, & Ferreira, 2017).

12

 Masgoret and Gardner (2003) worked with Spanish speakers, Jia, Gottardo, & Ferreira (2017) with Chinese immigrants, and Ferreira et al. (2016) with Hispanic immigrants in Canada.

Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation

country of arrival are fundamental to social mobility and success, this seems to suggest that there is little hope for heritage language maintenance beyond the second generation, and this is indeed what usually happens (Silva-Corvalán, 1991, 2003). Language maintenance requires effort and time and not all heritage speakers are willing to invest in an endeavour that provides intangible returns at best. Clearly what has kept Spanish alive in several areas of the US is the continuous influx of new, first generation of immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries, and not the commitment and motivation of second and third generation heritage speakers. Motivation in language learning is intimately related to the prestige that language has in the community, as well as practical purposes related to proficiency, which may span from integration in the community to opportunities for socioeconomic mobility (e.g., access to preferably high-paying jobs which require bilingual skills). Clearly in places such as the US, Canada, and Europe, where immigration and massive displacement of individuals (immigrants or refugees) are causing anxiety and fear among certain populations, heritage languages bear a cultural and socioeconomic stigma, which in turn gives these languages low prestige. Parodi and a number of her former graduate students vindicated California heritage speakers’ Spanish (or the koiné they tend towards, which she calls Spanish Vernacular) as being related to rural varieties from Mexico in a series of important publications (Parodi, 2003, 2004, 2009a, 2009b). She also launched a research centre and resources website at UCLA (CEEEUS),13 but heritage Spanish is still far from being a prestigious variety in California or elsewhere in the US. However, if we take a “relational” and “contextually grounded” view of motivation (Ushioda, 2009, 2011), in which the individual plays a more agentive role in language learning, the search for a more complex identity on the part of future generations of heritage speakers might provide some respite for their heritage language maintenance. Some studies, already mentioned above, from the 1980s showed that heritage Spanish maintenance can acquire a mostly symbolic use as an identity marker in middle class families (Amastae, 1982) or indicate solidarity with the surrounding community in deference of its minority culture (Sánchez, 1983/1994). While laws defending the rights of linguistic minorities are no guarantee that individuals will indeed want to maintain their heritage language (Hogan-Brun & Wolff, 2003), having them in place is a necessity. As such, we should read in a positive light the approval of proposition 58 in California, which became law on 1 July 2017, reversing the twenty-­yearold prohibition against bilingual education (proposition 227 ­repealing bilingual education had been approved in 1998). This does not mean 13

 http://www.spanport.ucla.edu/group/center-study-spanish-united-states-ceeeus. After Parodi’s untimely death, her work has been continued by her former graduate students; see for instance Carr, 2017; MacGregor Villarreal, 2014; Lamar Prieto, 2014, 2016; Raymond, 2012, 2013, 2014.

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that bilingual immersion programmes will start popping up everywhere, because it is not mandatory and would require an active interest on the part of the community: specifically, proposition 58 says that “if more than 20 parents or guardians from any one grade level or 30 parents or guardians from an entire school make a collective request for a dual language or bilingual program, the school site is required to at least explore the possibility of creating one” (Hopkinson, 2017). Therefore, the onus is on academics and experts on bilingualism to reach out to the community and spread the word about the cognitive and pragmatic advantages of being proficient in more than one language. Considering recent initiatives such as Bilingualism Matters, led by Antonella Sorace,14 the time for this type of awareness and outreach work may have finally come. Motivation could also be driven by professional and health reasons. As the Hispanic population grows, so will the demand for language services in Spanish. In California, for instance, Hispanics have outnumbered whites since some time in 2014 (14.99 to 14.92 million respectively).15 It is not unlikely that a situation more conducive to heritage Spanish maintenance will develop in this state. A study carried out in Florida (Boswell, 2000) showed how bilingual Hispanics, especially in Miami-Date County, had higher incomes, had better paid jobs, and were more educated than Hispanics who just spoke English. Economic incentives are important because they compensate for the effort of maintaining the heritage language by studying it formally, and they attribute prestige to it. For instance, careers in areas such as translation and interpreting are projected to increase by seventeen per cent in the next ten years or so. This is a much faster rate of growth than the average for all occupations, and the only one predicted to grow for which one needs only a bachelor’s degree (in the humanities), according to projections by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.16 Although translators and interpreters may make as much as $52,000 per year, court interpreters for Spanish in California earn even more, averaging between $70,000 and $80,000 per year.17 These are in fact tangible returns which may be reaped by heritage speakers more easily than by L2 learners. Investing in bicultural and bilingual education, especially for heritage speakers, may thus turn out to be advantageous in a nearer future than the data about heritage language attrition might project. In terms of health, moreover, the cognitive benefits of bilingualism have been pointed out by Bialystok in several studies (e.g., Bialystok, 2011). Her studies have 14

 http://www.bilingualism-matters.ppls.ed.ac.uk.

15

 Data from the national census published in 2015 and widely reported in newspapers, for instance the LA Times (“It’s official: Latinos now outnumber whites in California”, 8 July 2015, http://beta.latimes.com/local/california/ la-­me-census-latinos-20150708-story.html).

16

 https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/interpreters-and-translators.htm.

17

 This requires a specialized certificate, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. https://www.governmentjobs.com/ jobs?keyword=court%2Binterpreter&location= and http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/CIP-Info-Packet.pdf.

Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation

consistently demonstrated that bilinguals outperform their monolingual peers in tasks involving cognitive control and executive functions. In terms of literacy, Ferreira et al. (2016) showed that affiliation with the heritage culture (in this study, Hispanic) had a positive impact on reading comprehension (in Spanish) in a context in which heritage language and culture maintenance are supported by the community. The study was conducted in Canada, where students were immersed in a culture lacking media and mainstream resources in Spanish (unlike in the US); however, they still demonstrated that heritage language maintenance can be attained if the heritage language is supported at home and through extracurricular educational opportunities.

29.5 Minority Language Speakers in their Communities of Origin: The Case of Spain The case for historical linguistic minorities is different in the sense that (1) their languages are usually better protected legally than immigrant languages and have therefore better access to resources, funds, education, and the possibility of official or co-official status; (2) they are part and parcel of the identity of local ethnic or cultural communities that often want to stake a claim to their exceptionality in comparison with the language and culture of the majority, especially if they have suffered in the past from the assimilationist tendencies or the outright aggression of a centralized dictatorship; (3) the exceptionality may go hand in hand with political ambitions: such is the case of regions supporting their separatist goals through the specific historical, cultural, and linguistic heritage of their community. In these cases, one might think that language maintenance is a given, having the perfect storm of funding, legal protection, education, the prestige conferred by (co-)officialdom, and the desire to belong to one’s community. This desire to belong shapes a fundamental part of the cultural and psychological construct of identity (see also Darvin & Norton, Chapter 19, this volume). It may also give rise to the individual’s expression of a political stance, which in turn may coincide with the community’s ambitions of obtaining political autonomy, self-determination, or even independence. The linguistic reality of these communities, however, is rather different. For instance, the language attitudes of speakers of historical minority languages are, at times, no more positive than those of illiterate immigrants struggling to make ends meet, alone in a foreign country.18 It seems that an existence spanning several centuries on the territory of their community, a written standard, and 18

 A reviewer aptly noted that this may not be true in all areas of Europe where speakers of regional minority languages care about their language and speaking them is a form of political engagement.

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possibly considerable literary works are not enough to grant historical minority languages enough prestige. Consequently, the problems of weak language proficiency and language attrition and loss can be comparable between heritage speakers of migrant languages and speakers of minority languages within their own country of origin.19 These shared characteristics can be explained if one considers that both heritage speakers in a foreign country and minority language speakers are victims of some form or other of colonialism, intended in the broad sense of a majority that controls a country’s wealth and its distribution, through the regulation of its means of production, and therefore has power over all types of minorities, whether exogenous or endogenous ones. However, what is most relevant in this case is that colonial powers, in the words of wa Thiong’o (1986/2009) dominate the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people [perceive] themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools (p. 390) of self-definition in relationship to others.

Such control may be possible because of how interconnected language, culture, communication, and individuals’ identities are, as well as the history and identity of a community. Wa Thiong’o (1986/2009) goes on to say: Language as communication and as culture are then products of each other. Communication creates culture: culture is a means of communication. Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world. (p. 390)

The same tools are also implemented to control the “mental universe of the colonised”, and although wa Thiong’o (1986/2009) is talking about the colonization of Africa, these “tools” are the same regardless of the region where they are deployed or the period in which they are implemented. He states: For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process: the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature, and the 19

 It should be pointed out, however, that speakers of migrant languages in Europe speak, for the most part, languages which are not in danger, such as Arabic, Turkish, Russian, etc.; they do not have weak language proficiency (despite common beliefs that they do), but they do have difficulties sustaining the bilingualism of their children because of negative attitudes towards their languages and lack of support by education systems.

Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation conscious elevation of the language of the coloniser. The domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised. (p. 16)

This is true of Spanish in the US, as well as of minority languages spoken in the European nation-states, in current times or throughout history (Irujo & Miglio, 2013). Spain offers the perfect example to show some positive aspects of the modern legal protection of cultural and linguistic rights, as well as some negative aspects of “internal colonialism” by a centralized state. It is also perversely appropriate, in a certain sense, because one of the minoritized languages discussed in the previous section as a language of immigrants in the US, Spanish, is the “bully-language” of the context analysed in this section of the chapter.20 If anybody needed ultimate proof of the fact that no language is intrinsically superior to another, or that a language is “a dialect with an army”, this is certainly it. Minority languages are not necessarily the languages of a numerical minority but are rather languages subjected to active minoritization (Tendero, 2017). Castilian, as the language is often referred to within Spain, has in fact a long history of being implemented as a political weapon of colonization. It is well known that in the first grammar meant to enshrine the standardization of Spanish,21 written by Antonio Nebrija and published in 1492, the author sees language as the “companion” of the empire, an “uncannily prescient prophecy”, as Armillas-Tiseyra (2016, p. 197) puts it, and reminiscent of wa Thiong’o’s understanding of language as the ultimate means to dominate the colonized. It is also important to notice that the idea of grammar as a tool for national consolidation comes into existence at the same time as the idea of grammar as a tool for imperial expansion. In the centuries that followed, the processes of national consolidation (the creation of Spain itself) and expansion abroad would prove often interdependent and mutually contaminating (Armillas-Tiseyra, 2016, p. 197).

Or, as Hogan-Brun and Wright (2013) call it, the principle of cujus regio, ejus lingua was an indispensable tenet for the formation of the European nation-states, starting from the sixteenth century onwards, and really taking off in the nineteenth century (see also the historical analysis in Irujo & Miglio, 2013). For Nebrija and Queen Isabel of Castile, language was first and foremost the necessary tool for evangelization. As power and religion 20

 We note that it is not the language, per se, which is a “bully”, but rather the policies implemented in support of the language. The reader should also consider French as an example of this.

 Although Nebrija’s is often credited as being the first grammar in the vernacular about a vernacular language, see

21

for instance Zavala (1992) who states that “until then [1492] only the three languages related to the Sacred Texts (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) had their own [written] grammars” (p. 194, our translation; see also Armillas-Tiseyra, 2016). In actual fact, the Icelandic Fyrsta málfræðiritgerðin (“The First Grammatical Treatise”) is the oldest surviving grammar of a European language written in the vernacular (from the twelfth century; Benediktsson, 1972)

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always go hand in hand, the subversion of the Latin principle above,22 adopted at the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, couldn’t be more appropriate. Just as fitting is the following anecdote related by Nebrija in his preface to the grammar. When the Queen asks Nebrija about the purpose of the book being presented to her, it is the Bishop of Ávila, her private confessor who was present at the meeting, and not the grammarian, who answers. The Bishop then states: after subjugating many barbarous peoples and countries where strange languages are spoken (pueblos barbaros y naciones de peregrinas lenguas), after being vanquished they need to receive the laws that the conqueror imposes on the conquered, and with those our language; thus through [this] grammar they could learn it, just as we now learn Latin by studying its grammar.

As Hogan-Brun and Wright (2013) argue, “language always follows power” (p. 244; see also Lüdi, 2008). Therefore, while the 1978 Spanish constitution was a breath of fresh air after forty years of language discrimination, often implemented with extreme aggression and violence, especially in the Basque Country (Irujo & Urrutia, 2009; Miglio, 2014), the unbalanced legal status of the different languages can clearly be seen in Preliminary Part, section 3 of the constitution: 1. Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it. 2. The other Spanish languages shall also be official in the respective Self-governing Communities in accordance with their Statutes. 3. The wealth of the different linguistic forms of Spain is a cultural heritage which shall be especially respected and protected.23 While the 1978 constitution does consecrate the regional languages as part of the cultural heritage (patrimonio cultural) of Spain and therefore worthy of protection, only Spanish (referred to as “Castilian” in the constitution) is recognized as having a state-wide scope (the right of all Spaniards to use it—the implication being clearly everywhere). Particularly striking is the dichotomy between the duty of all citizens to know it, as opposed to the right to use other languages in their territory (as implied by their co-­official status). Language is indeed the closest proxy to the discredited jus sanguinis (Hogan-Brun & Wright, 2013) as a necessary requirement to belong to the majority and implement the oppression of minoritized groups: acculturation on a country-wide level equals assimilation as enshrined in the 1978 constitution of the Spanish state. One must 22

 The original is in fact cujus regio, ejus religio.

23

 The 1978 constitution can be found at: http://www.congreso.es/portal/page/portal/Congreso/Congreso/Hist_ Normas/Norm/const_espa_texto_ingles_0.pdf.

Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation

realize, moreover, that in the case of the regional languages of Spain, the normal intergenerational transmission of the language in some cases had been interrupted by the brutal repression of the Franco dictatorship. The regional languages, therefore, needed a plan for the normalization of their use even within the community in which they had been used historically. It should be pointed out that while “normalization” is hardly ever used in the non-Spanish language policy literature, its specific meaning applied to the peninsular context is important. It is not used, in fact, as a mere synonym of “standardization”, although that meaning is also implied in the word. Normalization also entails the meaning of revitalization and, even more importantly, of making the language the normal, customary means of communication in the autonomous communities (Cobarrubias, 2008, Lynch, 2011). It is therefore a highly-complex, polysemous word intended to be flexible enough to adapt to the local reality, but also conveying a sense of urgency in the presence of an enormous, slow, and by definition multi-factorial task, which takes generations to accomplish and is, in fact, still in motion. Revitalization, moreover, can only be undertaken with the support of the education system, the media, and the local administration. Article 148 of the 1978 Constitution states also that “the autonomous communities will have competence on the following matters: promotion of culture, research, and, where the case may be, the teaching of the languages of the autonomous community” (Cobarrubias, 2008, p. 136). In order to illustrate the slow and complex process of language revitalization, we will use data from the Basque Country, as Basque was the most harshly repressed of the regional languages during the Franco regime (Irujo & Urrutia, 2009). The historical Basque region is comprised of seven provinces, four of which are under Spanish administration (three form the Basque Autonomous Community or BAC, a fourth is Navarre, administratively separate from the BAC) and three in the French state (known collectively as Iparralde, or Northern Basque Country). Basque has a different legal status in these separate administrative areas, different provisions for its use in education, and consequently different prospects of survival (Totoricagüena and Urrutia, 2008; Miglio, 2014). Since Basque is a non-Indo-European language, it is much more distant from Castilian than the other two co-official languages, Catalan and Galician, and therefore it stands to reason that its revitalization should be more difficult. On the other hand, the BAC has implemented a successful programme of language immersion in primary and secondary schools, following the 1982 Normalization Law of the Basque Language and the flurry of activities sparked by its implementation (see a detailed chronology and analysis in Cobarrubias, 2008). Cobarrubias devotes several sections of the paper to describe the different education models implemented in the BAC

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and the results of longitudinal studies that clearly show that the most successful formulas for the revitalization of Basque required a certain degree of immersion (i.e., using Basque as a means to learn other educational contents; see also Miglio, 2014). As with any language, simply studying Basque in the classroom as if it were a foreign language was doomed to fail. The percentages of Basque speakers within the BAC in 1981 and 2011, shown in Table 29.2, show a considerable increase in linguistic competence over the thirty years from the start of revitalization efforts. The most encouraging statistics, however, can be seen in Table 29.3, which demonstrates the shift between age groups speaking Basque, from the start of revitalization efforts in 1981 to the most recent data in 2011. In 1981, competence hovered in general around twenty per cent of the population, and was only higher among individuals who had been born before the Civil War (aged 50+). In 2011, on the other hand, eighty-two per cent of primary and secondary school-age children were bilingual, as well as sixty-six per cent of young adults.

Table 29.2.  Linguistic competence of Basque in the Basque Autonomous Community in 1981 and 2011. Year 1981

Year 2011

Bilinguals

22%

36.5%

Passive bilinguals

12%

19.5%

Non-Basque speakers

66%

44%

Data are calculated using the most recent information provided by the Basque Institute of Statistics, www.eustat.eu.

Table 29.3.  Linguistic competence of Basque in the Basque Autonomous Community by age group in 1981 and 2011. Year 1981

Year 2011

5–14 years old

20%

82%

15–19 years old

19%

73%

20–29 years old

19%

66%

30–49 years old

20%

31.5%

50–69 years old

28%

22%

70–85+ years old

33%

24%

Data are also from the most recent information provided by the Basque Institute of Statistics, http://www.eustat.eu.

Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation

Cobarrubias (2008) identifies some language functions important for the welfare and maintenance of a language: (1) legal and official use; (2) education; (3) public administration; (4) commerce and industry; (5) media; (6) religion and culture; (7) security and public order; (8) public health; (9) recreation and environmental use; and (10) family and interpersonal relations (p. 147). Among these, language persists longer in the functions of informal use, such as family and interpersonal use, to the point where “even during the most repressive policies of Franco, control could not be enforced. He could only ban Euskara in the public and institutional use of the language” (p. 147). As we saw above, the private sphere is, in fact, also where heritage languages survive and was what guaranteed that twenty per cent of the Basque population always maintained the minoritized language. It is, however, also a boundary that stifles normal linguistic usage, or at least it does not promote maintaining or enriching the language of its more formal registers, for which language use in other environments is necessary, such as education, work, public administration, and media. More importantly, as Cobarrubias (2008) points out, among the ten language functions listed above, the first four are “the most effective in expanding the language and empowering it” (p. 147). The legal status of a language, and its use in education, public administration, commerce, and industry are the most important factors contributing to its prestige. This seems in line with wa Thiong’o’s (1986/2009) notion that a language has more prestige if used by the elites controlling the means of production of wealth and its distribution, as well as the laws governing the population and indoctrinating its children. Without these registers, and the prestige provided by the language use of the governing elites, minoritized languages end up being relegated to informal spheres and private domains. While the data on the learning of Basque are undoubtedly encouraging, a quick glance at language attitudes and language use can give us a more complete picture of the status of normalization for Basque (see Table 29.4). While about fifty-two per cent of the BAC in 1991 saw revitalization efforts favourably or very favourably, that number only increased to sixty-two per cent in 2012. The BAC, in this respect, fares better than the Northern Basque Country, governed by France, where Basque is only taught in private schools and has no official or co-official status. There, forty per cent of the population has no opinion about maintenance of Basque, and those that have an unfavourable or very unfavourable opinion increased from fourteen per cent to twenty-one per cent, while those that have a favourable or very favourable opinion decreased from forty-five per cent to thirty-nine per cent over the same period of time (between 1991 and 2012).

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Table 29.4.  Attitudes towards the promotion of Basque among 16+ yearolds across different historically Basque communities in 1991 and 2012. Year 1991

Year 2012

Basque Northern Autonomous Basque Community Country Navarre

Basque Northern Autonomous Basque Community Country Navarre

Very favourable

20.7

9.2

7.6

23.9

8.6

14.6

Favourable

31.4

36.0

14.7

38.4

29.9

23.1

Neither

29.5

40.8

24.0

26.1

40.2

27.8

Unfavourable

14.5

13.2

34.7

8.9

16.2

22.4

3.8

0.8

19.0

2.7

5.1

12.1

Very unfavourable Total

100

100

100

100

100

100

Source: http://es.eustat.eus/elementos/tbl0009576_c.html. Data for the BAC have not changed substantially between 2012 and a survey carried out in 2016 (http://es.eustat .eus/elementos/tbl0009575_c.html).

Table 29.5.  Use of Basque in the BAC according to social context in 1991 and 2016. Social context

Year 1991 (%)

Year 2016 (%)

at home

16.6

19.0

with one’s children

17.0

22.9

with friends

15.0

21.4

at work

15.0

25.3

with civil servants

14.0

25.8

8.0

20.0

in the health service

Source: http://es.eustat.eus/elementos/tbl0009570_c.html.

Also telling is a comparison of Basque usage across different social contexts (see Table 29.5). Despite the successful efforts of the school system, Basque usage has only increased by a few percentage points from 1991 to 2016. A notable difference between 1991 and 2016 can be seen in the use of Basque in public spheres, increasing by at least ten per cent. This is likely in part due to laws requiring proof of bilingualism for jobs in the public sector. However, we are still far from a “normalized” use of the language if only around twenty per cent of Basques use the language habitually with family and friends, and about forty-four per cent of Basques do not speak the language at all. It is fundamental, therefore, to understand

Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation

the important difference between competence in a language and its use. While competence can be increased (refer back to Tables 29.2 and 29.3) with informed linguistic policies and their implementation within the school system, normalized language use requires even more time, as prestige is slowly restored to the minoritized language by expanding its registers one social context at a time.

29.6  Language Policies, Attitudes, and Beliefs The example of Spanish analysed in the previous sections as both heritage and bully language demonstrates that language prestige can fluctuate, regardless of overall number of speakers or a written literary tradition. History and geography show us that socioeconomic power and factors correlated to it affect language prestige in similar ways across time and space. Language prestige in turn affects language maintenance, through mechanisms that cover the whole spectrum from pragmatic to symbolic, especially for minority and heritage languages. Today, we have access to instantaneous forms of communication, facilitated by technology that allows us to convey information at the same time around the world in several languages, even in languages of limited diffusion. Rapid changes are happening and along with them we see modifications in language use and policies that bring us some hope to better understand the importance of minority (or minoritized) languages, not only as cultural capital for the sake of a regional identity connected with tradition, but as a modern tool to acquire the advantages of a bilingual and bicultural education. The case of the Basque language in education, as seen above, is a successful example of multilingual education in a minoritized language. After forty years of sociolinguistic and political repression, there is no doubt that: “the teaching of the minority language on a large scale can lead to a gradual increase of the number of speakers” (Gorter et al., 2012, p. 217). After decades or repression and lack of language proficiency among teachers, individuals were encouraged to learn Basque and were offered a subsidized opportunity to study it full-time. Using a minority language (Basque, in this case) as a language of instruction results in better proficiency in the minority language, as expected, but, interestingly, also to similar levels of achievement in the majority language and slightly better scores in mathematics (see Gorter et al., 2012, for a review). It might be expected that the case of Basque and the decades-long efforts for its normalization should be upstaged in Spain by the other two co-official regional languages, Catalan and Galician. These are related to Spanish and should intuitively be easier to maintain in their respective regions than a non-Indoeuropean language like Basque. However, while

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competence in the population of these other two regions is certainly higher than the 37.5 per cent of survey respondents that reported being bilingual in Basque (75.6 per cent of Catalans claimed in 2007 to speak Catalan, and 89 per cent of Galicians to speak Galician in 2008; see discussion and references in DePalma 2015, p. 428), actual usage trails behind once again, and seems to depend on socioeconomic factors as well as language attitudes. In Catalonia, for instance, immersion programmes in schools have successfully ensured that most Catalans under forty “are fluent in academic, normalized Catalan” (DePalma, 2015, p. 429), and Catalan speakers are in positions of economic and political power. In Galicia on the other hand, only 58.8 per cent of the population reports speaking Galician exclusively or most of the time, and these are older and more rural individuals, while schools favour Spanish as a medium of education (DePalma 2015). Younger speakers have negative attitudes towards the minority language that they associate with poverty and traditional, rural environments (Loureiro-Rodriguez, Boggess, & Goldsmith, 2013), and the loss of intergenerational transmission is at twenty-five per cent (UNESCO classifies a language as “endangered” at thirty per cent; DePalma 2015, p. 427). On the other hand, Galician is also showing some positive changes as scholars have been working on projects that ensure that the language plays a more active role in society. One of these projects consists in the increased number of literary translations into Galician and their publication. Literary and scientific translation into a minoritized language is, in fact, of the elements or relevant signs of its normalization. Translation can incorporate different forms of expression into the culture and allows for access to science and literature in Galician, as well as for a wider distribution of Galician culture into other languages (SanMartín, 2013). When opting for using a global language as a communication intermediate, one inserts traces of tradition, language, and culture, and the global language is therefore used as a tool to transmit and preserve the minority language and culture (Sales Salvador, 2013). Translation is, according to Sales Salvador (2013), a border that allows us to understand cultures, languages, and means of conceiving the world we live in. In the case of Galician as a minoritized culture (Montero Kupper, 2013), translation has a normalizing function, not only in terms of language use, but also in terms of internal and external acknowledgement of Galician identity. It is possible that translations from Galician will bring opportunities for the increased prestige of Galician at home, as well as spread Galician culture abroad, and to see how language works as a communication agent (wa Thiong’o, 1993). It should be noticed that translation into the minoritized language is also a way to attribute importance to the language, stretch the domains of its vocabulary, and enrich its registers (see Olaziregi, 2017, for a thorough discussion of the importance of literary translation and minoritized

Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation

languages, especially Basque). Therefore, it is particularly positive to see initiatives by the Spanish regional governments to support literary translation into the minoritized languages.24 O’Rourke and Hogan Brun (2013) explain how language attitudes, beliefs, or ideologies are related to language policy and planning. Policy and planning are concerned with communicating more positive attitudes about the language to its speakers. The idea of reversing the low-prestige status and stigmatized identities associated with minoritized languages might constitute, according to the authors, the central language-planning problem faced by minority languages during the twentieth century. According to the authors, “revitalizing the low-prestige variety of a spoken form and developing a standard which could allow for its use in formal domains from which it was previously absent shows that the language is capable of formal and literary expression” (p. 2). However, the process of standardization can facilitate continued language loss (Grenoble & Whaley, 2006), further stigmatizing and isolating existing minority language speakers. In terms of acquisition planning goals, opportunities for learning a language—along with incentives to learn them—can have a positive effect on language attitudes (see Schwieter & Ferreira, 2014; for a review on language as a social capital, see Klee & Lynch 2009), and leads to “empowerment through viable literacy development” (O’Rourke & Hogan Brun, 2013, p. 2). In the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), heritage languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish are offered within the community. These programmes are free of cost and some may qualify for transferable credits to the school system (i.e., International Language Secondary Credits). The system also offers over twenty “international languages” for pre-kindergarten to grade 8. Students are mostly, but not exclusively, heritage speakers who have some command of the language but did not receive formal training in that language in the country of origin before immigrating to Canada. The language programmes therefore can serve to improve learners’ heritage skills and can also be a way of maintaining the heritage language for first, second, and subsequent generations born in Canada. Each generation might face acculturation in different ways, which may be related to the time spent in each country and the countries of origin. According to Lansbergen (2008), acculturation encompasses the changes that result from contact between individuals of different backgrounds. Even when sharing the same language, individuals might perceive themselves in different ways as a result of their national or territorial identities. For example, 24

 See for instance a recent impressive bilingual edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets in English and Galician (Gutiérrez Izquierdo, 2011).

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Portuguese heritage speakers from the Autonomous Region of Azores, Portugal, would frequently refer to themselves as Azoreans, sometimes correcting others who would call them Portuguese. This consequently may impact their perception of how far they would go to maintain contact with their culture once they move abroad. According to Stevens et al. (2004), cultural adaptation to the mainstream goes hand in hand with a loss of attachment to one’s own ethnic ties. Jia, Gottardo, and Ferreira (2017), explain that there are similarities between learning a language and learning about a culture. According to the authors, “a very appropriate proxy for how familiar a person is with a culture is his or her skill with the language” (p. 158). The adaptation to the new culture might be related to how easily a person can communicate in the new language (normally the society’s majority language) and how fast it is learned. The authors explain that it is important to understand that patterns of language learning and cultural engagement can help to improve language programmes for immigrants. Furthermore, it is important to maintain the heritage language in the new culture—something which can be achieved through such community-based heritage language programmes as those in the GTA and similar regions. While new immigrants learn and improve English, their children are able to maintain and develop their heritage language while constructing a bicultural identity. Although their language development might not achieve high levels due to the shortened amount of time in the heritage language classroom, it is fruitful to develop language consciousness and a new sense of identity through the heritage language. Clearly, socioeconomic and historical factors affect the prestige of languages by way of similar mechanisms, whether they are spoken by a minority group in its own country or by immigrant groups in a foreign country. However, the contexts, the balance of relevant factors, and how they affect issues of identity and prestige should be carefully evaluated case by case, since what can wield positive influence in one context can be detrimental to language maintenance in another. For instance, the symbolic value important for heritage Spanish maintenance in the US or Canada, as in the example above, can be detrimental to a language such as Galician, since speaking Galician is seen by younger, urban Galicians as a marker of backwardness and poverty. Speaking Galician is, in this particular context, anything but normalized, and therefore not a neutral choice. The use of Catalan (versus Spanish), on the other hand, has been argued to be more fluidly dictated by personal choice and context in Catalonia “drawing its authority primarily from its anonymity” (DePalma, 2015, p. 429) rather than from authenticity, since it does not single out a particular slice of the community, but it can be used by anyone in the community as a whole (see also Woolard & Frekko, 2012).

Minority Languages at Home and Abroad: Education and Acculturation

29.7 Conclusion After forty years of repression of regional minorities and their languages, Basque, Catalan, and Galician have been promoted with millions of euros in funding. In Galicia, half of the teaching must now take place in Galician, which would have been impossible a few decades ago. In Catalonia, the language in all state schools is Catalan, and Spanish is taught only for two to three hours a week. Three types of learning options are offered in the BAC: in Spanish, in Basque, or in both, but only five per cent of students choose the Spanish-only model. There is no evidence showing that these minorities’ languages threaten Spanish in Spain, just as heritage languages in the US, and Spanish in particular, do not threaten the fluency of children in English, the language of the majority. Successful efforts towards the normalization of the co-official regional languages of Spain since the 1978 constitution and subsequent regional laws have shown that informed policy decisions and their implementation in the school system can achieve a high level of competence of the population in the minoritized languages, even in the case of a language that is considerably different from Spanish, such as Basque. This positive picture must be tempered, however, by the studies that show that language use often lags severely behind competence, at least in Galicia and the Basque Country. Use, in turn, depends on linguistic attitudes and prestige. There are general guidelines that single out common factors that affect attitudes and prestige (legal protection, public use, use in education, written tradition, etc.), and these apply to languages spoken by both historical minorities in their own country and by communities of migrants in foreign countries. However, the way those factors function within specific communities or regions must be carefully evaluated in each context, as must be the type and level of acculturation appropriate to that community or group of speakers. Acculturation in the minority language, however, has been found to be an important factor for language maintenance, especially in the case of heritage language speakers. Multilingualism is achievable and is often a reality within countries such as Spain and Canada, and its benefits have been discussed and shown in many scientific papers. It must be acknowledged that since the 1970s, effective language policies have been implemented in several countries that have resulted in an increase in the number of speakers of some minority languages, as well as the maintenance of heritage languages in other cases. One must also recognize, however, that we are far from dealing properly with linguistic prejudice, which is oftentimes a proxy for other types of hostility towards certain groups of people. More research, legal protection, active outreach, and access to distance learning platforms and

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social media certainly can, and hopefully will, continue to improve the outlook for minority language learning in the future.

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Raymond, C. (2013). Language in public: The place and status of Spanish in the US public sphere. Voices, 1(1), 23–28. Raymond, C. (2014). Entitlement to language: Calling 911 without English. Language in Society, 43(1), 33–59. Rodríguez Pino, C. (1997). Teaching Spanish to native speakers: A new perspective in the 1990s. The ERIC/CLL News Bulletin, 21(1), 4–5. Sales Salvador, D. (2013). Traducir literaturas transculturais. In X. Mosquera Carregal (ed.) Lingua e tradución: IX Xornadas sobre Lingua e Usos (pp. 17–35). A Coruña: Universidade da Coruña. Sánchez, R. (1983/1994). Chicano discourse: Socio-historic perspectives. Houston, TX: Arte Público. SanMartín, R. (2013). Presentación del libro. In X. Mosquera Carregal (ed.) Lingua e tradución: IX Xornadas sobre Lingua e Usos (pp. 15–16). A Coruña: Universidade da Coruña. Saydee, F. (2014). Loss of culture, loss of language: An Afghan-American community. Journal of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages, 16, 87–109. Schumann, J. (1978). The acculturation model for second-language acquisition. In R. Gringas (ed.), Second language acquisition and foreign language  teaching (pp. 27–50). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Schwieter, J. W., & Ferreira, A. (2014). Intersections of study abroad, social capital, and second language acquisition. In M. Mantero, J. Watze, & P. Chamness Miller (eds.), Readings in language studies: Intersections of language and social justice (Vol. 4, pp. 107–128). Grandville, MI: International Society for Language Studies. Silva-Corvalán, C. (1991). Spanish language attrition in a contact situation with English. In H. Seliger & R. Vago (eds.), First language attrition (pp. 151–171). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silva-Corvalán, C. (2003). Linguistic consequences of reduced input in bilingual first language acquisition. In S. Montrul & F. Ordóñez (eds.), Linguistic theory and language development in Hispanic languages (pp. 375– 397). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Stevens, G., Pels, T., Vollebergh, W., & Crijnen, A. (2004). Patterns of psychological acculturation in adult and adolescent Moroccan immigrants living in the Netherlands. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 35(6), 689–704. Tendero, P. (2017). From minority languages to minoritized languages: Language on the move. Retrieved from http://www.languageonthemove.com/ from-minority-languages-to-minoritized-languages/. Toribio, A., & Nye, C. (2006). Restructuring of reverse psychological predicates in bilingual Spanish. In J.-P. Montreuil & C. Nishida (eds.), New perspectives in Romance linguistics (pp. 263–277). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins.

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30 Study Abroad and Immersion Jane Jackson and John W. Schwieter

30.1 Introduction Intuition tells us that immersion in a host speech community offers ­second language (L2) learners the best opportunity to enhance their L2 proficiency, intercultural competence, and global-mindedness. While some study abroad (SA) participants experience gains in all of these areas, contemporary researchers are finding that learner outcomes are highly ­variable. Not only are there significant differences among SA programmes, but a complicated mix of a variety of environmental elements including individual differences can affect the developmental trajectories of students participating in SA programmes. Even when two language learners with similar characteristics (e.g., language proficiency, intercultural competence, international experience) join the same study abroad programme, their development and outcomes may differ greatly. Students develop intercultural competence and L2 competence with idiosyncratic tendencies, which makes this topic valuable for researchers to investigate. Applied linguists and researchers from related fields (e.g., cross-cultural psychology, international education, sociology, among others) have drawn on various paradigms, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies in an effort to make sense of differences in the developmental patterns and outcomes of study abroad students. In addition to traditional quantitative studies, more and more scholars have been designing mixed-method and interpretive qualitative studies to better understand what actually happens on stays abroad (Jackson, 2012, 2018a; Kinginger, 2009). Detailed case studies of L2 sojourners, for example, are helping to explain the findings of larger-scale, product-oriented studies (e.g., variations in language and intercultural learning outcomes; e.g., Anderson & Lawton, 2011).

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In this chapter, we begin by explaining the study abroad terminology used in different parts of the world and describe variations that exist among study abroad programmes. We also discuss various environmental factors that can affect study abroad participants’ language and intercultural learning. Drawing on recent research findings, we then identify and explain some of the many individual differences that can result in striking differences in L2 learning in abroad and immersion settings.

30.2  Study Abroad Terminology Terminology in study abroad varies in different regions of the world. To reduce semantic ambiguity and facilitate comparisons of programmes and research findings, the Forum on Education Abroad (2011) published a glossary for study abroad professionals within and outside the US who work with American students abroad (see https://forumea.org/resources/ glossary/). They define study abroad as “a subtype of education abroad that results in progress toward an academic degree at a student’s home institution [excluding] the pursuit of a full academic degree at a foreign institution” (Forum on Education Abroad, 2011, p. 12). The Forum on Education Abroad’s definition of SA is closely aligned with the European term “credit mobility” (European Commission, 2015). An example of a type of credit mobility is the European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (ERASMUS) programme, which enables European students to study in another European country for a semester or academic year and transfer credits back to the home institution (European Commission). Europa, the European Commission of Education, Training and Youth (European Commission), and Coleman (2009, 2013) explain the education abroad nomenclature common in European contexts, for example, the term residence abroad is widely used in Europe to refer to time spent abroad as a foreign language assistant, on a work placement, or as a student. Even with these first examples, we can see that there are many different terms and types of programmes that characterize the field of study abroad.

30.3  Background and Development of Study Abroad Study abroad is not new, and to understand contemporary study abroad practices, it is useful to have some familiarity with historical developments. For centuries, students have left their homeland to gain international educational experience. As far back as 500 bce, ancient centres of learning (e.g., Athens, Alexandria, Rome) were welcoming students from

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many parts of the world to study and learn. In Europe, by the eighteenth century, the “European Grand Tour” had become popular, with elite students (e.g., the wealthy offspring of British aristocrats) travelling to Western European countries with the aspiration of acquiring greater cultural and social sophistication (Hoffa, 2007; Medina, 2008). The wanderjahr (cf. “the Grand Tour”) also emerged in Europe as an option for students from diverse backgrounds who wished to experience a different linguistic and cultural environment beyond their national boundaries. In this tradition, students took a year or more off from their academic studies to “fend for themselves” with the expectation that their time abroad would help them to become more mature. The wanderjahr was the precursor to the “gap year”, a modern-day phenomenon in which students from secondary schools and universities can take some extended time off from their studies with the aim of becoming more independent and mature through explorations in an unfamiliar environment (Hoffa, 2007). After World War II, the “Junior Year Abroad” scheme became a study abroad option for university-level American students. In this programme, students could study in another country and receive credit towards a degree in their home institution. This programme was especially popular among female undergraduates (e.g., majors in the Arts and Humanities) who wished to enhance their knowledge of another language and culture in the relevant host speech community (Hoffa, 2007). By the 1960s, study abroad had become more accessible for people from various backgrounds and social classes, more diverse (e.g., varied types of programmes), and increasingly focused on disciplinary learning, not just language and cultural enhancement.1 In recent decades, an unprecedented number of institutions of higher education across the globe have been developing implicit or explicit internationalization policies in light of accelerating globalization (e.g., Hudzik, 2015; Jones et al., 2016). Some of them, for instance, are embedding an international dimension into their teaching and research and creating more opportunities for their students to gain some form of international educational experience, including study abroad (e.g., faculty-led tours, international exchange programmes, summer language immersion, and internships). In Europe, various internationalization policies are guiding “academic mobility” initiatives at institutional, national, and regional levels. For example, the Erasmus+ programme has been developed to cultivate “European citizenship” and an international outlook in participants (Anquetil, 2006;

 For a detailed history of US study abroad from its roots until 1965, see Hoffa (2007), and for an account of

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Byram & Dervin, 2008; European Commission, 2015).2 This initiative has provided opportunities for around nine million Europeans to study, train, gain experience, and volunteer in another European country. In other parts of the world, other organizations are promoting study abroad experience, including University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific (UMAP). Founded in 1993, this association of government and nongovernmental members from the higher education sector in the Pacific Rim countries has sponsored programmes that seek to increase the mobility of university students and educators alike in order to provide opportunities for language and intercultural learning (see http://umap .org/).

30.4  The Diversity of Study Abroad Programming The experiences and learning of study abroad students may differ greatly depending on a wide range of programme characteristics (e.g., aims; amount of preparation and support provided; duration; focus; setting; depth of reflection that is encouraged; amount of contact with locals and other international students; re-entry preparation; debriefings; etc.). The duration of an international educational experience can vary from a few days or weeks to more than a year. Students may join a microsojourn lasting three weeks or less, a short-term sojourn ranging from four to seven weeks, or a semester or year-long international exchange programme (Forum on Education Abroad, 2011; Institute of International Education, 2016; Spencer & Tuma, 2008). At the secondary and tertiary levels, students may opt to enhance their L2 proficiency and intercultural sensitivity by joining a summer language immersion programme (e.g., study Arabic in Cairo or Japanese in Kyoto). Some students may decide to travel to another country on their own to join a language enhancement programme; others may travel with peers from their home institution and join language classes in the same commercial language centre or other educational institution in the host country. Study abroad participants may study alongside international students from other countries as well as domestic students or they may remain in intact groups, taking specially designed courses (e.g., language enhancement, cultural studies, international business) with co-nationals from their home institution. Secondary schools and institutions of higher education organize teacher or faculty-led programmes for language learners, with students usually  We refer the reader to also visit http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/node_en.

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remaining together throughout their stay abroad. This option typically consists of short-term or micro-term stays in the host environment, with varying degrees of contact between the leader and students, and, possibly, between the sojourners and a partner institution (e.g., host faculty and/or students). The amount of socio-emotional support and mentoring (guided, critical reflection about language and intercultural experience) provided varies. Following this model, a secondary school teacher of English in Seoul, Korea, for example, may travel to Melbourne, Australia, with her students for a ten-day intensive English language and cultural enhancement programme. This micro-sojourn may include a homestay (or residence in a dormitory), language lessons with host teachers, cultural site visits, intercultural communication workshops, and informal activities with Australian peers. Later in the year, the Korean delegation may reciprocate by hosting their Australian counterparts in an intercultural exchange programme in Seoul. In another example, a professor of Japanese in Vancouver may accompany a group of students to Kyoto and teach Japanese language, literature, intercultural communication, or cultural studies courses alongside local professors. He may also supervise out-of-class activities (e.g., interview research, service-learning, or ethnographic fieldwork) to encourage active participation in the host culture and promote language and intercultural learning. In some programmes, study abroad students may have formal language enhancement classes in the mornings and be free to practise the host language and explore the host community on their own in afternoons. There may be regular debriefings or no form of guided reflection. As we can see by the previous examples, there are several variations in faculty-led SA programmes. Internationalization initiatives have also brought about an increase in international exchange programmes for both students and faculty. Often, there is generally reciprocal movement of participants (e.g., faculty, students, staff, or community members) between countries (Forum on Education Abroad, 2011). In semester- or year-long international exchange programmes, the participants may enroll in language enhancement courses or, if they have an advanced level of proficiency in the host language, may take courses alongside host nationals and transfer credits back to their home institution. As English has become the de facto language of internationalization, L2 study abroad students who have an advanced level of proficiency in the language no longer need to travel to English-speaking countries to join English language enhancement courses or pursue further academic studies in a target language. Many non-English speaking countries now offer language immersion programmes and English-medium courses (even

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offered during the entire degree program), providing exposure to local and global perspectives in a range of disciplines (Altbach, 2016a, 2016b; Knight, 2016). Through interaction with domestic and international students, study abroad students may enhance their language and intercultural communication skills. Some of the participants may also choose to take language enhancement courses in the local language to develop a greater sense of belonging in the host environment and gain more exposure to the local scene. Within these exchange programmes, as in the faculty-led options, the quality and degree of interaction with the host language and culture can vary greatly. The housing arrangement in study abroad programmes can also have a profound impact on the language and intercultural learning of student sojourners. Accommodation can take many forms (e.g., host family life; independent living in an apartment; residence in a boarding house, youth hostel, or dormitory on campus; and the sharing of an off-campus apartment or house with co-nationals, host nationals, and/or other international students). Students may live close to the host institution and have many chances to participate in communal social activities, whereas others may reside with co-nationals in a less expensive area that is far away from the social scene. Unless the latter are highly motivated, they may miss out on valuable opportunities for language and intercultural learning. Furthermore, other environmental elements that can pose a challenge for student sojourners include an unfamiliar climate, food and diet, pollution (e.g., air, noise, water), congestion (e.g., reduction in personal space), or atmosphere for studying, among others. Transitioning from a rural university setting to an urban campus, or vice versa, can also be unsettling for some, at least initially. Another factor that can influence the degree of immersion in the host environment is access to and the use of technology to communicate. Advances in communications technology and social media (e.g., the use of e-mail, Skype, Facebook, WeChat) are enabling study abroad students to keep in regular contact with home, if they choose. This can make a stay abroad far different from previous generations (Coleman & Chafer, 2010; Jackson, 2018b). As this brief review suggests, there are many programme elements that can lead to different outcomes from a study abroad experience. In particular, the quality and amount of pre-sojourn preparation, sojourn support, and re-entry debriefings can vary tremendously, ranging from no support to credit-bearing language and intercultural coursework at all stages. It is, therefore, important to be mindful of programme elements when digesting research that centres on the language and intercultural development of study abroad learners.

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30.5  Diverse Environmental Factors in Study Abroad In addition to the many programme variations described above, we must also consider environmental factors which can result in different experiences and learning of student sojourners. In particular, power-related elements in the host environment can facilitate or hamper language and intercultural learning on stays abroad (Coleman, 2013; Jackson, 2008, 2010, 2018b; Kinginger, 2009, 2013). Power-related issues (inequality and resistance) and positioning (e.g., status of newcomers) can influence the quality of sojourn learning. When L2 speakers interact with first language (L1) speakers from the host environment, there is a power imbalance. Differing levels of proficiency and variations in the degree of familiarity with sociopragmatic norms in the host environment can result in newcomers feeling disadvantaged and vulnerable, especially if their hosts are impatient and possess limited intercultural communication skills. Hosts who have no international experience and do not speak an additional language may have little understanding of and empathy for study abroad students who are confronting adjustment issues. With reference to border crossings, Kim (2015a) defines host receptivity as “the degree to which a given host environment is structurally and psychologically accessible and open to a particular group of strangers” (p. 440). The amount of access that newcomers have to local communities of practice can affect their language and intercultural development (Jackson, 2008, 2010, 2018b). When student sojourners are welcomed by host nationals and encouraged to participate in local events (e.g., join social activities, converse with host nationals), they may feel more at home in the new environment; this, in turn, has the potential to enhance their language and intercultural development (Kim, 2015a, 2015b; Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001). In contrast, student sojourners who feel unwelcomed may have few chances to interact with locals in meaningful ways and have little or no incentive to do so. Low host receptivity can hinder their language and intercultural learning and personal growth (Jackson, 2018b; Kim, 2015b; Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001). Social capital is another environmental factor that may play a role in study abroad and immersion experiences. Many L2 learners view a study abroad experience as an opportunity to “invest” in multiple areas of their lives: personal, economic, social, cultural, and linguistic development (Hellsten, 2002). When an investment is made, a return is often expected. However, unlike other forms of capital that incorporate possession, social capital is focused on relationships that are built among people (Smith, 2011). Bourdieu (1986) argues that the original power of capital is

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its capacity to generate value. Individuals and groups are able to obtain and add productive value from the cultural contexts of the networks to which they have access (Clark, 2006). In multilingual communities, the language in which interactions are conducted plays an important role. It seems plausible that individuals who are able to utilize the possibilities of socializing in two or more languages—such as those who participate in SA experiences—may have a unique access to social capital. According to Field (2003), social capital interprets social networks as a valuable asset in the sense that people interact to build communities and to commit themselves to each other. When connections are maintained and possibly even strengthened over time, people can work together to achieve objectives that otherwise would have been accomplished with great difficulty, if at all. When people make connections and share values with other members of the same network, these networks become capital. Research by Schwieter and Ferreira (2014, 2016) and Schwieter, Ferreira, and Miller (2018), for example, supports the notion that a study abroad experience is a fruitful opportunity for learners to develop social capital and to share similar profiles and learning objectives.

30.6 Individual Differences Among Study Abroad Learners In addition to the programme elements and other external factors described above, individual differences among student sojourners can result in distinct developmental trajectories and learning outcomes. A number of contemporary scholars from different areas of study (e.g., applied linguistics, cross-cultural psychology) have identified and examined a range of individual characteristics that can influence the language and intercultural learning of students (Benson, 2012; Benson et al., 2013; Dörnyei, 2005; Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014; Jackson, 2018b; Kim, 2015a, 2015b). Their discoveries have resulted in new theoretical insights and understandings that have implications for study abroad scholars. In the following sections, we review some of the factors that have been found to impact the language and intercultural development of study abroad students. We have organized our discussion around: (1) agency; (2) aspirations and expectations; (3) cognitive and processing effects; and (3) affective and psychological dimensions. We further break down affective and psychological dimensions by looking at language and intercultural attitudes, resilience, motivation, investment, imagined selves and identities, self-confidence, self-efficacy beliefs, willingness to communicate, and anxiety or communication apprehension.

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30.6.1 Agency From an ecological, poststructuralist perspective, study abroad students are viewed as individuals or “social agents” who possess their own aims, desires, concerns, needs, and attributes (e.g., personality traits; Baxter, 2016; Jackson, 2008; Kirkhart & Kirkhart, 2015; van Lier, 2011). Their openness to other “ways of being” and the actions they take in the host environment can affect the quality of their sojourn experience as well as learning outcomes (e.g., language enhancement, intercultural development, identity expansion). Some study abroad students constantly seek out opportunities to use the host language. For example, they join extracurricular activities with domestic students and other international students to enhance their language and intercultural communication skills. They actively participate in social activities and make an effort to forge meaningful ties with individuals who have a different cultural background. With a positive frame of mind, these newcomers take advantage of linguistic and cultural affordances in the local speech community (e.g., initiate conversations in the host language) and try to pick up local expressions, while paying attention to local norms of politeness and other pragmatic nuances. By the end of their sojourn, these types of learners may feel very at ease in the host environment and more confident in their L2 skills in both formal and informal settings (Jackson, 2018b; Kinginger, 2009, 2013). In contrast, student sojourners who are less motivated and perhaps fearful of cultural difference may avoid intercultural interactions and L2 use. They may limit themselves to formal, academic contexts in the host environment and spend nearly all of their free time with co-nationals, conversing in their L1 about aspects in the host environment that they dislike (Jackson, 2008, 2018b; Paige & Vande Berg, 2012). When invited to join in activities (e.g., social functions hosted by local students) they decline, preferring the company of co-nationals who provide a safe haven. With limited access to local communities of practice, these newcomers have little exposure to the host language and culture in informal settings, which can curb their language and intercultural development. They may then return to their home institution with heightened ethnocentrism and little or no interest in intercultural interactions or the enhancement of their L2. As the above examples illustrate, agency can bring about differing sojourn outcomes.

30.6.2  Aspirations and Expectations The aims, expectations, and mindset of students for their stay abroad can also lead to differences in the ways sojourns unfold. A number of study abroad researchers have discovered that students who set specific, realistic

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goals for their stay abroad and are positive about their ability to cope in the host environment are better positioned to take advantage of language and intercultural learning affordances in the host environment (Beaven & Spencer-Oatey, 2016; Jackson, 2008, 2010, 2016a, 2018b; Savicki, 2015). Students who have not established clear goals for the sojourn and doubt their ability to cope in a foreign land may experience a higher level of acculturative stress and their negative mindset may hamper their adjustment in the host environment (Kim, 2015a; Savicki, 2015). In their investigation of the language learning of Chinese study abroad students, Benson et al. (2013) found a clear link between individual expectations (e.g., imagined self-identities) and sojourn experiences. When the research team reviewed the narratives in their data set, they found that “students tend to experience what they expect to experience” (p. 145). In other words, those who imagined themselves possessing “an identity that was not conducive to positive development [were] resistant to the idea that the experience of study abroad would lead to change”, whereas those who “imagined identities that would lead to positive effects [and] saw themselves as willing and enthusiastic participants in study abroad would take advantage of every opportunity to use and develop their English” (p. 145). Similarly, Schwieter and Ferreira’s (2016) study showed that short-term study abroad learners embraced their SA experience by trying to get the most from it—some stating things like “I definitely feel as though I came to do what I wanted: learn Spanish” (Jane) and “I got an in-depth understanding as to what I can do in the future and studying abroad has even clarified my career path” (Ellie; p. 165). Benson et al.’s (2013) study and those of other study abroad scholars (e.g., Jackson, 2008, 2010, 2017) suggest that positivity has the potential to foster resilience, that is, the ability to press on in the face of adversity and result in a stronger desire to seek out intercultural engagement and language learning opportunities. In contrast, negativity can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy and a poor outcome. While a positive mindset may facilitate study abroad learning, sojourners with unrealistic aspirations (e.g., the attainment of a “native-like” accent after a few weeks in the host country) may become disillusioned when they fail to achieve their goals (Jackson, 2018b; Ting-Toomey & Chung, 2012; Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001).

30.6.3  Cognitive and Processing Effects Language learners who study abroad may also experience different outcomes because of cognitive factors such as aptitude. Anderson (2014) posits that cognitive aptitude plays a role in developmental outcomes, specifically oral proficiency gains, of L2 learners abroad, and this, in turn,

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can influence their willingness to engage in intercultural interactions in that language. Her study, which included measures of cognitive aptitude (MLAT, WM) and affective aptitude (WTC), put forward four learner profiles which characterize learners in terms of their cognitive and affective aptitude (lower or higher) and word production and fluency (lower or higher) prior to study abroad. Based on combinations of these predeparture measures, Anderson (2014) argued that study abroad learners can have predictable oral fluency gains. For instance, a learner with high cognitive and affective aptitudes prior to studying abroad “begins the study abroad experience with higher production of words and higher fluency rate. For students who fit this description, higher oral proficiency gains can be predicted during SA due to both higher cognitive and affective aptitudes” (p. 484). Consequently, using these profiles and expected outcomes, scholars who are concerned with the learning trajectories of study abroad participants (e.g., programme directors, teachers, etc.) can identify areas of support and encouragement for language development which might potentially boost self-efficacy and willingness to initiate intercultural interactions. Other research investigating the role that cognitive factors play in oral proficiency gains during study abroad and immersion experiences shows that language development is significantly related to variation in L2-specific processing speed and efficiency (Segalowitz & Freed, 2004) and L1 phonological working memory (O’Brien et al., 2007). Perhaps one of the first studies to explore cognitive effects on L2 acquisition in study abroad and immersion contexts was Segalowitz & Freed (2004). The researchers administered a battery of oral proficiency measures prior to and at the conclusion of an SA experience to a study abroad learner group and an at-home learner group. The results showed that study abroad learners made more gains in oral proficiency compared to at-home learners and that these gains were related to more efficient and faster L2 cognitive processing skills. The subsequent study by O’Brien et al. (2007) compared the relationship between L2 oral fluency development and L1 phonological working memory among at-home and study abroad learners. The results suggested that both groups improved in oral proficiency but that the study abroad learners did so to a greater degree. Importantly, phonological working memory was significantly related to these gains. These findings are in line with Lord’s (2006) study, which also reported preliminary support for the notion that L2 development abroad is facilitated by improved mimicry skills as they relate to heightened abilities in phonological memory. Lee, Therriault, and Linderholm’s (2012) study shows that complex cognitive processes which subserve creative thinking are formulated and developed more so in study abroad experiences compared to at-home

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learning contexts. Specifically, the researchers argue that studying abroad “supports cognitive processes involved in developing innovative solutions in response to demands that arise in culturally diverse environments” (pp. 775–776). In addition to these creative thinking abilities being present in culture-specific situations, study abroad learners demonstrated these abilities in domain-free capacities. Linck, Kroll, and Sunderman (2009) investigated the effects of L2 immersion on the L1. In their comparative analyses of comprehension and production tasks among study abroad and at-home learners, study abroad learners outperformed their at-home counterparts. However, further analyses demonstrated that the study abroad learners, but not the at-home group, demonstrated a loss of access to the L1. The authors explain that immersion experiences can facilitate L2 learning if the L1 is inhibited for an extensive amount of time (see Green’s (1998) Inhibitory Control Model for an explanation of how one language is inhibited to some degree during the production of another language). In other words, the attenuated influence of the L1 on the L2 helped to hasten L2 learning. Linck, Kroll, and Sunderman’s (2009) findings may have some explanatory power for what may happen to a foreign language (i.e., L2) if students are immersed in another foreign language (i.e., L3). In Schwieter’s (2013a) study, L3 study abroad participants rated their L2 abilities significantly lower at the conclusion of a short-term L3 study abroad experience. It is possible that while the reduced influence of the L2 on the L3 may have facilitated L3 learning as in Linck, Kroll, and Sunderman’s (2009) study, such inhibition may have also led learners to believe that their L2 abilities had suffered. Give the problematic nature of relying on self-ratings of proficiency, whether or not this is true is yet to be seen. In terms of L2 lexical development as a consequence of study abroad, research by Sunderman and Kroll (2009) and Tokowicz, Michael, and Kroll (2004) suggests that working memory resources can play a role.3 Sunderman and Kroll argue that cognitive resources can mediate the learning development attained in a SA experience: for learners who have low working memory capacities, there will be significantly less development of L2 lexical production. However, a subsequent study by Grey et al. (2015) attempted to remedy some methodological limitations in these two studies and asked whether working memory and/or phonological working memory affect L2 grammatical and lexical development during a fiveweek intensive immersion experience. The results found that working memory did not affect lexical development leading Grey et al. to argue that “the combined effects of the richness of the context derived from  Some methodological limitations can be found in these studies. In particular, participants were tested in the L1

3

environment several months after the study abroad experience. See Grey et al. (2015) for a further discussion.

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extensive input and frequency of interaction led to gains in target language grammar and vocabulary that in large part were not constrained by variation in learners’ cognitive resources” (p. 153). Grey et al. (2015) drew attention to the scant work that has been carried out on cognitive factors in L2 learning in study abroad contexts—regardless of the learning domain of interest: The small number of studies as well as the methodological variability among studies—including the operationalization of SA experience, learner proficiency level, and confounds between measures of cognitive ability administered in the L2 and L2 proficiency—prohibit reliable interpretation of findings. (p. 139)

Their observation underscores the need for further work on the effects of cognitive factors on both language and intercultural development.

30.6.4  Affective and Psychological Dimensions A number of affective and psychological dimensions play a significant role in the language and intercultural development of study abroad learners. In the next subsections, we review some of these factors.

30.6.4.1  Language and Intercultural Attitudes The developmental trajectories of study abroad students may be modulated by their language and intercultural attitudes. Language attitudes are the feelings that people have about their own language variety or other language varieties (Garrett, 2010) and may range from favourable to unfavourable. These learned predispositions are influenced by one’s linguistic and cultural experiences (e.g., L2 interactions) and socialization within particular cultural, linguistic, and sociopolitical environments. Furthermore, within a specific environment or language situation (e.g., study abroad), individuals may have both positive and negative feelings towards a language or elements of the language (e.g., accents, scripts, local sociopragmatic norms; Baker, 1992; Garrett, 2010). An individual’s language attitudes can influence his or her desire to learn and use the target language, such as in the case of the amount of effort expended to seek out opportunities to practise the host language in social situations (Yashima, Zenuk-Nishide, & Shimizu, 2004; Wanner, 2009). Positive perceptions of the host language and culture can inspire student sojourners to interact with host nationals and use the host language, whereas negative perceptions may curtail their willingness to use their L2 and engage in intercultural interactions (Isabelli-García, 2006; Jackson, 2017, 2018b; Schwieter, Ferreira, & Miller, 2018). With respect to Byram’s (1997) model of intercultural communicative competence, “intercultural attitudes” (savoir être) are defined as “curiosity

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and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about others cultures and belief about one’s own intercultural attitudes” (Byram, Gribkova, & Starkey, 2002, p. 12). These attitudes are viewed as essential for successful language learning. Along similar lines, in Deardorff’s (2008) process model of intercultural competence, intercultural attitudes are deemed foundational to the development of intercultural competence.

30.6.4.2  Motivation and Investment For Ginsberg and Wlodkowski (2015), motivation is “the natural human capacity to direct energy in pursuit of a goal” (p. 634). In relation to study abroad, motivation may be described as aspirations, expectations, drives, motives, and/or reasons (Isabelli-García, 2006; Kinginger, 2009). Within the context of L2 acquisition, motivation comprises “the attitudes and affective states that influence the degree of effort that learners make to learn an L2” (Ellis, 1997, p. 75). This definition may be extended to include an individual’s desire to learn another language and enhance his or her degree of intercultural competence. Psycholinguists maintain that motivation can play an influential role in language and intercultural learning, impacting an individual’s degree of investment, persistence, and proficiency attainment (Dörnyei, Alastair, & MacIntyre, 2015; Jackson, 2016a; Ginsberg & Wlodkowski, 2015; Schwieter, 2013b). Investigations of language learners identify several types of motivation, including an instrumental orientation (e.g., the learning of a language to get a high-paying job or to gain admission to an institution of higher education abroad) and an integrative orientation (e.g., the learning of a language to become close to host nationals who speak that language; Gardner, 1985, 2010; Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014). If study abroad students are largely driven by instrumental aims, they may be less motivated to invest a lot of time and energy in their courses in the host institution if the grades they receive will not count towards their grade-point average in their home institution. Conversely, students who are keen to make the most of their academic experience abroad may continue to work hard and aim to learn as much as possible even if their grades will not be counted. These individuals may take fuller advantage of the opportunities the courses provide for language and intercultural learning (Jackson, 2016b). Self-determination research has categorized motivation as intrinsic (e.g., the desire to learn a language because it is enjoyable and interesting) or extrinsic (e.g., the learning of another language to benefit from certain rewards such as the fulfillment of a language requirement for admission to postgraduate studies; Gardner, 2010; Ryan & Deci, 2002; Ushioda, 2014). Drawing on this theory, personality trait psychology, social cognitive theory, and attribution theory, Dörnyei’s (2009) L2 Motivational Self System has illustrated the learner-specific elements (e.g., proficiency

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level, personality traits, cognitive ability, emotional state, self-identities) and learning situational factors (e.g., teacher, institutional culture, sociopolitical environment) that can affect an individual’s language (and culture) learning motivation and change over time. Within the context of English as a global lingua franca, Dörnyei (2005, 2009) reframed language learning motivation in terms of “possible/ideal selves”. Drawing on psychological theories of the self (Higgins, 1987; Markus & Nurius, 1986), the L2 Motivational Self System encompasses: the “Ideal L2 self”; the “Ought-to L2 self”; and the “L2 learning experience”. Dörnyei (2009) defines the former as “the L2-specific facet of one’s ideal self”, whereas the “Ought-to L2 self” encompasses “the attributes that one believes one ought to possess (i.e., various duties, obligations, or responsibilities) in order to avoid possible negative outcomes” (p. 29). The L2 learning experience refers to “situation-specific motives related to the immediate learning environment and experience” (p. 29). This framework suggests that language learning motivation is driven by the desire to reduce the discrepancy between one’s actual self and ideal possible selves, whether in one’s home environment or abroad. Nowadays, there is more awareness of the dynamic, socially-situated nature of motivation, and recognition that the degree and type of L2 motivation may be self-determined or externally imposed on individuals (Dörnyei, Alastair, & MacIntyre, 2015; Ushioda, 2014). Instead of depicting motivation as a fixed construct, researchers are acknowledging the dynamic, complex nature of this variable. Dörnyei (2009) points out that an individual learner’s language learning motivation may be influenced by multiple learner-specific elements (e.g., “Ought-to L2 self”, proficiency level, personality traits, cognitive ability, emotional state) and a range of situational factors (e.g., teacher, school culture, sociopolitical environment). Accordingly, the degree and type of motivation may alter over time. Educators may assume that language learners who join study abroad programmes will be highly motivated to integrate themselves into the host community and, through immersion, gain ample access to local communities of practice and, by the end of the sojourn, experience significant gains in their language proficiency. For a number of individual and environmental reasons, however, learners abroad may gain less exposure to the host language than anticipated and fail to develop meaningful intercultural ties or a more advanced level of L2 proficiency (Coleman, 2013; Jackson, 2017, 2018a).

30.6.4.3  Self-Efficacy and Self-Confidence Self-efficacy and self-confidence can also impact the quality of the SA experience and lead to differences in learners’ developmental trajectories. Bandura (1994) defines the former as “people’s beliefs about their

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capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives” (p. 71). For Graham and Weiner (1995), self-efficacy simply refers to “individuals’ beliefs about their capabilities to perform well” (p. 74). Bandura discovered that individuals who possess a high degree of self-efficacy tend to approach problems with a positive mindset and persevere, whereas those who have a low self-efficacy view challenges as threatening and retreat, which then stymies their learning and personal growth. In relation to L2 learning and use, Ehrman (1996) observes that “enhanced self-efficacy—that is, more expectations of good results— tends to increase motivation. It also increases willingness to take risks” (p. 144). Mills (2014) agrees, noting that confidence in one’s capabilities is a critical ingredient for successful L2 learning. Based on a review of L2 motivation studies, Mercer and Williams (2014) observe that “having a positive sense of self, irrespective of how that is defined, is invaluable for successful learning in terms of reducing anxiety, enhancing motivation, developing persistence and promoting autonomy, self-regulation and an effective, flexible use of strategies” (p. 182). To engage in intercultural interactions in an L2, whether in one’s home environment or abroad, individuals must have sufficient self-confidence and self-efficacy beliefs. A number of study abroad scholars maintain that knowledge of effective language and culture learning strategies and the ability to monitor one’s language use and intercultural communication strategies can help build confidence in L2 learners and bring about more successful outcomes (Allen, 2013; Mills, 2014).

30.6.4.4  Willingness to Communicate Research on L2 learning suggests that self-efficacy beliefs are associated with an individual’s degree of investment in language learning as well as his or her willingness to communicate (WTC) in that language. In relation to language learning, MacIntyre et al. (1998) define WTC as an individual’s “readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons, using a L2” (p. 547). SA participants may have a high level of WTC in the host language (MacIntyre et al., 1998) but find it difficult to initiate and sustain interactions in their L2. External elements (e.g., host receptivity, amount of access to local communities of practice) can hamper or facilitate an individual’s WTC in the host language (or another L2; Jackson, 2018b). In addition to L2 self-efficacy beliefs, a range of other individual differences can influence an individual’s WTC in an additional language, such as the desire to interact or connect with certain individuals (e.g., host nationals), the degree of investment in language proficiency enhancement, level of self-confidence and self-esteem, personality traits, and the degree of anxiety or language/intercultural communication apprehension

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(e.g., fear of interacting with people who have a different cultural background; Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014; Sampasivam & Clément, 2014).

30.6.4.5  Language and Intercultural Anxiety L2 learning in SA and immersion contexts may be affected by learners’ degree of anxiety when using the language. MacIntyre and Gardner (1994) define language anxiety as “a feeling of tension and apprehension specifically associated with L2 contexts, including speaking, listening, and learning” (p. 284). Negative language learning experiences may result in a heightened level of anxiety in intercultural situations and reduce the individual’s WTC. Conversely, positive experiences may lower one’s anxiety level and enhance an individual’s WTC in the L2. Fearful of cultural differences, language learners with limited intercultural experience may have some anxiety about potential misunderstandings, anticipating a language and/or cultural barrier. Others, who also have limited intercultural experience, may be keen to experience intercultural diversity in real life and feel confident that they will be able to communicate well in their L2. While an elevated WTC and a reduced stress level can foster more L2 use and intercultural learning, “without the decision to act upon those behavioural intentions to communicate, learners may still not use the language, despite their ability and the opportunity to do so” (Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014, p. 216).

30.7 Conclusion In this chapter, we have drawn attention to some of the many external elements (e.g., programme variations, power relations, host receptivity, degree of socio-emotional or intercultural support provided) and individual differences (e.g., motivation, language and intercultural attitudes, cognitive and processing factors, investment, willingness to communicate) that can influence the language and intercultural learning of study abroad students. A complex mix of these factors can lead to very different experiences (e.g., amount of exposure to the host language and culture) and result in differing degrees of language and intercultural learning. Some SA learners become fully immersed in the host environment, develop meaningful intercultural friendships, and experience significant gains in language and intercultural development, while other participants have little or no exposure to local communities of practice and return home with reinforced stereotypes and little interest in language and intercultural learning. With more awareness about what actually happens on stays abroad, study abroad educators and administrators are increasingly advocating research-driven, theory-based pedagogical interventions to deepen language and intercultural learning at all stages of the study

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abroad cycle: pre-sojourn, sojourn, and post-sojourn (Jackson & Oguro, 2018; Paige & Vande Berg, 2012). The complexity and individual nature of study abroad pose challenges for programme providers, including language educators who seek to enhance the language and intercultural learning and engagement of student sojourners. To address these issues and optimize international educational experience, a growing number of study abroad educators in various parts of the world are devising innovative pedagogical interventions (see Jackson & Oguro, 2018; Plews & Misfeldt, 2018; Vande Berg, Paige, & Lou, 2012).

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Smith, M. (2011). A computational framework for social capital in online communities. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT. Sunderman, G., & Kroll, J. (2009). When study-abroad experience fails to deliver: The internal resources threshold effect. Applied Psycholinguistics, 30, 79–99. Ting-Toomey, S., & Chung, L. (2012). Understanding intercultural communication (2nd edn.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tokowicz, N., Michael, E., & Kroll, J. (2004). The roles of study-abroad experience and working memory capacity in the types of errors made during translation. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7, 255–272. Ushioda, E. (2014). Motivational perspectives on the self in SLA: A developmental view. In S. Mercer & M. Williams (eds.), Multiple perspectives on the self in SLA (pp. 127–141). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Vande Berg, M., Paige, R., & Lou, K. (eds.) (2012). Student learning abroad: What our students are learning, what they’re not and what we can do about it. Sterling, VA: Stylus. van Lier, L. (2011). Language learning: An ecological-semiotic approach. In E. Hinkel (ed.), The handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (Vol.2, pp. 383–394). New York: Routledge. Wanner, D. (2009). Study abroad and language: From maximal to realistic models. In R. Lewin (ed.), The handbook of practice and research in study abroad: Higher education and the quest for global citizenship (pp. 81–98). New York: Routledge. Ward, C., Bochner, S., & Furnham, A. (2001). The psychology of culture shock. London: Routledge. Welch, A. (2008). Myths and modes of mobility: The changing face of academic mobility in the global era. In M. Byram & F. Dervin (eds.), Students, staff and academic mobility in higher education (pp. 292–311). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Yashima, T., Zenuk-Nishide, L., & Shimizu, K. (2004). The influence of attitudes and effect on willingness to communicate and second language communication. Language Learning, 54, 119–152.

31 Teacher Education: Past, Present, and Future Peter Swanson

31.1 Introduction The preparation of teachers has a rich history as a critical topic in political and social circles in the United States of America and is currently in policymakers’ crosshairs. With more than 200 years in development, teacher education in the US has changed dramatically, which can be documented by four historical periods: Colonial to 1789; 1789 to 1860; 1860 to 1910; and 1910 forward (LaBue, 1960). This chapter begins by presenting a historical perspective of the US teacher preparation system focusing on aspects such as who controlled teacher education and teacher credentialling as well as how the past seventy years have been impacted by four questions driving educational reform with an emphasis on the teaching of languages. After, the chapter highlights the teacher preparation system in Finland, extolled globally for outstanding student achievement. Subsequent to that, it turns to discuss the current landscape of the American teacher education system and juxtaposes it against its history over the past 200 plus years and the success of the Finnish system of preparing teachers. A discussion of the rewards and criticisms of teacher education are presented before the author presents his and others’ thoughts regarding the future of language teacher preparation in the US.

31.2 Historical View of Teacher Preparation in the United States Regarding teacher licensure during the colonial era in a general sense, LaBue (1960) reported that there was “some concern regarding the licensing of teachers but virtually no interest in their education or competences”

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(p. 147). Those who wanted to become a teacher had to “be approved by one or more of the local ministers” (Angus, 2001, p. 2), which was based on moral and ethical qualities rather than content knowledge, as well as on whom one knew or to whom one was related (Spell, 1927). Licences to teach were issued by selectmen or school committees with ministers’ approval. In Virginia, for example, Knight and Hall (1951) noted that in 1686, the General Assembly of Virginia requested in every county the appointment of a person who would orally examine and license schoolmasters. LaBue (1960) recalled how examining committees would interview prospective teachers:

Chairman  : Candidate  : Chairman  : Candidate  : Chairman  : Candidate  : Chairman  :

How old are you? I was eighteen years old the 27th day of last May. Where did you last attend school? At the Academy of S. Do you think you can make our big youngsters mind? Yes, I think I can. Well, I’m satisfied. I guess you will do for our school. I will send over the certificate by the children tomorrow. (p. 150)

However, citizens soon became dissatisfied with nepotism and teachers’ lack of knowledge about pedagogy, demanding examinations for those who desired to become certified to teach. Later, as the Revolutionary War approached, an oath of political loyalty was added as a means to thwart subversive activities (LaBue, 1960). Teacher certification was controlled locally, and certification became regulated slowly by state educational agencies between 1789 and 1860 (Carman, 1960; LaBue, 1960). With respect to language teaching, even though English remained the dominant language in the east, the curriculum of the Latin Grammar schools was viewed as rather narrow, and Benjamin Franklin proposed the idea of English academies that would offer a wide range of subjects including modern foreign languages such as Spanish and Portuguese, among others (Gutek, 1991). Modern language learning was viewed as a skill; the classics were considered more as valuable disciplines to be studied in schools and colleges. However, in the southwest portion of what is now part of the US (e.g., the territory of New Mexico), a proclamation from the King of Spain established public schools with children taught in Spanish by clergy members beginning in 1721 (Spell, 1927). In California, Spanish was the dominant language, with Jesuit missions dotting the landscape in the early 1700s. Teachers were brought in from Spain and the curriculum shifted from an emphasis on the practical arts to reading and writing, and Spanish grammar. Spell (1927) noted that in some schools, soldiers were used as teachers when a new law required that Native Americans were forbidden to use their native language in schools.

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Following the signing of the US Constitution and election of the country’s first president, a slow and gradual shift towards county control of teacher credentials took place. At first, teacher certification was controlled locally, and licences were valid for a year or less. Teachers were only licensed in the school in which they were employed, and in most cases, teachers were reexamined annually (LaBue, 1960). Also, community officials began to estimate pupil progress when it came to recommending continuation of a teaching licence (Mann, 1839). As time passed, normal schools emerged (Angus, 2001), the licensing of teachers was handled by states and civil authorities, and the criteria for licensing teachers included knowledge of the subject matter and, later, knowledge of pedagogy, which were ascertained by means of a written examination (Angus, 2001). Pennsylvania was the first state to require teachers to pass a test of arithmetic, reading, and writing in 1834. Nine years later, in 1843, certification exams became the norm as New York required exams and issued teaching certificates statewide, and Indiana (1852) and Pennsylvania (1854) enacted similar measures later. Curricula were based on the psychology of child development as well as a strong liberal arts component, especially for those interested in teaching at the secondary level. By the end of the Civil War, the third historical period, most states required teachers to pass a locally administered exam in order to receive a state teaching certificate, which typically included not only an assessment of basic skills, but also knowledge in geography, grammar, spelling, and US history (Ravitch, 2003). Even though normal schools were created in the early nineteenth century for the sole purpose of preparing teachers (Angus, 2001), they began to expand greatly between 1860 and 1910. At this time, teacher colleges, schools of education, and departments of education in liberal arts colleges and universities emerged, and a movement to centralize state authority over the certification of teachers was underway (Angus, 2001). By 1897, “28 states certified teachers on the basis of graduation from a normal school or university without further examination” (Cook, 1921, p. 12). In other states, normal school graduates had to take an exam. In 1900, only four normal schools were collegiate institutions that required high school graduation for entrance and granted bachelor’s degrees. By 1930, there were nearly 150 (Angus, 2001). During the nineteenth century and into the early part of the twentieth century, uniformity in training teachers was not the goal. Teacher training varied greatly in rural and urban contexts. Angus (2001) noted that New York chose to subsidize private academies to prepare teachers for its schools while leaders in Massachusetts created and charged normal schools in the training of teachers. In short, standardization of teacher education was non-existent, and there was not a teaching profession per se as uniformity

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in training teachers was not the goal. Teacher training varied greatly in rural and urban contexts. With respect to language teaching and learning prior to World War I, the classical languages were dominant in public school curricula, followed by French and German as Spanish lagged well behind (Klein, 1992). However, when World War I began, German offerings at the secondary level plummetted, and Spanish replaced German “not for any love of Spanish, but rather as a matter of simple expediency. Other Romance languages, such as Portuguese for all practical purposes, did not exist in the American curriculum” (Klein, 1992, p. 1036). In the Republic of Texas, English began to supplant Spanish, and in 1918 it became illegal in Texas to teach in any language other than English (Spell, 1927). Since then, Spanish enrollments have seen the largest growth of all world languages taught in the US (Draper & Hicks, 2002). As noted earlier, from approximately the end of World War I onwards, the fourth historical period, teacher preparation for the bulk of the nation’s public school teachers took place in normal schools, which were generally supported by public funds. It was also during the early twentieth century when departments specializing in pedagogy expanded into undergraduate and graduate schools of education. Faculties began to develop a variety of educational specializations like school administration, educational psychology, educational sociology, and curriculum. Ravitch (2003) has added that, perhaps even more importantly, experts sought to create the profession of education replete with its own new technical language as well as another teacher assessment. When the American Council on Education established a National Teachers’ Examination in the 1930s, the nation’s schools of education vehemently opposed it because the exam focused on subject matter mastery. However, with the onset of World War II, the National Teachers’ Examination was abandoned and a severe national teacher shortage arose, which led to emergency credentials for teachers. Following World War II, serious changes to the American education system in general transformed teacher preparation.

31.3 Four Questions that have Guided US Educational Reform Cochran-Smith (2000) noted that, starting in the 1950s, four questions have driven educational reform—the questions about teacher attributes, effectiveness, knowledge, and outcomes. She noted that the political climate shaped the order in which these questions emerged, the kind and degree of public attention to K–12 education, state and federal policies regarding funding, the supply of and demand for teachers, and even the public

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perception of teacher education as a profession. Each of these questions is highlighted below with an emphasis on world language (WL) teacher preparation.

31.3.1  The Attributes Question Beginning in the early 1950s and through the next decade, US teacher preparation came under attack for multiple reasons, such as low entry and exit standards for pre-service teachers, a lack of professional knowledge base, an overemphasis on pedagogy rather than content area knowledge, and the absence of a relationship between the preparation of teachers and effective classroom instruction (Angus, 2001). According to CochranSmith (2000), education reform was influenced by what she refers to as the Attributes Question, which inquired about prospective teacher qualities and characteristics and what constitutes good teachers and the education programmes from which they come. It was at this time when Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower called for an increase in the number of second and foreign language teachers at all levels in Canada and the US (Flattau et al., 2006; Ray, 1978). Also during this period, teacher preparation in the US became publicly scrutinized because of low entry and exit standards of teacher candidates, a focus on pedagogy instead of content area knowledge, and an absence of a direct link between teacher preparation and effective classroom instruction (Angus, 2001). As a response to criticisms, five educational groups (e.g., the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the Council of Chief State School Officers) founded the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE; National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, 2015) as a mechanism to help establish high quality educator preparation by serving as an independent accrediting body. While the creation of NCATE and legislative policy (e.g., Brown vs. the Board of Education, 1954; National Defense Education Act, 1958) played influential roles in the change of the American educational system, the events that followed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy ushered in sweeping educational reform. In an effort to bring Kennedy’s educational vision to fruition, President Lyndon B. Johnson, during his first State of the Union Address on 8 January 1964, proposed a War on Poverty—a legislative package aimed to eradicate poverty as well as redesign the American educational system in general. A cornerstone of the enacted legislation was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). ESEA extended the federal government’s role in education and focused on equal access to education. It set high standards for student academic performance and demanded school accountability. According to the law, ESEA was set to be examined and reauthorized every three to

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five years in order to decrease the achievement gaps between students by providing every child with fair and equal opportunities for an exceptional education. However, while the poverty rate dropped dramatically (Eichelberger, Lee, & Vicens, 2014), the legislation waned following its creation for several decades. It was at this time when the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages was established as a national voice for the importance of language teaching and learning as well as to help guide the profession (Terry, 2016). Researchers during this period explored the personal characteristics of WL teachers and those that prepared them. Specifically, research focused on several areas, such as the attributes of effective language teachers (Paquette, 1964), teaching practices within the paradigm of the four skills (e.g., Carroll & Burke, 1965; Keislar, Stern, & Mace, 1965), methods of instruction (e.g., Birkmaier & Lange, 1967; Hayes, 1965), and even comparative investigations of language programmes in Russia (Lewis, 1962; Mildenberger, Johnston, & Fairbanks, 1960). Additionally, language learning organizations suggested certain qualities of language teachers. For example, the Modern Language Association advanced the notion that language teachers must command the language that they are going to teach, have factual and conceptual knowledge from various disciplines, possess an ability to teach, and attend to responsibilities as a professional (Axelrod, 1966).

31.3.2  The Effectiveness Question Beginning in the late 1960s and through to the early 1980s, a change of focus took place. The emphasis on studying teacher and preparation programme attributes was replaced with what it means to be an effective instructor. Cochran-Smith (2000) suggested that questions revolving around effective teaching processes and strategies and, in particular, what teacher education processes were most effective in ensuring that preservice teachers learn these strategies served as a catalyst for many of the developments and reforms in teacher education. It was at this time that many teacher education programmes developed systems for evaluating prospective teachers according to scientific objectives and performance criteria (Gage, 1978). Teacher preparation faculties began empirical investigations related to pre-service teachers’ teaching strategies, such as the use of micro-teaching (e.g., Clifford, Jorstad, & Lange, 1977; Meier, 1968), team teaching (e.g., Otto, 1968), and assessment (e.g., Levin, 1979). Research also focused on elements of WL teacher education programmes (Banathy, 1968; Brooks, 1966), the identification of effective teaching practices in order to improve WL teacher education (Hallman, 1966), the characteristics of outstanding language teachers (Moskowitz, 1976), methods

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of evaluating instructors (Smith, 1973), and supervision and evaluation of pre-service teacher candidates (McKim, 1969).

31.3.3  The Knowledge Question From the early 1980s, with the first Reagan administration, and continuing through to the Clinton administrations in the 1990s, public and governmental concern about teacher education and teacher quality became the focus (Cochran-Smith, 2000). Instead of placing emphasis on what effective teachers do, the focus became what effective teachers know and what they need to know and be able to do. Questions revolved around what the teacher knowledge base should be mainly due to a federal commission, backed by the Reagan administration, which published a scathing report of the American school system called A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). Among the report’s many accusations, the authors stated that American students never excelled when compared with their international peers in student achievement, and that such a failure reflected a systematic weakness in school programmes and a lack of motivation and talent among American teachers. Citing students’ test scores between 1963 and 1980, the commission reported that American students scored at or near the bottom on nineteen academic tests. Later, in the early 1990s, US Secretary of Energy James Watkins commissioned the Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico to examine the case from an empirical standpoint. Perspectives on Education in America (Carson, Huelskamp, & Woodall, 1993), more commonly known as the Sandia report, contradicted the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s findings and documented how education policy became politicized. The authors, both scientists and statisticians, showed that on nearly every measure of student achievement, a steady or slightly improving trend was present. Data analysis showed that the ESEA legislation was not a failure but rather a success as the goal of the legislation was met—to extend educational opportunities to a broader range of the population. Unfortunately, the US government never released the Sandia report and “hardly anyone else knew it ever existed until, in 1993” (Ansary, 2007, p. 3). However, by that time, a firestorm of educational reform was well underway. In terms of language teaching, researchers suggested that the knowledge base of second language teacher education consists of four types of knowledge: content knowledge (i.e., subject matter knowledge); pedagogic knowledge (i.e., knowledge of generic teaching strategies); pedagogic content knowledge (i.e., the specialized knowledge of how to represent content knowledge in diverse ways that students can understand); and

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support knowledge (i.e., knowledge from other disciplines that inform language teaching; Day & Conklin, 1992). Researchers advocated that language teachers have a high level of language proficiency in the four skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening, and speaking) and the ability to use the target language in real-life contexts (Peyton, 1997). It was during this period that two major turning points in the field occurred. First was the development of the language learner performance descriptions in the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Proficiency Guidelines in 1986 (Phillips, 1991). The second was the work that emerged from a three-year grant from the US Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The funds helped an eleven-member task force, representing a variety of languages, programme models, levels of instruction, and geographic regions, to develop content standards for language learning—what students should know and be able to do (National Standards Collaborative Board, 2015). From this work, the Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the 21st Century was published (National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project, 1996). The proficiency movement, along with the national standards, quickly became a focus of researchers at all levels in order to improve language education in the US.

31.3.4  The Outcomes Question At the turn of the new millennium, Cochran-Smith (2000) advanced the notion that what could be considered the hottest topic of the new millennium has been how to measure and demonstrate the outcomes of teacher education, the Outcomes Question. Policymakers, like so many others, began to pose questions about “how we should conceptualize and define the outcomes of teacher education for teacher learning, professional practice, and student learning, as well as how, by whom, and for what purposes these outcomes should be documented, demonstrated, and/or measured” (Cochran-Smith, 2001, p. 1). The foundation of the question suggests that the ultimate goal of teacher education is student learning, and that certain measures exist that can be used to determine the degree of success or failure for teacher education candidates, students, teacher education programmes, and institutions that prepare teachers (CochranSmith, 2000). While other administrations have certainly had an impact on the American educational system, the policies of President George W. Bush have had lasting effects to date. With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as No Child Left Behind (2001), the Bush administration sought to close student achievement gaps and placed the focus on providing all children with a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education based on four pillars

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within the bill: accountability; flexibility; research-based education; and parental options. In short, the mandate required states to establish academic standards and a state testing system to examine if students were meeting adequate yearly progress in core areas (mathematics, reading, and science) as determined by each state. While it is difficult to argue with the legislation’s philosophical merit of having a highly qualified teacher in every classroom, arguments raged stating that the mandate was unfunded (e.g., Walsh, 2008) or underfunded (e.g., US Department of Education, 2004a). States could opt-out of the legislation; however, they would lose federal education funding for such a choice. In the context of WL teacher preparation, the law became problematic almost instantly because WL teachers who were once licensed to teach in their respective states found that they might not be highly qualified1 in the eyes of the federal government at a time of a national WL teacher shortage (Swanson & Moore, 2006). No Child Left Behind prioritized instruction and the allocation of resources to the core areas of science, mathematics, and reading (Rosenbusch, 2005; Rosenbusch & Jensen, 2004), thus narrowing the curriculum by decreasing the number of elective courses students could take (Glisan, 2005), effectively shortchanging WL learning in schools (Edwards, 2004; Rosenbusch, 2005). Swanson (2012) noted that such precedence served to increase funding in the core areas while decreasing available funds for other core but untested content areas such as WLs. Clearly, such preference made K-12 WL programmes more vulnerable to scrutiny, reduction, and even elimination, which in turn had the same ramifications for WL teacher preparation programmes. Later reauthorizations of No Child Left Behind (i.e., Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds Act) have continued the policies to narrow the curriculum. Viewed collectively over the past 200+ years, teacher education in the US has made dramatic shifts. More than 100 years ago citizens called for teacher accountability and demanded empirically driven measures to ensure teacher quality before the issuance of credentials. Over the same period of time, other nations, such as Finland, looked to the US as a model for advancement and created high-quality teacher preparation systems while fostering public trust and respect for teachers.

31.4  Teacher Preparation in Finland Standing in sharp contrast to the US, Finland’s educational philosophy is to provide its citizens equal opportunities to education via focus that “is on learning rather than testing” (Finnish National Board of Education  To be considered highly qualified, teachers must have: a bachelor’s degree; full state certification or licensure; and

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(FNBE), 2015a, p. 1). In Finland, school performance is a reflection of the expertise of its teachers instead of focusing on results from standardized tests or rigorous inspection systems (Sahlberg, 2010). Teacher preparation institutions are highly autonomous in that they determine teacher education curricula and content (FNBE, 2015b). Unlike in the US, there is an inherent trust in teachers and teacher education, as national evaluations of teacher performance do not exist. Becoming an elementary school teacher is highly competitive. According to Sahlberg (2010), thousands of high school graduates submit their applications to the Departments of Teacher Education each year. In addition to the completion of high school, strong results on the national matriculation exams, and relevant records of out-of-school accomplishments, successful candidates must have excellent interpersonal skills. Additionally, candidates must (1) complete a written exam on assigned books on pedagogy, (2) participate in an observed clinical activity replicating school situations, which focuses on social interaction and communication skills, and (3) pass an interview where they explain why they want to become teachers. Once admitted to one of the eight Finnish universities, pre-service teachers learn to use the research process in order to become independent problem-solvers who can find, read, and use research for educational purposes. Teacher education is research-based and focuses on thinking processes and cognitive skills used in conducting research (Jakku-Sihvonen & Niemi, 2006). Both qualitative and quantitative measures are used in the development of teacher candidates and include “the cooperation between school and home and cooperation with the world of work” (FNBE, 2015b, p. 2). In addition to classwork, pre-service teachers in Finland devote approximately fifteen per cent of their time teaching in schools. In subject-specific programmes, field experiences constitute approximately thirty per cent of the curriculum (Sahlberg, 2010). In Finland, all teachers have at least a master’s degree (Sahlberg, 2010). Elementary school teachers major in education and secondary school teachers focus on a content area as well as content specific pedagogy. Unlike the US, there are no alternative pathways to teacher certification in Finland. A university degree represents a licence to teach. Upon completion of a required fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice, pre-service teachers are considered as having “equal status with doctors and lawyers” (Hancock, 2011, p. 4) even though the salary is not commensurate with such professions (Sahlberg, 2010). As can be imagined, there is fierce competition to become a teacher. Hopeful teacher candidates take university entrance exams that measure various individual aspects of applicants such competence and expertise in the specific field of teaching. Only one for every four applicants is selected

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each year from a pool of the top ten per cent of the nation’s graduates (Hancock, 2011). Such selectivity and training help explain Finland’s education success from a testing perspective. On the 2015 PISA exams, results showed that Finnish children were ranked fifth in science and fourth in reading among the sixty-four participating countries and economies (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2015). Of particular interest is that the differences between Finland’s weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world (OECD, 2015), in part because teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to guide students and to turn young lives around (Hancock, 2011). Teacher professional development is obligatory and is funded by the government (FNBE, 2015b). Overall, Finland is regarded as “one of the world’s most literate societies” (Sahlberg, 2010, p. 1). For example, ninety-eight per cent of its children attend pre-school, ninety-nine per cent complete obligatory basic education, and more than ninety per cent of those who begin the academic strand of upper secondary school graduate, while almost ninety per cent of those enrolled in vocational upper secondary school graduate (Välijärvi & Sahlberg, 2008). With respect to language learning, Finnish world language skills are found to be above the European average. Finland boasts that sixty-nine per cent of its citizens can speak more than one foreign language. Forty-seven per cent of the nation commands at least two languages and twenty-three per cent speak three foreign languages (New Federalist, 2018). In Finland, there are two official languages: Finnish and Swedish. While Swedish is compulsory, English was the most commonly studied world language in grades 1–6 in 2010 behind languages from neighbouring counties such as German and Russian. (Statistics Finland, 2010).

31.5 Current State-of-Affairs of American Teacher Education For years, the American teacher education system has been a focal point and has been scrutinized by local, state, regional, and federal stakeholders as well as the media. Leef (2013) reported that many students leave high school with dismal abilities in crucial areas (e.g., maths, reading) because “many of their teachers are not very good themselves” (p. 1). Historically viewed as an easy target for critics who lack concern or care to know what those inside the profession think (Labaree, 2004), legislators and others promote the idea that “many, if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education, are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the twenty-first-century classroom” (Medina, 2009, p. 1). However, such anecdotal quips lack validity.

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Teacher preparation in the US is highly structured and regulated. As mentioned earlier, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), begun in 1954, now known as the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), following a merger with another accreditation body, was established as an independent body to accredit educator preparation programmes. CAEP advances the notion of excellence in teacher preparation through evidence-based accreditation. Over the years, the accreditation standards were developed and grounded in the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium principles and National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. For each content specialty, professional organizations create their own set of standards, and some of those standards require evidence that relies on standardized assessments that can show that teacher candidates “develop a deep understanding of the critical concepts and principles of their discipline and, by completion, are able to use discipline-specific practices flexibly to advance the learning of all students toward attainment of college- and career-readiness standards” (CAEP, 2013, p. 48). Adopted by the Interim Board of Directors in 2013, CAEP’s six strategic goals set out to: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

raise the bar in educator preparation; promote continuous improvement; advance research and innovation; increase accreditation’s value; be a model accrediting body; be a model learning organization.

Teacher preparation programmes seeking CAEP accreditation must prepare and undergo external peer reviews on a regular basis, typically every seven to ten years (CAEP, 2017). As programme coordinators can attest, submitting accreditation reports and waiting for unit and even programme approval can be nerve-wracking for all involved because it is a high-stakes endeavour. Programmes that are not accredited or lose accreditation are seen as less rigorous and problematic, which can adversely affect enrollments and employment prospects for pre-service teachers. As dozens of empirical studies show, there are manifold benefits of formal teacher preparation. First, teacher preparation has been directly linked to teacher retention. At present, many schools across the country are reporting teacher shortages as well as having difficulties finding substitute teachers, especially in certain content areas such as world languages (Mason, 2017; Strauss, 2017). While teacher attrition has been problematic for years (Ingersoll, 2003; Ingersoll & Smith, 2003), Shen’s (2003) longitudinal study showed that teachers without any training were three times more likely to leave the profession, and those who had completed student teaching, acquired certification, and participated in

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induction programmes were 111% more likely to remain in the classroom. Boe and colleagues’ (1997) analysis of the National Center for Educational Statistics report, Schools and Staffing Survey, reinforced both Ingersoll’s and Shen’s findings. Second, high quality teacher preparation helps teacher candidates develop essential knowledge and teaching skills. Findings from the American Educational Research Association Panel (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005) revealed that teacher education programmes that produce successful teachers develop collaborative arrangements between university programmes and local school districts (a.k.a professional development schools), which have a positive impact on K-12 students in terms of standardized test scores. Third, high quality teacher preparation makes a difference in student achievement, a goal of education. Research has substantiated that there are positive correlations between licensure and student achievement (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005). Goldhaber’s (2006) longitudinal study of more than 700,000 students in North Carolina showed that students of teachers who graduated from a state-approved teacher preparation programme outperformed those whose teachers did not. Regarding teachers given emergency credentials, research shows the students of such teachers tended to achieve less than students of those with state-approved teacher certification (Boyd et al., 2006). Such findings have been corroborated by other researchers such as Goe (2002), who reported that “the more emergency permit teachers there are in a school, the lower the school’s achievement” (p. 1). Finally, establishing and holding high standards for teacher preparation in leading industrialized nations leads to greater student achievement. Data from the 2015 PISA examinations (OECD, 2015) showed that students in the G8 nations, the eight most industrialized nations in the world (e.g., China, Finland, Japan), outperformed students from less industrialized nations (e.g., Algeria, Dominican Republic, Peru). As discussed earlier regarding Finland, high-performing students are products of teachers who come from high-quality teacher preparation. In France, teacher preparation includes three years of study in the area to be taught, two years of discipline-specific pedagogy, and two years of being paired with a veteran teacher (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005). Similar preparation takes place for teachers in Germany and Japan. However, critics continue to argue that teacher preparation is flawed, even though teacher professional development is considered the most important factor in education (Treagust et al., 2015). For example, Arthur Levine (2006), former President of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City, reported that more than half of teacher education graduates come from programmes that have low admission and graduation

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standards, and that graduates of teacher education programmes feel that they were not prepared well. Schorr (2013) added that teacher preparation programmes are not particularly selective of those allowed in or allowed to graduate, citing that schools of education lack “the ability and the mandate to screen out candidates who are ineffective teachers” (p. 1). Yet others tout the benefits of alternative routes to certification such as Teach for America, where teacher candidates with subject-specific knowledge are given two to six-week orientations before placing them into schools. While there are certainly two sides regarding the effectiveness of teacher preparation, it appears that teachers require specific knowledge and skills. Simply, having content knowledge is not sufficient to bring students to higher levels of learning. Shortcutting the system is grounded in the notion of promoting a better and/or cheaper alternative to teacher preparation. However, given that foundation of the Outcomes Question deals with the ultimate goal of teacher education—student learning— providing shortcuts to teacher certification does not lead to student achievement. For those who did not complete a state-approved teacher preparation programme, the results in terms of student achievement are abysmal (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005). With respect to Teach for America, Korn (2014) finds that it “undermines the American public education system from the very foundation by urging the replacement of experienced career teachers with a neoliberal model of interchangeable educators and standardized testing” (p. 2). Moreover, the attrition rate of alternate pathway teachers is twice to three times higher than those who entered the profession via traditional routes (Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, & Carver-Thomas, 2016). Finally, with respect to Levine’s argument regarding teacher satisfaction with preparedness, survey research “consistently shows that the large majority of teachers feel the teacher education program they graduated from did a good to excellent job preparing them to be a teacher” (Clarken, 2012, p. 2).

31.6  Thoughts from the Field While there are certainly issues with just about every profession, including teacher certification, I agree that the criticisms of teacher preparation are highly subjective and ideologically driven (Clarken, 2012). However, since its inception in the mid-1950s, the notion of accreditation attempts to remove subjectivity and focus on the process of developing highly effective teachers for our youth. Like other professions (e.g., medicine, law), accreditation holds the preparation of teachers to high standards and demands programme accountability for its graduates. Without such accountability, standards of practice can become murky or non-existent.

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Additionally, a lack of accountability can lead to lower admission standards, a focus on content knowledge only at the expense of expertise in pedagogy and assessment of student learning, and the marginalization of the expertise that teacher educators have learned, possess, and transmit to the next generation of teachers. I believe much can be learned by reviewing the history of teacher education, learning from its results, and looking at other countries’ systems in order to develop highly effective teachers that bring students to higher levels of learning. Taking ideas from Finland, for example, may be helpful as we look to reform the US system of teacher education. First, I strongly believe that effort must be taken to build and sustain public trust in and respect for teachers and teacher education. Research shows that teacher and education respect in Finland have certainly played a role in literacy and graduate rates, equality of learning, and overall academic outcomes (OECD, 2010, 2012; Sahlberg, 2010; Välijärvi & Sahlberg, 2008). The days of blaming society’s ills on teachers must end. Policymakers and parents place undue stress and burden on schools and teachers while marginalizing teachers and the profession almost daily because of a direct lack of knowledge about teaching and learning. As a former high school Spanish teacher, I was told by students each year as they prepared for the annual state tests that their parents told them it did not matter if they passed the tests or not. Either way, they would get their diplomas and move forward—and they were right. For years, student achievement, teacher effectiveness, and school accountability have ignored several important factors like student and parent accountability and equality. With respect to student and parent accountability, it is unfair to fire teachers for students’ poor performance on standardized tests. As noted by Darling-Hammond, “we can’t fire our way to Finland.” Parents and students must, at the very least, bare responsibility for student academic success. If it takes a village to raise a child, selecting one group to hold responsible for America’s problems seems ridiculous. Students and parents must become intrinsically interested and vested partners in academic success, starting at a very early age so that Kindergarten students are ready to learn when they arrive in school, which unfortunately is not the case at the moment for sixty per cent of the children (US Department of Education, 2015). Additionally, teachers must become an integral role in the educational system. Finland’s system trusts teachers implicitly, and the results have been tremendous in terms of student achievement at the global level. With respect to testing, I believe that it has become out of control. During the Attributes Question period, academic test sales in 1955 were $7 million. Today, the value of the testing market ranges between $400 million to $700 million (Rainesford, 2016). It is my opinion that standardized tests

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are most proficient at one thing—the preparation of good standardized test-takers. As Darling-Hammond is noted for saying, “life doesn’t come with four choices.” Such a declaration is clearly true with regard to pre-service teacher outcomes in the area of language teaching and learning. To become a language teacher in the state of Georgia, teacher candidates must submit to multiple standardized tests focused on basic skills (e.g., reading, math), ethics, and second language linguistic and cultural knowledge, which totals hundreds of dollars and does not examine proficiency to use the target language nor pedagogy and assessment (Hildebrandt & Swanson, 2014). Additionally, teacher candidates must develop an edTPA portfolio and pay $300 to have the portfolio reviewed externally by individuals who may not be qualified for such an assessment (Hildebrandt & Swanson, 2016). Second, we must learn from our past. During a conversation with Dr Terry A. Osborn, Vice Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee, about the future of language teacher preparation, he expressed concerns about a number of conservative reformers who believe that teacher education has had a monopoly for way too long, and they want to see teacher preparation changed dramatically. However, they won’t be able to sustain their efforts because their current language teacher shortage will become worse. In order to solve the shortage, they will insist on lowering the criteria to become an educator and will allow school districts to do on-the-job training (personal communication, 8 September 2017). Such thoughts to return to an apprenticeship model, which was first employed hundreds of years ago (LaBue, 1960), seem absurd considering what we know today about teaching and learning. Furthermore, lowering criteria and having pre-service educators prepared by individuals who lack the knowledge and skill of teacher preparation certainly is not the answer, because soon criticism about lower entry requirements and teacher quality will arise like it did in the 1950s during the Attributes Questions period (Cochran-Smith, 2000). Such advocates appear to favour reverting to notions from the colonial period, a point in our history when citizens were first dissatisfied with teachers’ lack of knowledge about pedagogy (LaBue, 1960). Moreover, the pipeline to develop language teachers, those students enrolled in postsecondary language classes, has decreased for the first time since 1995 (Goldberg, Looney, & Lusin, 2015). Such a decline will only exacerbate the existing teacher shortage. Third, our history has shown us teaching is a complex endeavour and requires so much more than content knowledge. Highly effective teaching demands a myriad of knowledge, skills, and practice, working with highly diverse student populations in different contexts. It is a well-documented fact that unlike suburban and rural schools, urban schools function in

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densely populated areas serving significantly more students (Ahram et al., 2011). When compared to suburban and rural districts, urban schools are frequently populated by higher concentrations of poverty, greater ethnic and racial diversity, and increasingly larger immigrant populations with linguistic diversity (Kincheloe, 2004, 2010). Such socio-demographics have serious implications for learning in terms of low student achievement, a lack of instructional coherence, inexperienced teaching staffs, and even low expectations of students (Kincheloe, 2004, 2010). Given such complexity, teacher education requires skilled individuals with deep knowledge about content as well as pedagogy and assessment and experience working with pre-service teachers, not classroom teachers who lack such knowledge and experience. Dr Susan A. Hildebrandt, Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Spanish at Illinois State University, concurs and advances the notion that faculty members in higher education should be the ones conceptualizing and defining the outcomes of teacher preparation, not individuals who have never studied education nor taught. Given that the Outcomes Question is based on the ultimate goal of student learning, teacher educators should be charged with determining the degree of success or failure for our teacher education candidates, programmes, and institutions. Returning to an apprenticeship model of teacher education stands in stark contrast to what decades of research has taught us about preparing highly effective teachers” (personal communication, 6 September 2017). Finally, as detailed by García and Davis-Wiley (2015), I concur that there are three interdependent macro-issues that define the historical and present challenges to language teacher education: 1. We repeat the past. It invades our present and can foretell the future. 2. We reduce or lower standards of excellence established by leadership. 3. We acknowledge the debilitating effects of being a disunited profession.  (p. 32)

As Cochran-Smith (2000) noted, we are in the Outcomes period of educational reform. It is of paramount importance that language teachers are prepared in communicative language teaching approaches so that students can demonstrate linguistic and cultural competence instead of knowing about a language without being able to use it for meaningful purposes. I firmly believe that we need to establish and sustain a national conversation to develop an agenda to deal with the creation of effective policies for language teacher education. First, we must avoid the temptation to revert to past errors hoping for different results. Teacher preparation has been shown to positively impact student achievement by applying research on effective teaching (Hildebrandt & Swanson, 2016), and we must slow and close loopholes

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that allow under-prepared individuals in the classroom. In order to do so, we must depoliticize education so that political interests do not result in another A Nation at Risk debacle (Carson, Huelskamp, & Woodall, 1993), take serious action and develop strategies to recruit more individuals into the profession to offset the language teacher shortage (Swanson, 2012), and develop certified teachers that can bring students to higher levels of achievement (Hildebrandt & Swanson, 2016). We do not need to lower standards for entry to exit as was the case in the 1950s (Angus, 2001). At present, both ACTFL and the Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers have been developing projects focused on teacher recruitment. National initiatives need to be brought to the state and district levels. If every language teacher in the US identified and mentored one student per year into the profession annually and helped him/her matriculate into a teacher certification programme, the shortage could be arrested in a matter of several years. Second, as teacher educators, we must enact our rights as citizens and become present and vocal advocates for our profession by constantly writing and talking to policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels. We have a voice and we need to be advocating loudly and daily for ourselves and not relying on ACTFL or other organizations to speak for us. If the squeaky wheel gets the grease, then we need to squeak collectively via our voting, emails, letters, calls, and social media. Third, we need to help build respect in and out of our profession as teachers. Finland is a tremendous example where teachers are revered. We need to build respect for ourselves by showing education stakeholders (e.g., parents, administrators, legislators) that our teachers and students are achieving in our classrooms, at both the K-12 and higher education levels. We need to show that we are impacting student achievement by creating global citizens and garner the respect that we certainly merit. Over the past 240 years, teacher education has transformed dramatically. Unlike the colonial area as documented by LaBue (1960), there is remarkable concern regarding the licensing of teachers these days. We must be proactive, understand our past, but plan for the future. Teacher education must remain relevant and have a clear and achievable vision. Much can be learned from Finland and the literature base. The days of politicizing education and not referring to the past to determine the best course of action for the future need to end. Teacher education has been shown to have multiple benefits and care must be taken to advance the profession, constantly seek to improve achievement, and develop globally minded citizens. Learning about second language teaching definitely contributes to such a lofty goal.

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References Ahram, R., Stembridge, A., Fergus, E., & Noguera, P. (2011). Framing urban school challenges: The problems to examine when implementing response to intervention. Retrieved from http://www.rtinetwork.org/learn/diversity/ urban-school-challenges. Angus, D. L. (2001). A brief history of teacher education. Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Ansary, T. (2007). Education at risk: Fallout from a flawed report. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk. Axelrod, J. (1966). The education of the modern foreign language teacher for American schools. New York: The Modern Language Association. Banathy, B. H. (1968). The design of foreign language teacher education. The Modern Language Journal, 52(8), 490–500. Birkmaier, E., & Lange, D. (1967). Foreign language instruction. Review of Educational Research, 34(2), 186–199. Boe, E. E., Bobbitt, S. A., Cook, L. H, Whitener, S. D., & Weber, A. L. (1997). Why didst thou go? Predictors of retention, transfer, and attrition of special and general education teachers from a national perspective. The Journal of Special Education, 30(4), 390–411. Boyd, D., Grossman, P., Lankford, H., Loeb, S., & Wyckoff, J. (2006). How changes in entry requirements alter the teacher workforce and affect student achievement. Education Finance, and Policy, 1(2), 176–216. Brooks, N. (1966). The ideal preparation of foreign language teachers. The Modern Language Journal, 50(2), 71–78. Carman, H. J. (1960). The historical development of licensing for the professions. Journal of Teacher Education, 11(2), 136–146. Carroll, F. B., & Burke, M. L. (1965). Parameters of paired associate verbal learning: Length of list, meaningfulness, rate of presentation, and ability. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69, 543–553. Carson, C. C., Huelskamp, R. M., & Woodall, T. D. (1993). Perspectives on education in America. Journal of Educational Research, 86(5), 259–310. Clarken, R. (2012). Criticisms of teacher education programs. Retrieved from https://rodclarken.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/ criticisms-of-teacher-education-programs/. Clifford, R. T., Jorstad, H. L., & Lange, D. L. (1977). Student evaluation of peer-group microteaching as preparation for student teaching. The Modern Language Journal, 61(5), 229–236. Cochran-Smith, M. (2000). The questions that drive reform. Journal of Teacher Education, 51(5), 331–333. Cochran-Smith, M. (2001). Constructing outcomes in teacher education: Policy, practice and pitfalls. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 9(11), 1–53.

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Cochran-Smith, M., & Zeichner, K. M. (2005). Studying teacher education: The report of the AERA panel on research and teacher education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Cook, K. M. (1921). State laws and regulations governing teachers’ certificates. US Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 22. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation. (2013). Standard 1: Content and Pedagogical Knowledge. Retrieved from http://caepnet.org/ standards/standard-1 Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation. (2017). Accreditation cycle. Retrieved from http://caepnet.org/accreditation/caep-accreditation/ accreditation-cycle Day, R. R., & Conklin, G. (1992). The knowledge base in ESL/EFL teacher education. Paper presented at the 1992 TESOL Conference, Vancouver. Draper, J., & Hicks, J. (2002). Foreign language enrollments in public secondary schools: Fall 2000. Retrieved from https://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/ pdfs/public/Enroll2000.pdf. Edwards, J. D. (2004). The role of languages in a post-9/11 United States. The Modern Language Journal, 88(2), 268–271. Eichelberger, E., Lee, J., & Vicens, A. J. (2014). How we won—and lost—the war on poverty, in 6 charts. Retrieved from http://www.motherjones.com/ politics/2014/01/charts-poverty-50-years-after-war-poverty. Finnish National Board of Education (2015a). Education system. Retrieved from http://www.oph.fi/english/education_system. Finnish National Board of Education (2015b). Teacher education in Finland. Retrieved from http://www.oph.fi/english/education_system/teacher_ education. Flattau, P. E., Bracken, J., Van Atta, R., Bendeh-Ahmadi, A., de la Cruz, R., & Sullivan, K. (2006). The National Defense Education Act of 1958: Selected Outcomes. Washington, DC: Institute for Defense Analyses Science & Technology Policy Institute. Gage, N. L. (1978). The scientific basis of the art of teaching. New York: Teachers College Press. García, P., & Davis-Wiley, P. (2015). Tomorrow’s world language teachers: Practices, processes, caveats and challenges along the yellow brick road. Journal of Education & Social Policy, 2(5), 30–39. Glisan, E. (2005). Leaving no foreign language teachers behind: A grassroots response. The Modern Language Journal, 89, 268–272. Goe, L. (2002). Legislating equity. The distribution of emergency permit teachers in California. Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 10(42), 1–36. Goldberg, D., Looney, D., & Lusin, N. (2015). Enrollments in languages other than English in the United States institutions of higher education, Fall

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2013. The Modern Language Association. Retrieved from https://www .mla.org/Resources/Research/Surveys-Reports-and-Other-Documents/ Teaching-Enrollments-and-Programs/Enrollments-in-Languages-OtherThan-English-in-United-States-Institutions-of-Higher-Education Goldhaber, D. (2006). Everyone’s doing it, but what does teacher testing tell us about teacher effectiveness? Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, 4 April, San Francisco, CA. Gutek, G. L. (1991). An historical introduction to American education. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Hallman, C. L. (ed.) (1966). Proceedings of the conference on methods in foreign language education. Indiana University. ERIC Document Reproduction Service NO. ED010932. Retrieved from https://eric .ed.gov/?q=+ED010932&id=ED010932. Hancock, L. (2011). Why are Finland’s schools successful? Retrieved from http:// www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schoolssuccessful-49859555/. Hayes, A. S. (1965). New directions in foreign language teaching. The Modern Language Journal, 49(5), 281–293. Hildebrandt, S. A., & Swanson, P. (2014). World language teacher candidate performance on edTPA: An exploratory study. Foreign Language Annals, 47(4), 576–591. Hildebrandt, S. A., & Swanson, P. (2016). Understanding the world language edTPA: Research-based policy and practice. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Ingersoll, R. M. (2003). Is there really a teacher shortage? Seattle, WA: University of Washington. Ingersoll, R. M., & Smith, T. M. (2003). The wrong solution to the teacher shortage. Educational Leadership, 60(8), 30–33. Jakku-Sihvonen, R., & Niemi, H. (eds.) (2006). Research-based teacher education in Finland: Reflections by Finnish teacher educators. Turku: Finnish Educational Research Association. Keislar, E. R., Stern, C., & Mace, L. (1965). Sequence of speaking and listening training in beginning French: A replication experiment. American Educational Research Journal, 3(3), 169–178. Kincheloe, J. L. (2004). Why a book on urban education? In S. Steinberg & J. Kincheloe (eds.), 19 urban questions: Teaching in the city (pp. 1–32). New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Kincheloe, J. L. (2010). Why a book on urban education? In S. Steinberg (ed.), 19 urban questions: Teaching in the city (2nd edn., pp. 1–28). New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Klein, R. B. (1992). The American association of teachers of Spanish and Portuguese: The first 75 years. Hispania, 75(4), 1036–1079.

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National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project (1996). Standards for foreign language learning: Preparing for the 21st century. Yonkers, NY: National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2010). PISA 2009 results. Retrieved from www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/46619703 .pdf. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2012). PISA 2012 Results. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa2012-results.htm. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2015). PISA 2015 Results. Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-resultsin-focus.pdf. Otto, F. (1968). Alternative approaches to staffing the elementary foreign language program: Cost and time vs. achievement and satisfaction. The Modern Language Journal, 52(5), 293–301. Paquette, F. A. (1964). Undergraduate MFL teacher-training in liberal arts colleges—A survey. The Modern Language Journal, 48(4), 424–431. Peyton, J. K. (1997). Professional development of foreign language teachers. Washington, DC: ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics. Phillips, J. K. (1991). Upgrading the target language proficiency levels of foreign language teachers. Washington, DC: ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics. Rainesford, A. (2016). The business of standardized testing. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rainesford-alexandra/the-business-ofstandardi_b_9785988.html. Ravitch, D. (2003). A brief history of teacher professionalism. White House Conference on Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers. Washington, DC: US Department of Education. Ray, D. W. (1978). Cultural pluralism and the reorientation of educational policy in Canada. Comparative Education, 14(1), 19–32. Rosenbusch, M. H. (2005). The No Child Left Behind Act and teaching and learning languages in US schools. The Modern Language Journal, 89, 250–261. Rosenbusch, M. H., & Jensen, J. (2004). Status of foreign language programs in NECTFL states. NECTFL Review, 56, 26–37. Sahlberg, P. (2010). The secret to Finland’s success: Educating teachers. Research brief. Stanford, CA: Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. Schorr, J. (2013). A revolution begins in teacher prep. Retrieved from https:// ssir.org/articles/entry/a_revolution_begins_in_teacher_prep. Shen, J. (2003). New teachers’ certification status and attrition pattern. A survival analysis using the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study 1993–97. Paper presented at the AERA annual meeting, Chicago, IL.

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32 Future Directions in Language Learning and Teaching Susan M. Gass 32.1 Introduction Looking into a crystal ball is a difficult task, but one that gives me leeway to take a broad view of the field and “think aloud” about where the future might take us. It is a dangerous task because within a year of publication (or less), it is likely that I will already be proven wrong. Nonetheless, I will attempt to take the pulse of the field as it was in the past, as it is today, and as it might be in the future. This paper has three parts. In the first part, I will look at the field historically and consider: (1) the relationship between language teaching and learning; (2) the overall growth of the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and its increasing distance from language teaching and the resulting quest for disciplinary identity; and (3) changes in emphases that suggest a narrowing of the gap. In the second part, I will isolate dominant themes of SLA research and comment on ways in which each of these SLA research areas have been viewed as relevant to concerns of language teaching. In the final section, I will consider recent emphases in second language research, basing my comments on study quality, methodological rigour, and statistical sophistication. The main point is that these emphases impact both disciplines regardless of what directions each takes.

32.2 Historical Overview 32.2.1 Language Learning and Language Teaching How one defines the “beginning” of a discipline can take on many perspectives and often includes a diversity of opinions. Thomas (1998) begins her discussion of precisely this issue by stating “[s]econd language acquisition

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theory conventionally represents itself as having been invented ex nihilo in the last decades of the twentieth century” (p. 387).1 She points to numerous scholars whose views support what she considers a mistaken notion (Rutherford, 1988; Larsen-Freeman, 1991; Cook, 1993; Ellis, 1994) and, in particular, to Newmeyer and Weinberger (1988), who, in an attempt to understand the lack of emphasis on phonology within SLA research, refer to the discipline as having arisen “from total nonexistence to become the pedagogical wing of structural linguistics and from there to achieve relative independence in the space of only two generations” (p. 41). She also refers to books by Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991) and Gass and Selinker (1994), both of which acknowledge that there is a discipline prior to the mid-twentieth century, but then go no further in addressing the “past”: “People have been interested in second language acquisition since antiquity” (Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991, p. 5) and The field of second language learning is old and new at the same time. It is old in the sense that scholars for centuries have been fascinated by the nature of questions posed by foreign language learning and language teaching. It is new in the sense that the field, as it is now represented, only goes back about 30–40 years. (Gass & Selinker, 1994, pp. xiii–xiv)

In a response to Thomas, Gass et al. (1998), acknowledging that SLA did not arise “ex nihilo”, reflect, nevertheless, on the lack of major influencing factors from earlier times on current SLA research. They come to the conclusion that “the point at which SLA separated itself from language teaching is a logical point from which to date the beginnings of SLA as a true discipline” (p. 407) because that was the time that gave SLA a sense of emergence as its own discipline without having to be concerned with issues central to another discipline, in this case, language teaching. In Gass and Selinker’s (1994) words, “[i]n the earlier part of the modern phase, most scholarly articles emphasized language teaching and only had a secondary interest in language learning. In other words, the impetus for studying language learning was derived from pedagogical concerns” (p. xiv). Language teaching, on the other hand, has a long history, as is apparent from the title of Kelly’s (1969) classic work 25 Centuries of Language Teaching: An Inquiry into the Science, Art, and Development of Language Teaching Methodology, 500 bc–1969. In this work, Kelly discusses issues that are most relevant to language teaching, with parts of the book devoted to topics  The belief that SLA in its current configuration is a “new” discipline is comparable to an idea expressed by Kelly

1

(1969) in his discussion of the history of language teaching: “As a field of scholarly research and theorizing, the study of language teaching is claimed to be new. Specialists point out that whereas during the twentieth century, it was developed into a separate discipline under the impetus of applied linguistics and psychology, in previous centuries language teaching was merely an outgrowth of linguistic scholarship. … So it is that most present-day specialists are firmly convinced that in no other age has the body of knowledge underlying language teaching been so well organized, so complete, or in pragmatic terms so effective” (p. ix).

Future Directions in Language Learning and Teaching

such as what is to be taught, how to order elements of a course, and teaching specific parts of language (meaning, grammar, pronunciation). Despite this emphasis, peppered throughout the book are hints of a concern with language learning. For example, Kelly considers the interest in language learning when he discusses the two problems that have been used in designing language courses, the nature of language, and what constitutes language learning. The skill aspect of language predominated during the classical, Renaissance, and modern periods; while in the intervening centuries, the knowledge aspect was taken as the most important. This in turn, has affected the importance of the various means of teaching that suggest themselves. (p. 303)

Throughout the years, one can see sporadic nods to language learning, although instances of underlying theoretical principles to guide language teaching are not what one thinks of when studying historical approaches to language teaching (cf. Howatt, 2014; Richards & Rodgers, 1986). For example, one would be hard pressed to talk in any depth about classical and Renaissance periods involving theoretical approaches to language learning. Howatt (2014), in his interesting article on the history of English language teaching, refers to what he calls the Classical Period (1750– 1880); in his description of methods associated with this period (e.g., ­grammar-translation), there is no mention of anything “scientific” or any reference to language learning. In the Reform Period (1880–1920), we begin to see a bit of theory: “speech is the primary foundation of all language activity. The influence of the new science of phonetics is obvious … the beginning of a long history of connection between language teaching and linguistics” (pp. 81–82). In the Scientific Period (1920–1970), there is a greater interest and concern with scientific findings and to understand theoretical underpinnings of language teaching. As he points out, those interested in language teaching were concerned “to justify their ideas according to insights from the new social sciences: particularly linguistics but also, increasingly, learning theory derived from psychology” (p. 85). This is the period of time, I would argue, during which language learning began to be recognized as an important area of investigation. Lado’s (1957) work on behaviourist underpinnings to language learning is an extensive treatise on principles of learning on which language teaching materials should be based. Fries (1957), in his foreword to this work, makes this point clear: “The struggle to apply to the problems of foreign language learning the new views of language arising out of ‘structural’ analyses has served to shift the focus of attention to the basis upon which to build these materials” (no page given). Lado, relying on the common psychological theoretical position of the day, in this same work makes it clear that the behaviourist position of transfer forms the basis of his work:

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individuals tend to transfer the forms and meanings, and the distribution of forms and meanings of their native language and culture to the foreign language and culture—both productively when attempting to speak the language and to act in the culture, and receptively when attempting to grasp and understand the language and the culture as practiced by natives. (p. 2)

And, finally, Fries, in the same Foreword, makes the role of learning as part of understanding language teaching abundantly clear when he states that [b]efore any of the questions of how to teach a foreign language must come the much more important preliminary work of finding the special problems arising out of any effort to develop a new set of language habits against a background of different native language habits … Learning a second language, therefore, constitutes a very different task from learning the first language. The basic problems arise, not out of any essential difficulty in the features of the new language themselves, but primarily out of the special “set” created by the first language habits.  (no page given)

In sum, the ultimate purpose of research into language learning in these earlier times was to improve pedagogical approaches, tools, and methodologies.

32.2.2 A Parting of the Ways And this is the point where SLA took a different path and began to distance itself from concerns of language teaching. This is not the place to give a complete history of the field of SLA; nonetheless, suffice it to say that part of the distancing of SLA from pedagogy came as a result of (1) challenges to the behaviourist ideas on which language teaching at the time relied (cf. work by Krashen, 1982; Bailey, Madden, & Krashen, 1974; Dulay & Burt, 1973, 1974); (2) a closer connection with child first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition; and (3) cognitive alternatives to understanding underlying constructs associated with behaviourism, in particular (a) transfer (Gass, 1979; Kellerman, 1979; Kellerman & Sharwood Smith, 1986; Sharwood Smith, 1978; papers in Gass & Selinker, 1992) and (b) input (see papers in Gass & Madden, 1985). To look at the field of SLA today, one can think of an analogy with tinker toys, a child’s toy with spokes and wheels. Each wheel can support numerous spokes of various lengths and can be connected with other wheels that also have spokes with various lengths. There is no “main” wheel; rather pieces connect to one part or another. The task of researchers is to address a particular theoretical piece and to relate it to the broader field. Pieces are not fixed and can be moved as the field moves and/or changes directions.

Future Directions in Language Learning and Teaching

32.2.3 The Middle Years As I have written elsewhere (Gass, 2001), the relationship between language teaching and learning may be more fruitfully addressed if we do not think of teaching issues versus learning issues as a dichotomy, but rather as a continuum with pure research issues on one end and purely teaching issues on the other. In the middle there is research in the classroom which can be of at least two sorts: research that is conducted so that we will be better informed about learning and research that is conducted for purposes of teaching—those that address specific effects on learning. (p. 63)

In today’s climate, I would modify this and exclude the last part of this quotation, as the two are not perceived as separate as they were nearly twenty years ago. In the late 1970s, the journal Studies in Second Language Acquisition was founded, and it is interesting to consider the tension between SLA as a discipline and its relationship to language teaching. The journal (1979) reflected the emergence of a “centrally theoretically-oriented core in applied linguistics” (p. iii). As I reported in Gass (2001), “[i]t is quite telling that the contents of the first issue reflect what appears to be the ambivalence of the field as it was attempting to identify itself as an area of inquiry in its own right without needing to answer to pedagogical concerns” (p. 52; cf. Hatch’s (1979) article telling us to “Apply with Caution”). If we move to a time in the late 1990s, scholars in each of the two disciplines continued to see themselves as separate from one another, and professional organizations reflected the distance and attempted to establish their own identity. In Gass (2001), I reported the following which gives an idea of the climate in which researchers concerned with both teaching and learning lived. A few years ago, there was a discussion on the SLART bulletin board2 concerning the relationship between SLA and language teaching. The context of the specific debate was the extent to which an SLA conference should include papers on language pedagogy. Some strongly favoured such inclusion and others argued against it. Shortly after this discussion, I received a letter from the then president of TESOL asking me to participate in a debate concerning the role of SLA research in a teachers’ professional organization. In her letter, the TESOL president said Over the last several years, TESOL membership has shifted from an organization of researchers working primarily in institutes of higher education to an organization of educators who teach in a variety of different settings

 An unmoderated listserv.

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in many different countries. At the same time, other organizations interested in second language research have grown. So, as an organization whose mission is “to develop the professional expertise of its members and other service providers to foster effective communication through English in diverse settings” we need to consider how TESOL’s contribution in research is unique but also complementary to the work that goes on in other forums and professional groups. (p. 63)

I then went on to point out within the space of just a few months, two organizations were asking questions of identity: one wondering if pedagogy should be part of it and if so to what extent, and the other wondering if research should be part of it and if so to what extent. (p. 63)

Thus, as late as twenty years ago, SLA and language teaching were still undergoing separate identity crises, debating whether one was a part of the other. In fact, articles in journals reflected the different emphases. In a paper dealing with the influence of Selinker’s (1972) classic paper on interlanguage, we (Gass & Polio, 2014) presented data from papers published in Language Learning (1967–1979)3 and placed the papers into one of the following six categories: pedagogy; description; data analysis; testing; position papers; and other. Those results are presented in Figure 32.1. Looking more closely within that timeframe (years 1970–1972), pedagogy articles decreased from 10 to 6 to 4. One can surmise that in the early 1970s, the emphasis in the field had already moved away from pedagogical concerns. There is little doubt that a distribution similar to this would not be prevalent in today’s research climate. 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Pedagogy Description

Data Analysis 1967–1972

Testing

Position Papers

Other

1973–1979

Figure 32.1.  Article types appearing in Language Learning 1967–1972 and 1973–1979.  As we noted in the paper, we selected Language Learning “primarily because it was the only journal in existence

3

in the 1960s that had as its specific focus language learning (viz, the title of the journal) and had been in existence for some time prior to the years in question” (p. 150).

Future Directions in Language Learning and Teaching

32.2.4 Narrowing of the Gap: Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) One way of understanding trends in a field is to look at themes of annual conferences. The Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) is an annual international conference which is undoubtedly recognized as the major conference dealing with the field of SLA.4 In Table 32.1 are themes of SLRF conferences since 1990 (https://sites.google.com/site/­ secondlanguageresearchforum/, compiled by Drs Ryan Miller and Yasuhiro Shirai; modifications and emphases are my own). There are three broad categories of conference themes: (1) specific emphases; (2) integrating parts of the whole; and (3) relating theory and practice. In the first category are specific foci, such as variation (1990); sociocognitive approaches (1991); cognitive perspectives (1993); input Table 32.1.  SLRF conferences and themes from 1990–2018. Year

Host

Theme

2018

The University of Montréal

On the Contribution of Cognitive Science to Second Language Research

2017

The Ohio State University

Growing Connections in SLR

2016

Teachers College, Columbia University

Thirty Years of Instructed SLA: Learning, Instruction, Learning, and Outcome

2015

Georgia State University

Application, Context, and Language Use

2014

University of South Carolina

Theory Meets Practice

2013

Brigham Young University

The Natural Phenomenon of SLA: Complexity, Context, and Communication

2012

University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University

Building Bridges Between Disciplines: SLA in Many Contexts

2011

Iowa State University

Innovation in Second Language Acquisition Research: Converging Theory and Practice.

2010

University of Maryland

Reconsidering SLA Research: Dimensions and Directions

2009

Michigan State University

Diverse contributions to SLA: Integrating the parts of a greater whole

2008

University of Hawaii

Exploring SLA: Perspectives, positions, and practices

2007

University of Illinois at Urbana- Second language acquisition and research: Champaign Focus on form and function

2006

University of Washington

4

In search of the “Zen” of second language acquisition: Examining the learner at the crossroads of language, culture, and identity

 This is not intended to imply that other important conferences do not exist; it is only a claim that this is the most important conference that is limited to SLA as opposed to conferences with a broader purview such as applied linguistics or conferences with a focus on subareas.

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Table 32.1. (cont.) Year

Host

Theme

2005

Teachers College, Columbia University

SLA models and second language instruction: Broadening the scope of inquiry

2004

Pennsylvania State University

Convergence and collage: Collaboration in applied linguistics and the language sciences

2003

University of Arizona

Multiple Paths: Mutual Goals

2002

University of Toronto

Interfaces in second language acquisition

2000

University of WisconsinMadison

Second language research: Past, present, and future

1999

University of Minnesota

The interaction of social and cognitive factors in SLA

1998

University of Hawaii

Complementary perspectives on second language research

1997

Michigan State University

Second language acquisition across languages

1996

University of Arizona

Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries

1995

Cornell University

*See note below

1994

McGill University

Perspectives on input in L2 acquisition

1993

University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University

Cognitive perspectives on second language acquisition

1992

Michigan State University

Second language acquisition: Interdisciplinary perspectives

1991

University of Southern California

Sociocognitive approaches to second language acquisition theory

1990

University of Oregon

Variability in second language acquisition

Note: Bold indicates conference themes that attempt to integrate various perspectives of the field; italics indicate an emphasis on teaching and learning. *Although there was no stated theme, of relevance to the present article is the special colloquium titled “SLA Research/Theory and Language Pedagogy”.

(1994); and form and function (2007). In the second category are ten examples (2017, 2012, 2009, 2004, 2003, 2002, 1999, 1998, 1996, 1992). More relevant to the present discussion is the third category that relates teaching and learning. The first relevant conference theme took place in 2005 with three conferences following in 2011, 2014, and 2016.5 One does not know if this common theme (occurring four times in twelve years, but not earlier) is a portend of things to come or just the vagaries involved in finding meaningful themes for conferences.  The fact that there were two conferences with this theme since 2005 is somewhat misleading because two of them

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were at the same university (Columbia University). Themes are selected by each university that hosts the conference and clearly those themes reflect faculty interests at the host institution. The summary also belies the fact that there was an emphasis on this intersection in 1995, not evidenced in the theme, but in the special colloquium topic.

Future Directions in Language Learning and Teaching

32.3 Where Has SLA Been?: A (Short) Selection of Research Emphases In this section, I will briefly explore some of the research traditions in SLA over the years and comment on the level of their relatedness to language teaching. For a fuller description of divergent themes, the interested reader is referred to standard surveys in the field (e.g., Ellis, 2015; Gass, Behney, & Plonsky, 2013; Gass & Mackey, 2014) as well as to other chapters in this book. There are many different topics that could also be included, but given the cursory nature of the overview, I limited my discussion to those I felt had dominated over the years or that have taken on greater significance in recent years. Many other topics (e.g., the significant focus on constructs such as attention, explicit/implicit learning, complexity/ accuracy/fluency) are central to some of the approaches mentioned below, and were they to be included would logically belong in those sections. However, time and space preclude anything more than a brief mention to the following six areas.

32.3.1 Formal Approaches This research area has been at the forefront of research since the early days of SLA research. Its basis can be found in theoretical linguistic orientations with the same questions that are asked with so-called “natural” languages being extended to second language grammars. In addition, questions focus on the starting-point and potential end-points of second language learning (White, 2003; Slabakova, 2016). Within this framework, it is not common to link findings to classroom learning or to suggest implications from findings for classroom practice. An encouraging indication of change, however, can be seen in the call for papers for a special issue of the journal Instructed Second Language Acquisition dealing with the intersection of generative approaches to SLA and language teaching.

32.3.2 Psycholinguistics/Psychology In addition to questions of grammar formation, there has been increased emphasis on second language processing. Issues of innateness, prevalent in formal approaches, are not a driving force, with many scholars instead approaching their research from a cognitive linguistics or usage-based approach. With the introduction of psychology as a contributing discipline to second language research (note the subtle change [1998–1999] in the purpose statement of the journal Language Learning from psycholinguistics to the broader domain of psychology), many methodological innovations have become common. And along with new methodologies have come new research standards (cf. editor’s statement in Language Learning

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2002 mandating the inclusion of effect size in reporting) for all stages of research (e.g., design, reporting). Within this context, second language research is a way to understand the human mind, and as with formal approaches, classroom learning is not a dominant concern.

32.3.3 Sociocultural Theory As Lantolf (2004) notes, the theory “recognizes the central role that social relationships and culturally constructed artefacts play in organizing uniquely human forms of thinking” (pp. 30–31, cited in Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, p. 1). In other words, second language learning, within this approach, is contextually situated and cannot be understood without the context in which learning occurs. A learner’s full range of experiences must be taken into account when attempting to understand the social and psychological processes of learning. It is an obvious step to consider classroom learning within this framework, as is evidenced by recent publications linking sociocultural theory and topics related to the classroom. Discussions of dynamic assessment (e.g., Poehner, 2008, 2013) and language pedagogy (Lantolf & Poehner, 2008; Matsuda, Arnett, & Labarca, 2015; van Compernolle & Williams, 2013; Swain, Kinnear, & Steinman, 2015) have become commonplace in recent research.

32.3.4 Interactionist Approaches Interactionist approaches share a common base with task-based language teaching (TBLT). The basic idea is that conversation is a driving force of learning. It is based on an idea promulgated by Wagner-Gough and Hatch (1975), who argued, based on data from a child L2 learner, that conversational interaction forms the basis for the development of syntax rather than being only a forum for practice of grammatical structures. This research direction was further developed in the early 1980s as well as throughout the years, and during that time a clear link between interaction and language development has been established. A close relationship between this research area and classroom-based research exists primarily through the construct of focus on form, the function of which is to “overtly draw students’ attention to linguistic elements as they arise incidentally in lessons whose overriding focus is on meaning or communication” (Long, 1991, p. 46). In other words, focus on form in a classroom context is explicitly related to TBLT in that tasks in many (if not most) cases involve interactions between or among students and the feedback received on language production. Long (2015), in his discussion of TBLT, argues for the necessity of basing pedagogical practice on research findings stemming from a variety of interests. Among them, he points to interaction-based research and his formulation of it as the Interaction Hypothesis (IH) (Long, 1996),

Future Directions in Language Learning and Teaching which accords special status to the role of brief episodes of selective learner attention to critical segments of the input (focus on form) … The Interaction Hypothesis holds that important brief opportunities for attention to linguistic code features, and for explicit learning … to improve (p. 53) implicit input processing during negotiation for meaning.

There is a close relationship between TBLT and an interactionist orientation, even though research addressing each does not always acknowledge the other.

32.3.5 Individual Differences Research Individual differences research covers a wide range of issues including identity, motivation, aptitude, and working memory, to name a few. In recent years, there has been interest in cognitive aptitudes and the interface with learning (e.g., DeKeyser, 2012; Yilmaz, 2013; Granena, 2016; Li, 2015; Linck et al., 2013; Skehan, 2015; Suzuki & DeKeyser, 2017). In general, the line of research, referred to as aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI), is likely to become important as we attempt to understand the complex relationship between instruction and individual differences. ATI takes as its basis the idea that some instructional treatments will impact individuals differently depending on their cognitive profile. ATI will become increasingly important as a means to connect theoretical issues of learning with more practical or applied concerns of language teaching.

32.3.6 Research Methods This topic has come to the forefront over the past few decades. This is not to say that strict guidelines have not always been followed; it is to say that the discussion of methods was not always as prevalent as it is in today’s research environment. As evidence, consider that, in the past twenty years or so, there have been an increased number of articles and books focusing on research methods and emphasizing the need for study quality. The concern and emphasis on quality methods and quality research appears to be growing in all research areas of second language studies. Quality research has numerous branches, including not only the actual conduct of research, but also ethics, openness, and reporting practices. These issues are the focus of the following section.

32.4 New Common Ground Fast forward to today’s relationship between language learning and teaching. Here, I focus on the subdiscipline of SLA that is now known as Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) because it is the area of

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second language research that is most closely tied to language pedagogy. Loewen (2015, cited in Loewen & Sato, 2017) defined ISLA as follows: A theoretically and empirically based field of academic inquiry that aims to understand how the systematic manipulation of the mechanisms of learning and/or the conditions under which they occur enable or facilitate the development and acquisition of an additional language.  (p. 2)

In the past few years, books have appeared that link language teaching with underlying principles of learning (e.g., Benati, 2013; Pawlak, 2014). However, even more recently, the year 2017 has seen the appearance of two important contributions to this area of research and suggests that the intersection of SLA and instruction is here to stay. One is the appearance of a new journal (Volume 1, issue 1 from 2017) with the title Instructed Second Language Acquisition (https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/ isla) and the other is the publication of a Handbook of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (Loewen & Sato, 2017).6 The central focus of the journal is the integration of language teaching and language learning research. They state the importance as follows: Second language research findings might have a direct application to instructional decisions or provide insights into the learning process that serves as a resource to inform teaching practice. Knowing how languages are learned will help language instructors develop a more innovative and effective way to teach a language and to create the necessary conditions for learners to learn more efficiently and appropriately. (https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/isla) 

This follows from the stated aim which is “to provide an opportunity for researchers, second and foreign language educators, and other language practitioners and policy makers to publish and read second language acquisition research that has direct relevance and impact for language teaching” (https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/isla). Although it is too early to know what the impact of this journal will be, it is noteworthy that there is a call for papers that emphasize the relationship between teaching and generative linguistics. This bodes well in the sense that there are many diverse research areas in SLA and connections to language teaching are not always easy to come by. The Handbook by Loewen and Sato (2017) is equally important in setting common goals that unify language learning and language teaching. What I will focus on in the remainder of this chapter is study quality and rigour. I do so because this is the area that is truly common to both research areas and is likely to drive research in the future. Loewen and Sato make it clear 6

 By focusing on these two we do not intend to minimize the research in this area that has been conducted over previous years (e.g., Ellis, 2003, 2005; Loewen, 2005; Housen & Pierrard, 2005); it only is intended to show recent emphases.

Future Directions in Language Learning and Teaching

that the same rigour that is necessary for SLA research is also necessary for ISLA research: ISLA is an academic endeavor, meaning that it is based on a rigorous and scientific process of accumulating knowledge about L2 learning … ISLA includes examination of research methodology … because research methods are lenses that provide information from specific epistemological perspectives. Consequently, methodology impacts the credibility and trustworthiness of research findings that ultimately inform pedagogical practice. (pp. 1–2)

In talking about rigour in research, Plonsky (2017) comments on the important impact between research in … [ISLA] and second language (L2) pedagogy. ISLA, as much or perhaps more than any other domain within applied linguistics, is expected to contribute to L2 practice. In order to do so in reliable and meaningful ways, however, the research methods from which our findings are derived must be sound and trustworthy. Without sound methodological practices, the results of ISLA research, the majority of which works with quantitative data, will not be trustworthy and will therefore fail to enhance our understanding of best classroom practices.  (p. 505)

In other words, the issues surrounding recent discussions in the SLA literature regarding rigour and study quality are of equal concern to research in a classroom context. Part of any discussion of quality research must include ethical standards for research. All research in language learning and language teaching is governed by institutional review boards where guidelines are intended to protect individuals. Language learning and language teaching research have slightly different concerns in this regard. What is noteworthy is the recent emphasis on research ethics both in and out of the classroom. Sterling and Gass (2017), with particular regard to classroom research, point out that in a classroom context, one has to be concerned with protecting individuals (e.g., some students may not want to participate) while at the same time being true to the goals of the curriculum. Additionally, classroom research must protect the instructor given that reporting practices which need to be detailed in some cases cannot be specific for fear of identifying the instructor or even students. Nonetheless, the fact that a chapter (Gass & Sterling, 2017) on ethics in classroom-based research appears in a Handbook on ISLA suggests yet another area of “common ground” in recent years. The field of SLA has seen an increased emphasis on research methods, in general, and a focus on study quality and rigour in particular. Byrnes (2013), referring to the methodological turn in applied linguistics, argues for the importance of methodological rigour:

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Of course, methodological issues inherently merit a certain level of attention inasmuch as they assure the quality of our work. But it appears that at this point in the development of applied linguistics, they demand a kind of professional scrutiny that goes directly to the core of what we do and what we know and what we can tell our publics that we know—and not only how we do it. (p. 825)

The idea of methodological rigour and high-quality research is not new and is the sine qua non of any scientific discipline. It concerns both language learning research as well as language teaching research. Numerous books on research methodology and statistics for second language acquisition research have appeared, all of which are neutral as to the context of research (cf. Hatch & Farhady, 1982; Brown, 1988; Seliger & Shohamy, 1989; Hatch & Lazaraton, 1991; Dörnyei, 2007; Larson-Hall, 2016; Nunan, 1992; Mackey & Gass, 2016; Richards, Ross, & Seedhouse, 2012; Paltridge & Phakiti, 2015), although the more recent ones (e.g., Mackey & Gass, 2016; Dörnyei, 2007; Richards, Ross, & Seedhouse, 2012) have separate sections that deal with classroom research. In addition to books is the very recent interest in study quality, which transcends all second language research boundaries (e.g., Derrick, 2016; Plonsky & Gass, 2011; Plonsky & Oswald, 2014, 2017; Plonsky, 2013). Loewen and Gass (2009) published a timeline titled “The use of statistics in L2 acquisition research” in which they looked at the use of statistics in second language research showing a decrease in the number of studies with no statistics. In general, they pointed to indications of increased rigour and more appropriate use of statistics, including journal guidelines for the use of statistics, the 1993 introduction of a replication section in Studies in Second Language Acquisition, the 2000 mandate by Language Learning to include effect sizes for all major statistical comparisons and the first meta-analysis in SLA research (Norris & Ortega, 2000) in this case dealing with the effectiveness of instruction, and their subsequent edited volume on research synthesis (Norris & Ortega, 2006). Plonsky (2017) discusses three key issues in relation to quantitative research in ISLA. These same comments are relevant to all SLA research, not just that branch of research that takes place in a pedagogical context. The first is sampling, the second is analysis, and the third is reporting. Although all three areas are important for all research, I turn to the last of these because detailed reporting is often difficult for classroom research. I also raise the issue of replication because detailed reporting is crucial for replication to take place. Reporting has been a continued issue for a number of years. Polio and Gass (1997) argued for the need for reporting sufficient to allow replication. Polio (2012), however, finds that despite the emphasis on replication there are not a large number of replication

Future Directions in Language Learning and Teaching

studies in the field, possibly because of the difficulty in conducting exact replications. A basis of replication is having knowledge of what was done in a given research project, or, in other words, of what instruments were used to elicit data or test knowledge. Published research is generally limited in word count, making the inclusion of materials difficult without severely impacting other parts of an article. IRIS (a digital repository of instruments and materials for research into second languages, a project that began in 2011—http://www.iris-database.org; cf. Mackey & Marsden, 2016) is an important contribution to the field. It is a free, searchable, up- and downloadable collection of instruments, materials and stimuli that are used to elicit data for research into second and foreign languages. This includes research into the effectiveness of different types of experimental treatments and instructional techniques; linguistic development and how languages are learnt; the contexts in which second languages are used and learnt; and stakeholders’ (learners’, teachers’, policy-makers’) opinions about language use and how these impact teaching and learning.

The goal is to: • • • •

improve transparency; increase availability of methods; enhance research agendas across time and space; and facilitate replication, systematic reviews; meta-analyses.

The importance of replication is recognized by IRIS with their first annual “IRIS Replication Award” (https://www.iris-database.org/iris/app/home/ replication_award) for articles published or in press from 2016 and later. This, along with separate sections in journals devoted to replication, are indications of the seriousness that the field gives to accurate reporting and replication. Reporting is an essential part of research in classroom-based and non-classroom-based research, as a way of understanding and interpreting what has been done in the research in question. Plonsky (2017), for example, emphasizes the importance of reporting standard deviations in classroom research so that one can understand the homogeneity of the groups and for use when later calculating effect sizes when conducting meta-analyses. My crystal ball sees no abatement in the continued emphasis on rigour in all research related to second language research, regardless of the context of that research. A particular emphasis will be on reporting and making research accessible. Open access journals are becoming more and more common, and, in fact, there is a movement towards open access which essentially means that anyone can access the articles in the journal

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with no cost to the reader. The Center for Open Science has as its mission the following: to increase the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scholarly research. We work on ways to make the process, content, and outcomes of research openly accessible for others to discuss and build on. It is possible for all scholarly content to be preserved and connected, and for transparency to be expected and rewarded. Acceleration of scientific progress can be a primary motivator for scholarship and a powerful driver of real solutions.

As an example of a journal that deals with language learning, Language Learning & Technology (llt.msu.edu) allows readers at no cost to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author, as long as they cite Language Learning & Technology as the publisher”. Even for journals that are not open access, authors can often pay a fee to have their article be accessible to the public. Part of the movement towards openness and transparency is the concept of badges, which some journals have adopted (e.g., Language Learning and Studies in Second Language Acquisition). There are three types of badges which authors can apply for; the two most relevant to second language research are (1) Open Data Badge and (2) Open Materials Badge. The articles display the badge on the front page with wording that indicates the badge awarded. As an example, there is a note on the article by McManus and Marsden (2018) that says “The experiment in this article earned an Open Materials badge for transparent practices. The materials are available at …” (p. 459). From the Studies in Second Language Acquisition website (https://www .cambridge.org/core/journals/studies-in-second-language-acquisition/open-­ science-badges) is the following: an Open Data Badge is awarded to researchers who share their data publicly so that it can be accessed for replication purposes. Data must be shared publicly with open access (e.g., a university repository or a database on the Registry of Research Data Repositories, www.re3data.org). A codebook or metadata must be included to provide enough information for other researchers to reproduce the analyses and results and the data must have an open license.

An Open Materials Badge is awarded to researchers who share their materials publicly so they can be used to replicate research procedures and analyses. These materials should be shared on an open-access repository such as the IRIS Digital Repository of Data Collection Materials (http://www.iris-database.org) and be accompanied by an explanation of how the materials relate to a given methodology.

Future Directions in Language Learning and Teaching

As is further stated on the Studies in Second Language Acquisition website, “[t]hese badges … are incentive for researchers to participate in open communication by sharing evidence for their findings and thereby facilitating replication, critique, extension and application.” Badges represent a significant trend to openness in reporting and sharing, which in turn speaks to the quality of research in the field. But regardless of openness, the link between SLA research and actual teaching practices is generally limited to a few active practising researchers. Marsden and Kasprowicz (2017) report on the findings from two surveys conducted in which they were concerned with how research flows to foreign language educators. Their results showed “negligible direct exposure to publications in the Social Science Citation Index” (p. 613), in some cases due to lack of the physical ability to access publications, the time to do so, and/or the lack of appropriate requisite train to benefit from the research. This was despite the “generally positive perceptions of research” (p. 613). A second survey reported on 284 published journal articles which were deemed to have research relevant to pedagogy. They found very few citations to these articles (12.43 per cent), suggesting that even in the literature where the research–teaching interface is strong, there is little engagement and dialogue. They make a number of suggestions, including involving to a greater extent university-based research and practitioners, but perhaps the most significant one is to make research articles more accessible through lay summaries of findings. Whatever solutions are ultimately adopted, greater accessibility on all fronts is part of the future. Whatever form accessibility takes, the narrowing of the gap between learning and teaching research will be furthered.

32.5 Conclusion In this chapter, I have attempted to look at the relationship of language teaching and language learning from a historical perspective with an eye on today’s research climate. We have seen the emergence of SLA as something separate from the concerns of language teaching where many subareas of SLA distanced themselves from talking about “applications”. However, the distance between the two is in some sense artificial; one deals with how learning happens and the other deals with how to make it happen. In fact, many otherwise educated individuals confuse these two concepts. This is not to say that one cannot conduct research separately, for I believe that there are many areas of SLA research that may not have relevance to the classroom. It is in this sense that I would echo Hatch’s

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(1979) words “Apply with Caution.” However, what I am seeing now is a greater rapprochement of the two, albeit with a sense of healthy distance between them.

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Index

abstract constructions, 43 abstract syntactic frames, 42 accentedness, 149, 262, 263, 269, 270, 272, 273, 379 acceptability judgment, 211 acculturation, 8, 696, 697, 698, 699, 701, 703, 704, 710, 717, 719 accuracy, xiii, 46, 68, 74, 153, 200, 236, 242, 244, 258, 263, 267, 271, 272, 277, 278, 289, 293, 322, 342, 345, 346, 349, 351, 353, 358, 359, 361, 362, 369, 378, 393, 396, 436, 437, 438, 441, 511, 513, 516, 533, 555, 556, 560, 564, 571, 603, 605, 606, 607, 608, 785 achievement gap, 654, 676, 756, 758 action research, 3, 111, 117, 121, 129, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178 adult education, 552, 568, 621, 622 advanced-level texts, 331, 332, 333 affective, 66, 115, 149, 187, 271, 296, 297, 324, 326, 441, 459, 464, 487, 532, 544, 581, 681, 682, 683, 684, 734, 737, 739, 740 age of acquisition (AOA), 430, 431, 432, 437 age of arrival, 267, 430, 439, 682 agency, xix, 119, 121, 344, 423, 452, 453, 459, 462, 465, 467, 542, 568, 587, 591, 629, 630, 633, 636, 637, 639, 640, 674, 734, 735 agentive actors, 3, 166, 464, 638, 666, 705 American Association for Applied Linguistics, xiv, xxiii, 127 American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 755 American Association of Teachers of German, 561 American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), 7, 78, 258, 259, 260, 261, 271, 274, 514, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554, 555, 556, 561, 562, 563, 565, 566, 569, 570, 571, 683, 687, 689, 697, 758, 768 analytical ability, 391 anaphora resolution, 24, 25, 29, 213, 218, 324, 335

anxiety, 115, 139, 140, 151, 158, 244, 245, 283, 288, 306, 308, 331, 527, 538, 544, 705, 734, 742, 743 apprenticeship model (of teacher education), 766, 767 approximative system, 86 aptitude affective aptitude, 737 aptitude-treatment interaction, 787 cognitive aptitude, xvii, 372, 396, 397, 736, 737, 787 language aptitude, xvii, xix, xx, xxiv, 4, 5, 233, 243, 244, 245, 246, 390, 391, 394, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 401, 403, 505, 511, 515 aptitude-treatment interaction, xvii, 399 assimilation, 292, 294, 651, 660, 699, 703, 707, 710 associative learning, 2, 41, 43, 47, 51 attention, 2, 4, 41, 44, 46, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 68, 74, 75, 80, 98, 111, 143, 213, 233, 234, 237, 239, 242, 244, 245, 247, 248, 261, 264, 289, 293, 295, 299, 347, 350, 351, 352, 367, 368, 369, 377, 379, 380, 395, 398, 402, 422, 424, 431, 440, 441, 457, 460, 481, 483, 486, 488, 489, 493, 494, 495, 496, 501, 505, 506, 507, 511, 512, 528, 530, 531, 532, 533, 534, 538, 542, 544, 545, 560, 590, 597, 603, 607, 608, 611, 785, 786, 790 attentional capacity, 289, 348 attrition (of language), 8, 95, 701, 702, 706, 708 audio-lingual method, 188, 482, 484 auditory representations, 90 authentic listening materials, 137, 138, 139, 307 authentic speech, 4 autoethnography, 119, 127 automaticity, 289, 290, 304, 511 autonomy (of the learner), 466, 568, 575, 621, 622, 634, 636, 638, 639, 662, 707, 742 Barcelona Age Factor (BAF) project, xxi, 435, 436 Basic Property of Language (BLP), 18

800

Index basic variety (of interlanguage), 46 Basque, 149, 600, 652, 658, 698, 710, 711, 712, 713, 714, 715, 716, 717, 719 behaviourism, 482, 780 blended learning, 7 blocking, 2, 41, 44, 51, 53, 55 bottom-up, 49, 153, 178, 286 brain maturation, 266 capital, 435, 453, 454, 455, 457, 458, 460, 461, 462, 467, 491, 653, 656, 659, 661, 684, 715, 717, 733, 734 case agreement, 213 category system, 190 clarification requests, 196, 235, 237, 238, 306, 491, 492, 515, 516, 608, 610 Classical Period, 779 classroom behaviour, 113, 191, 192, 193, 202 classroom observational research, 3, 63, 186, 187, 192, 199, 246 classroom praxis, 70, 72 clitics, 48, 507, 519, 529 co-articulation, 291 cochlear implants, 655 co-curricular activities, 630 code-meshing, 675 coding procedures, 3, 145, 186, 189, 190 Cognition Hypothesis, 242, 244, 348, 349, 350, 534, 541 cognitive decline, 439, 440, 441, 443 cognitive fluency, 264 cognitive grammar, 14 cognitive interactionism, 233, 243 cognitive load, 512, 513, 531, 532, 535, 536, 537 cognitive mechanisms, 2, 26, 41, 97, 98, 101, 382, 480, 531, See also cognitive processes cognitive processes, 47, 102, 241, 247, 327, 335, 391, 393, 399, 401, 452, 486, 528, 533, 541, 629, 737, 738, See also cognitive mechanisms cognitive psychology, 85, 86, 99, 365, 366, 370, 382, 392, 393, 532 colonialism, 708, 709 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, xix, 7, 550, 551, 552, 556, 562, 563, 564, 566, 567, 568, 569, 570, 571, 588 communicative language teaching, 3, 7, 77, 189, 191, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 265, 273, 482, 483, 484, 496, 529, 530, 567, 607, 767 communicative practice, 195, 458 communicative value, 481, 502, 542, 609 competence, 7, 18, 74, 97, 218, 264, 266, 270, 512, 553, 554, 555, 556, 567, 589, 600, 602, 650, 652, 655, 661, 674, 676, 679, 690, 697, 711, 712, 715, 716, 719, 727, 752, 760 communicative competence, 141, 143, 144, 196, 245, 264, 265, 274, 307, 391, 483, 484, 585, 739 cultural competence, 455, 571, 601, 656, 699, 727, 740, 767 discourse competence, 144, 265 grammatical competence, 13, 144, 265, 481, 493 interactional competence, 258

langua-technocultural competence, 589 linguistic competence, 15, 31, 70, 144, 343, 554, 560, 567, 605, 634, 659, 680, 697, 702, 712, 767 listening competence, 284, 296, 298 literacy competence, 330 pragmalinguistic competence, 144 pragmatic competence, 144 sociolinguistic competence, 265, 609 strategic competence, xix, 46, 144, 265, 297, 308 transitional competence, 86 Competition Model, 51 complex adaptive systems, 2, 96 comprehensible output, 261, 481, 493 comprehension checks. See clarification requests comprehension processes, 208, 214, 321 comprehension question, 211, 284, 290, 308, 324, 519 computer-assisted language learning (CALL), xxiv, 575, 576, 578, 586 computer-mediated communication, 240, 330, 463, 578, 586 computer-mediated writing, 5 concept-based instruction, xxiv, 115 confirmation checks. See clarification requests conformism, 702 connected speech, 4, 48, 290, 292, 293, 301, 302, 303, 308 connection ethnography, 126 consciousness raising, 483, 490, 496, 577 conscious-practical method, 529, 530 constructicon, 45, 49 construction grammar, xv, 14, 42 content and language integrated learning, 118, 148, 149, 157, 158, 200, 436, 514, 598, 599, 600, 601, 602, 605, 606, 652, 658, 659, 660 content knowledge, 118, 511, 607, 610, 612, 752, 757, 764, 765, 766 content-based language teaching, 118, 122, 199, 200, 483, 597, 603, 607, 608, 609, 610, 611, 612 contextual cues, 289 contrived texts, 141, 142 control conditions, 55, 208, 219 conversation analysis, 116, 117 coreferential, 22, 23, 24 corpus, 4, 48, 301, 355, 463, 464, 564, 578, 579, 580, 704 corpus linguistics, xv, xix, xxiv, 579, 580, 583 corrective feedback, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, 3, 139, 155, 198, 199, 200, 233, 234, 237, 244, 341, 343, 346, 372, 374, 377, 381, 398, 491, 492, 610 co-textual cues, 289 Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, 762 counter-culture community of practice, 630, 631 creative construction approach, 88, 89, 98 credit mobility, 728 critical period, 25, 86, 266, 394, 430 cue-outcomes, 43, 49, 50 cultural background knowledge, 324 cultural historical activity theory, 628

Index data-driven learning, 151, 157, 578, 579, 580 declarative knowledge, 345, 480, 500, 556 deductive task, 490 dementia, 440 developmental BE, 656, 660 developmental readiness, 241, 246, 542 developmental trajectory, 66, 68, 556 digital gaming, 581 digital literacy, xv, 126, 455, 586, 589 Direct Method, 482 Directed Motivational Currents, 417 discourse analysis, xiii, 3, 115, 119, 140, 187, 201, 285, 508, 621, 635 discourse antecedent, 22, 23, 24 discourse construction, 289 discourse representation, 288 display questions, 200, 516, 611 distance learning, 7, 584, 585, 719 domain-general cognition, xxii, 18, 20, 25 double play, 305, 306 dual immersion, 598, 600, 601, 657, 686, 690 dual language programmes, 657, 663, 680, 682, 685, 706 dynamic assessment, xxiv, 115, 786 Dynamic Systems Theory, 351, 465, 588, 589 dysfluency markers, 264 ear-training, 290, 294 eclectic mixed methods approach, 127 ecological validity, 17, 144, 145, 160, 236 EEG (electroencephalography), 26, 208, 209, 219 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), 755, 757 elision, 292, 294 embedded-processes model, 366 enacted curriculum, 167 enculturation, 697 English for academic purposes, 124, 638 English-only, 656, 657, 660, 700 episodic memory, 368, 392 epistemology, 79, 116, 138 ERP (event-related potential), 30, 208, 219, 220, 221, 222 ESL (English as a second language), 112, 148, 151, 153, 155, 157, 196, 197, 240, 263, 326, 454, 489, 513, 610, 632, 660, 688 ethnic group affiliation, 267 ethnographic approaches, 115, 117, 122, 123, 126, 140, 187, 193, 198, 201, 463, 465, 466, 632, 684, 731 European Commission, 433, 567, 676, 689, 728, 730 European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (ERASMUS), 728, 729 evangelization, 709 executive control model, 366 exemplar-based learning, 2, 41, 43 explicit feedback. See feedback, explicit explicit instruction, xvii, 20, 54, 68, 372, 398, 489, 505, 543, 578

explicit knowledge, 63, 80, 95, 96, 102, 212, 213, 217, 344, 345, 376, 396, 440, 480, 501, 505, 506, 521 explicit learning, 54, 247, 267, 375, 381, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 403, 506, 786 exploratory teaching, 169 Extended Projection Principle, 16 eye-tracking, 26, 53, 55, 145, 208, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218, 219, 222, 300, 382 face-to-face, 151, 240, 403, 463, 464, 539, 575, 578, 579, 580, 581, 585, 586 Failed Functional Features Hypothesis, 216 feedback. See also corrective feedback explicit feedback, 241, 243, 375, 398, 399 feedback-on-error models, 198 immediate feedback, 456, 575, 579 implicit feedback, 237, 241, 243, 244, 399 Initiation–Response–Feedback, 187, 502, 503, 504, 515, 516, 518 field-dependent learners, 245 field-independent learners, 245 Five Graces group, 2, 85, 90, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104 fixation, 24, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218 Flander’s Interaction Analysis Categories, 188 flexible bilingualism, 675 fluency, 4, 149, 153, 158, 236, 244, 258, 259, 263, 264, 267, 270, 271, 272, 274, 330, 346, 349, 351, 352, 378, 379, 380, 392, 432, 437, 438, 443, 480, 506, 511, 512, 533, 555, 556, 558, 560, 604, 606, 607, 608, 680, 701, 702, 719, 737, 785 Foci for Observing Communications Used in Settings (FOCUS), 187, 193, 194, 195 focus on form, 55, 157, 197, 242, 247, 248, 329, 343, 346, 350, 351, 398, 483, 485, 486, 492, 496, 497, 504, 515, 516, 519, 527, 541, 542, 543, 544, 607, 608, 609, 610, 611, 783, 786 integrated focus on form, 608 isolated focus on form, 608 focus on forms, 485, 519, 530 Foreign Language Interaction System, 188 formal linguistic approaches, 2, 13, 15 form-function mappings, 2, 44, 45, 46, 55, 239, 543 form-meaning, 42, 45, 97, 480, 486, 487, 501 formulaic language, 5, 148, 151, 158, 266, 293, 302, 381, 586 fossilization, 86 fragmentation, 466 French immersion (in Canada), 200, 237, 462, 600, 604, 605, 609, 610, 611 Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis, 216 garden-path sentences, 210, 211, 212, 215, 287 gender mismatch, 218 gender violation sentences, 217 generation 1.5, 702 generative grammar, 14, 17, 18, 97, 104 generative linguistic approach/framework, 15, 85, 87, 92, 788 genetically-based language faculty, 100, 101, 102, 482 global citizenship, 459, 466

801

802

Index globalization, 8, 123, 433, 452, 455, 456, 460, 586, 649, 651, 655, 656, 657, 658, 662 Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale, 689 Grammar Translation Method, 482 grammatical cues, 41, 46 grammatical range, 258 grammatical sensitivity, 355, 391, 393, 398, 400 grammaticality judgments, 209, 213 grounded theory, 117, 123, 124 heritage language teaching/learning, xi, xiii, xxii, xxiii, 8, 77, 78, 120, 652, 660, 664, 673, 674, 675, 676, 677, 678, 679, 680, 681, 682, 683, 684, 685, 686, 687, 688, 689, 690, 696, 697, 698, 699, 701, 702, 703, 704, 705, 706, 707, 708, 710, 713, 715, 717, 718, 719 heteroglossia, 651, 661, 664, 675 hierarchical structure, 18, 478, 479 history-in-person, 75, 76, 77 homophone, 287 host receptivity, 733, 742, 743 hypermedia, 329, 333, 334, 586 identity, xv, xviii, xix, xxi, xxii, 6, 76, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 127, 176, 177, 268, 413, 415, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 467, 568, 585, 599, 601, 611, 612, 625, 626, 628, 630, 633, 636, 638, 639, 640, 652, 653, 655, 659, 702, 705, 707, 708, 715, 716, 718, 735, 736, 777, 781, 782, 783, 787 cultural identity, 451, 699, 718 group identity, 701 identity categories, 6 social identity, 451 idioms, 42, 322, 422, 514, 558 immigrants/immigrant education, 632, 633, 636, 640, 652, 653, 654, 655, 673, 675, 676, 677, 679, 681, 682, 684, 686, 696, 697, 698, 699, 700, 701, 702, 703, 704, 705, 707, 709, 717, 718, 767 implicit feedback. See feedback, implicit implicit instruction, xvii, 68, 372, 486, 488, 543 implicit knowledge, 14, 95, 96, 209, 213, 345, 354, 376, 501, 502, 503, 505, 506, 517, 520, 521 implicit learning, 54, 102, 103, 267, 392, 393, 396, 397, 399, 400, 401, 402, 506, 521, 785 incidental learning, 239, 398, 501, 505, 506, 518, 519, 520, 521 incremental sentence processing, 28 individual differences, xvii, xviii, xxi, 1, 3, 4, 5, 14, 69, 70, 223, 243, 265, 274, 366, 369, 372, 379, 390, 395, 396, 398, 400, 402, 403, 409, 413, 415, 417, 435, 436, 442, 539, 684, 727, 728, 734, 742, 743, 787 individualized performance, 636 inductive language learning capacity, 355, 391 inductive task, 490 inequality, 456, 467, 623, 660, 662, 733 innateness, 100, 101, 102, 104, 785 input, xviii, 6, 13, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 51, 53, 54, 56, 60, 63, 92, 93, 98, 99, 100, 141, 170, 175, 189, 195, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 214, 216, 218, 219, 220,

222, 233, 234, 235, 237, 239, 242, 245, 246, 247, 265, 267, 283, 284, 287, 289, 290, 291, 293, 295, 299, 301, 302, 306, 308, 320, 343, 344, 347, 356, 374, 375, 376, 393, 394, 397, 399, 431, 432, 434, 436, 438, 439, 440, 443, 444, 464, 465, 477, 478, 479, 480, 481, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487, 488, 489, 492, 493, 495, 496, 497, 501, 502, 506, 514, 515, 516, 517, 518, 519, 521, 527, 533, 535, 537, 542, 543, 556, 576, 577, 584, 603, 605, 606, 607, 608, 609, 663, 739, 780, 784, 786 input elaboration. See input enhancement input enhancement, xviii, 481, 483, 487, 488, 489, 496, 533, 542, 584, 609 input flood, 488, 533, 542, 608 input processing, 52, 247, 344, 356, 480, 484, 486, 542, 577, 584, 786 input sensitivity, 245 input simplification, 514, 542 input-based programme, 518, 519 input-processing theory, 584 message-based input, 195 intelligibility, xiv, 20, 262, 263, 272, 304 interaction, xxiv, 4, 6, 19, 20, 26, 42, 45, 62, 64, 73, 76, 77, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 122, 123, 140, 141, 158, 159, 186, 187, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 200, 201, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 270, 300, 372, 399, 439, 442, 443, 451, 452, 453, 454, 456, 460, 462, 463, 464, 466, 477, 478, 481, 484, 486, 490, 491, 492, 496, 501, 502, 503, 508, 515, 516, 517, 520, 527, 533, 538, 553, 556, 558, 560, 561, 564, 565, 566, 567, 575, 580, 581, 582, 584, 585, 589, 590, 598, 606, 607, 608, 610, 626, 627, 629, 636, 637, 665, 680, 683, 689, 732, 735, 737, 739, 742, 760, 786 interaction analysis, 3, 115, 140, 186, 187, 188, 190, 192, 193, 194, 196, 201 Interaction Approach, 260, 261, 264, 265, 274 Interaction Hypothesis, 233, 234, 480, 486, 786 negotiated interaction, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238, 246, 247 talk-in-interaction, 117, 118 interactive compensatory framework, 4, 321 interactive hypermedia, 586 Interface Hypothesis, 218 inter-generational transmission, 679, 711 interlanguage, 2, 4, 86, 87, 88, 212, 233, 346, 484, 493, 494, 512, 782 International English Language Testing System, 258 internationalization, 729, 731 inter-rater reliability, 144, 190, 509 intonation, 153, 258, 273, 491, 554 intra-rater reliability, 191 jigsaw task, 493, 494, 495 languaculture pedagogy, 590 language aptitude. See aptitude, language language arts, 684, 688 language compartmentalization, 657

Index language nests, 655 language shift, 679, 701, 702 language socialization, xix, 114, 115, 121 langua-technocultural competence, 590 learner histories, 68, 75 learner-initiated technology, 586, 592 learning outcomes, 5, 69, 70, 71, 73, 114, 158, 189, 192, 195, 196, 197, 202, 371, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 411, 412, 418, 420, 422, 520, 528, 566, 582, 583, 686, 727, 734, 735 leave-taking speech acts, 71 left inferior frontal gyrus, 221 left-anterior negativity (LAN), 219, 220 lexical functional grammar, 14 Lexical Preference Principle, 52 lexical resource, 258 lexical segmentation, 291, 294, 440 lexical stress, 291 lexicon, 42, 258, 292, 478, 516 liaison, 292, 577 lingua franca, 305, 459, 741 linguafolio, 569, 570 linguistic diversity, xix, 677, 678, 681, 683, 689, 700, 767 linguistic minority, 120, 697 listening strategies, 283, 294, 295, 296, 297, 309 local Englishes approach, 305 logical positivism, 62, 64 long-term memory, 302, 367, 368, 370, 371, 392, 393, 440, 442 majority language, 599, 601, 610, 674, 697, 699, 700, 701, 704, 715, 718 Massive Open Online Courses, 112 mature learners, 439 memory decay hypothesis, 368 mental representation, 86, 380, 479 metalinguistic, 54, 68, 73, 74, 195, 209, 211, 212, 213, 217, 222, 236, 237, 238, 241, 243, 245, 344, 354, 355, 374, 375, 376, 395, 399, 438, 442, 481, 491, 492, 610 metatheory, 65, 84, 88, 623 methodological innovation, 126, 127, 419, 421, 785 micro-teaching, 756 migrant workers, 88 Minimalism, 17 minorization, 651 mixed methods research, 117, 122, 127, 138, 161, 201, 419 modality, 5, 196, 331, 332, 342, 345, 346, 347, 350, 352, 367, 368, 578 Modern Language Aptitude Test, 391 Modular Cognition Framework (MCF), 89 Modular Online Growth and Use of Language (MOGUL) framework, 89 modularity, 90, 92, 93, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104 Monitor Theory, 478, 483 monolinguals, 13, 14, 53, 209, 215, 219, 382, 424, 431, 432, 600, 650, 653, 654, 657, 660, 661, 663, 664, 675, 682, 685, 696, 699, 700, 703, 707

morphemes, 42, 46, 49, 478 morphologically rich languages, xiv, 7, 53, 528, 538, 539 morphology, 17, 21, 51 morphosyntax, 2, 30, 31, 42, 209, 240, 246, 325, 394, 395, 430, 435 motivation extrinsic motivation, 415, 704, 740 intrinsic motivation, 415, 418, 422, 704, 740, 765 L2 Motivational Self System, 273, 415, 740, 741 Motivational Orientation of Language Teaching, 197 motivational psychology, 411, 415 motivational renaissance, 414 multi-level modeling, 159 Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis, 127 multimodality, xxi, xxiv, 283, 300 multiple-component model, 366 mutual constitution, 65 N400 effect, 209, 219, 220, 221 naïve listeners, 262, 302 narrative inquiry, 117, 119 National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, 755, 762 Natural Approach, 482, 484 negative evidence, 20, 21, 261, 488, 491 neural plausibility, 99 No Child Left Behind, 685, 758, 759 normalisation, 293, 309 North American codification of proficiency, 321 Noticing Hypothesis, 54, 343 Null-Subject Parameter, 16 number agreement, 30, 220, 396 observation instruments, 3, 186, 188, 189, 190, 193, 201 observational research. See classroom observational research on-line recovery, 211, 212 ontology, 79, 116, 138, 623, 624 open-class words, 41, 46, 48 open-ended interviews, 122 open-ended questions, 200 oral proficiency interview, 4, 78, 259, 260, 270, 271, 550, 551, 556, 562, 563, 565 output modified output, 4, 233, 236, 241, 242, 243, 246, 372 pushed output, 236, 344, 493, 605, 611 Output Hypothesis, 236, 239, 343 output-based instructional programmes, 189 output-prompting, 237 Overt Pronoun Constraint, 21 overt subjects, 16, 21, 23 P600 effect, 31, 219, 220, 221 parsing, 18, 28, 31, 209, 210, 211, 215, 222, 285, 287, 289, 332, 487 pedagogic content knowledge. See content knowledge pedagogic tasks, 501, 509, 510, 513, 519, 527, 531, 537, 539, 543

803

804

Index Perceptual Assimilation Model, 268, 302 perceptual processing, 285, 299, 309 perceptual saliency, 245, 481, 501, 608 perezhivanie, 66, 67, 70, 72, 75, 77, 78, 80 performance guidelines, 550, 565, 566 performed presentation, 176 phoneme perception, 153, 158, 283, 301 phonetic coding, 391 phonological processing, 325 phonological reduction, 48 phonological representations, 92, 93, 96, 368 phonological short-term memory, 368, 373, 374, 375, 376, 393, 398 phonology, 2, 4, 18, 258, 259, 263, 265, 274, 485, 505, 778 poetic inquiry, 127 post-method pedagogy, 638 postmodernism, 116 post-modernist paradigm, 138 postpositivism, 116, 117 post-positivist paradigm, 138 post-structuralism, 114, 625 poverty of the stimulus, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25 power, 8, 114, 121, 122, 177, 320, 332, 415, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 458, 460, 461, 463, 464, 466, 467, 623, 625, 626, 630, 632, 634, 636, 637, 638, 640, 651, 652, 653, 654, 661, 674, 675, 708, 709, 710, 713, 715, 716, 717, 733, 738, 743 practicality, 143, 641 practice-oriented culture pedagogy, 591 pragmatics, xxiv, 2, 21, 71, 72, 73, 74, 92, 115, 144, 148, 151, 153, 157, 199, 208, 209, 211, 218, 288, 320, 411, 413, 420, 505, 578, 680, 700, 702, 706, 715, 733, 735, 739 Present–Practice–Produce (PPP) pedagogy, 484, 501, 502, 504, 514, 515, 518, 519, 520, 521 prestigious languages, 656, 696 primary memory. See working memory priming, 44, 208, 393, 402 principles and parameters, 16, 17 processability theory, 2, 88, 479, 504 Processing Instruction, 483, 486, 487, 488, 496, 584 processing problems, 208, 209, 210, 211, 214, 216, 486 process-product research, 186, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202 productive skills, 605, 606 proficiency guidelines, 7, 258, 550, 551, 554, 555, 561, 562, 565, 571, 758 programme evaluation, 193, 194, 518, 521 pronunciation, xiv, 76, 258, 262, 263, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 283, 554, 578, 583, 680, 682, 779 psychological salience, 47 psychometric, 140 psychophysical salience, 47, 48, 49 qualitative methods, 2, 3, 62, 64, 69, 78, 113, 117 questionnaires, 121, 122, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 158, 297, 308, 418, 419, 507, 513, 539, 612

raciolinguistic ideologies, 654, 663 racism, 661, 663 random assignment, 3, 139, 142, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 401 Rasch modelling, 299 rating scale, 190, 195 readiness, 246, 272, 417, 479, 489, 504, 542, 566, 588, 697, 740, 742, 762, See also developmental readiness real-life situations, 144, 145, 307, 485, 527, 539, 758 real-time processing, 3, 208, 213, 219 recasts, 20, 139, 155, 161, 199, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246, 248, 329, 374, 375, 399, 491, 492, 515, 517, 533, 610 receptive skills, 437, 606 reductionism, 144, 145, 148 referential activities, 487 referential questions, 200 reflexive anaphor, 217, 218 Reform Period, 779 regressions, 208, 214, 216, 217 reliability, 49, 50, 51, 143, 144, 190, 191, 192, 193, 240, 402, 509, 562 replication, 145, 146, 160, 246, 402, 413, 564, 790, 791, 792, 793 resource-directing variable, 511, 512 resource-dispersing variable, 379, 380 resting activation level, 44, 94 resyllabification, 292 retention (of language teachers), xxiii, 762 retrospective measures, 176, 297, 324, 326, 333 revitalization (of languages), 655, 658, 689, 711, 712, 713 rote learning/memory, 373, 391, 398 rule presentation, 398 rule search, 398 Scientific Period, 779 secondary memory. See long-term memory segmentation cues. See lexical segmentation self-determination theory, 415, 417, 740 self-efficacy, 125, 151, 158, 296, 309, 436, 439, 734, 737, 741, 742 self-paced reading, 27, 208, 209, 210, 212, 222, 520 semantics, 2, 92, 265 semi-scripted materials, 307 sensitive period. See critical period Shallow Structure Hypothesis, 28, 31, 217 shared repertoire, 630, 631 Sheltered Content Instruction, 598, 602, 603 shortage (of teachers), 680, 754, 759, 762, 766, 768 sign systems, 62, 66, 190 simplified listening materials, 137 simultaneous bilinguals, 662 Skill Acquisition Theory, 343, 500, 501, 502 skills-based instruction, 285 social class, xv, 465, 629, 729 social imaginary, 115 social network, 115, 452, 461, 588, 636, 734 sociocultural theory, xxiv, 2, 62, 63, 65, 68, 69, 114, 115, 116, 481, 786

Index socioeconomic mobility, 701, 705 socio-educational model, 413, 416, 419 speech comprehension, 1, 4, 53, 55, 92, 94, 215, 234, 235, 246, 283, 301, 327, 328, 366, 369, 370, 373, 598, 606, 738 Speech Learning Model, 302 speech production, 1, 55, 89, 92, 245, 262, 264, 269, 366, 369, 370, 373, 379, 380, 491, 598, 606, 738 speech-gesture synchronization, 116 standardized tests, 259, 328, 760, 763, 764, 765, 766 stereotypical gender match, 29, 30 strategic planning, 379 structure-based activities, 195, 490, 609 study abroad, xviii, xxii, 9, 70, 72, 112, 115, 120, 121, 126, 260, 267, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274, 437, 455, 465, 727, 728, 729, 730, 731, 732, 733, 734, 735, 736, 737, 738, 739, 740, 741, 742, 743, 744 suprasegmental instruction, 153, 157, 269 surprisal, 47, 48 sustained speech, 196, 197 syntactic binding constraints, 29, 30 systematic formative assessment, 579 target grammar, 20, 87, 89 Target Language Observation Scheme, 189, 191, 193, 194, 195 task complexity, xvii, xix, 5, 7, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 345, 347, 348, 349, 350, 379, 380, 510, 511, 512, 513, 514, 528, 531, 532, 534, 540, 541 task modality. See modality task repetition, 5, 345, 350, 351, 352, 353, 544 task-based language teaching/learning, xvii, xix, xx, 6, 7, 247, 500, 501, 507, 513, 521, 522, 579, 786 teacher education, xiii, xxii, xxiii, 9, 68, 70, 75, 78, 168, 169, 193, 201, 606, 637, 658, 659, 751, 753, 755, 756, 757, 758, 759, 760, 761, 763, 764, 765, 766, 767, 768 teacher language choice, 192 teacher-as-advisor, 284 Teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), xiii, 114, 170, 171, 172, 612, 781, 782 team teaching, 756 technology, xvii, xxiii, 7, 325, 326, 329, 333, 334, 382, 455, 456, 460, 463, 466, 575, 576, 577, 578, 579, 580, 581, 582, 583, 584, 585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592, 715, 732 telecollaboration, 580, 585, 590 temporal adverbs, 46, 48, 51 temporal measures, 264 temporal reference, 49, 51, 52, 53 Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), 258, 303, 306 Test–Teach–Test approach, 484 text authenticity, 283 text structure, 324, 330, 333 textual enhancement, 55, 481, 488, 489, 490, 608

top-down, 49, 178, 286 Total Physical Response, 140, 482, 484, 518 Trade-Off Hypothesis, 348 transitional BE, 656, 660 translanguaging, xvi, xxii, 114, 123, 651, 659, 663, 664, 665, 666, 675 translanguaging lifesaver rings, 665 translanguaging transformative space, 666 Triadic Componential Framework, 534 two-way immersion. See dual immersion ultimate attainment, 13, 14, 20, 25, 46, 390, 394, 395, 430, 431, 438, 439, 440, 506 unconscious learning, 102, 624 unitary (memory) representation, 44 unitary analysis, 67, 69 units of analysis, 186, 190, 192, 195 Universal Grammar (UG), 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 25, 92, 478, 486 University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific, 730 upper-register text, 4, 320, 321, 326, 327, 329, 333, 334 uptake, 119, 238, 240, 241, 242, 246, 344, 354, 491, 610 validity, 3, 5, 17, 86, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 151, 157, 159, 160, 190, 191, 192, 193, 236, 240, 283, 390, 394, 513, 562, 761 verb grammar instruction, 55 verbal analytic ability, 394, 400 video recordings, 187, 190 virtual presentation, 176 virtual world, 456, 464, 580, 662 visual processor, 90 visual-world paradigm, 213, 218 visuo-spatial sketchpad, 368 vocabulary, xiv, xviii, 5, 7, 71, 77, 139, 143, 144, 148, 149, 153, 157, 158, 167, 193, 234, 283, 287, 288, 289, 292, 300, 301, 323, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 333, 334, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 378, 380, 391, 392, 434, 437, 438, 442, 482, 489, 494, 514, 517, 518, 519, 540, 555, 557, 560, 565, 566, 575, 577, 578, 612, 631, 632, 640, 680, 682, 716, 739 Vocabulary Levels Test, 144 Vygotskian psychology, 62, 63, 65, 69, 70, 78 within-task planning, 379 word recognition, 214, 218, 287, 290, 292, 303, 324, 325, 326, 529, 604 word-by-word reading, 212, 213 working memory (WM), xv, xvii, xix, xxiv, 5, 13, 19, 94, 216, 221, 233, 243, 244, 245, 246, 264, 329, 331, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 392, 393, 398, 399, 400, 440, 442, 443, 444, 532, 536, 737, 738, 787 xenophobia, 663 ZISA project, 88 zone of proximal development (ZPD), 65, 66, 67, 79, 481

805