The goals of this article are to appraise second language acquisition's (SLA) disciplinary progress over the last 15 years and to reflect on transdisciplinary relevance as the field has completed 40 years of existence and moves forward into the 21st century. I first identify four trends that demonstrate vibrant disciplinary progress in SLA. I then…

This article positions research on the acquisition of pragmatics as an inquiry in the greater field of second language acquisition research. Viewing pragmatics from this intersection, I consider five areas of research that are of interest in both fields and have the potential to make significant contributions to second language pragmatics…

Instruction is motivated by the assumption that students can transfer their learning, or apply what they have learned in school to another setting. A common problem arises when the expected transfer does not take place, what has been referred to as the inert knowledge problem. More than an academic inconvenience, the failure to transfer is a major…

In the process of language learning, individuals must acquire different types of linguistic knowledge, such as the sounds of the language (phonemes), how these may be combined to form words (phonotactics), and morphological rules. Early and late bilinguals tend to perform like natives on second language phonological tasks that involve pre-lexical…

As is the case in traditional second language (L2) acquisition research, a major question in the field of L2 real-time sentence processing is the extent to which L2 learners process the input like native speakers. Where differences are observed, the underlying causes could be the influence of the learner's first language and/or differences…

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

In this article, I describe studies conducted over 25 years with secondary and post-secondary L2 learners in the United States. The evidence from these studies shows that there are important connections between students' early L1 skills and their L2 aptitude and L2 proficiency and that individual differences in students' L1 skills in elementary…

A great deal of research into second-language (L2) development focuses on the role of cognitive factors and other individual differences. Studies of children and prime-of-life adult L2 learners suggest that differences exist in the learning processes of these groups. However, to date, little empirical work has been conducted with older adult…

This paper describes the development of web-based software at a university in Spain to help students of EFL self-correct their free-form writing. The software makes use of an eighty-million-word corpus of English known to be correct as a normative corpus for error correction purposes. It was discovered that bigrams (two-word combinations of words)…

While teachers play a central role in capitalizing on the potentials of computer assisted language learning (CALL), CALL teacher education overall still appears not to be adequate and effective (Healey et al., 2011; Hubbard, 2008). Furthermore, foreign/second language teachers have expressed a desire for more and better professional development…

Emotion is "the primary human motive" (MacIntyre, 2002, p. 61). The human brain is an emotional brain, creating relationships among thought, emotion, and motivation in a complex dynamic system (Dörnyei, 2009). Emotion "functions as an amplifier, providing the intensity, urgency, and energy to propel our behavior" in…

Drawing on current theories in personality, second-language (L2) oral ability, and psychometrics, this study investigates the extent to which self-consciousness and assertiveness are explanatory variables of L2 oral ability. Three hundred sixty first-year Japanese university students who were studying English as a foreign language participated in…

This paper will describe pedagogical approaches for re-purposing an open educational resource (OER) designed and produced by the Deutsche Welle. This free online program, "Deutsch Interaktiv," consists of authentic digital videos, slideshows and audio texts and gives a contemporary overview of the culture and language in Germany, Austria…

This article explores ways in which learners' achievements can be assessed and reflected in both the domains of linguistic performance and subject-content learning. The content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach adopted by the authors is one in which language learning and content learning are truly integrated and where neither…

With today's rapid developments in digital technologies, technical obsolescence can occur much faster than in the past. Who would have predicted five years ago that Adobe's Flash would have seen the rapid decline it has experienced as a development environment? Using open, internationally accepted standards for materials development is…