Vocabulary can no longer be said to be "a Cinderella topic", at least so far as its representation in other journals is concerned. Research articles on vocabulary learning and teaching now occur frequently and have been particularly well represented in recent issues of the North American research journal "Language Learning". While studies of…

In this review, the author explores various perspectives on language issues in political contexts, not least because languages have been prominent recently on the political agenda both in the UK and the US. She reviews articles that highlight different ways in which political pressures and contexts influence language teaching, learning and use.…

There has been much reflection recently on how language gets used in language classrooms, by language learners and by language teachers. Rather than the perennial debate about target-language use, the author is referring to the growing body of classroom research in the area of linguistics known as pragmatics. Pragmatics, as defined by Crystal…

In this article, the author critiques six articles. Five of the six articles are about motivation in language learning, an area which has seen considerable theoretical and empirical development over the last decade. The articles she reviews include: (1) Udo Jung's report on the top twelve "most prestigious FLT (foreign language teaching) journals"…

As teachers, people often dream of research results which will tell them, with scientific accuracy, what is going to work in their classroom. However, as researchers, people know how elusive such "recipes" or "best methods" are. Conventional quantitative research methods have been designed to identify the effect of "factor X" in a given context,…