This article examines the role of cultural awareness (CA) and intercultural awareness (ICA) in classroom theory and practice. CA and ICA can be roughly characterised as an awareness of the role of culture in communication with CA focused on national cultures and ICA on more dynamic and flexible relationships between languages and cultures. There…

Corpus linguistics has transformed the landscape of empirical research on languages in recent decades. The proliferation of corpus technology has enabled researchers worldwide to conduct research in their own geographical locations with few hindrances. It has become increasingly commonplace for researchers to compile their own corpora for specific…

There has been considerable debate about the relevance and applicability of SLA theory and research for L2 pedagogy. There are those who maintain that SLA must be applicable to L2 pedagogy: a view based on the argument that because SLA is a subfield of applied linguistics, it should have direct relevance to L2 teaching. Others take the view that…

This paper brings together the research and developments of instructed pragmatics over the past three decades by reporting the synthesis findings of instructional intervention studies in interlanguage pragmatics. Two questions have guided this investigation: (1) is instruction effective in learning pragmatics?; and (2) what methods are most…

The paper reports a study of a narrative-based Dynamic Assessment (DA) procedure developed in the USA that is used in the UK with children with developmental language disabilities. Three monolingual English children with language disabilities are assessed by a speech/language pathologist/therapist who is learning to work with DA in collaboration…

This plenary paper showcases current corpus-based research on written academic English, illustrating the tight links that exist between corpus research and pedagogic applications. I first explicate Sinclair's concept of the "lexical approach", which underpins much corpus research and pedagogy. I then discuss studies which focus on…

There is no doubt that attention and (un)awareness in second/foreign language (L2 learning) are two constructs that have permeated, explicitly or implicitly, second language acquisition (SLA) studies since their inception. Indeed, we have witnessed several empirical studies attempting to probe more deeply into the roles of these two constructs in…

In this plenary speech I examine multilingual interaction in a number of European regions in which minority languages are being revitalized. Education is a crucial variable, but the wider society is equally significant. The context of revitalization is no longer bilingual but increasingly multilingual. I draw on the results of a long-running…

This seminar took place on 19 April, 2013 at the Centre for Language and Communication, Faculty of Language and Education Studies, The Open University. The seminar was coordinated by Janet Maybin and Theresa Lillis and there were 28 participants, including four postgraduate students, from universities in Britain, Belgium and South Africa.

A brief "language learning experience" (LLE) in Thai was integrated into a second language development course as part of postgraduate TESOL study at an Australian university. Sixty primary and secondary teachers from a range of schools evaluated the impact of the LLE by means of a questionnaire; the teachers proved highly affirming of…

This study investigates the effects of cognacy on vocabulary learning. The research expands on earlier designs by measuring learning of English-Japanese cognates with both decontextualized and contextualized tests, scoring responses at two levels of sensitivity, and examining learning in a more ecologically valid setting. The results indicated…

The aim of this article is twofold: to assess the effectiveness of a CLIL (content and language integrated learning) module on affective factors (motivation and self-esteem), and to test the purported blurring effect of CLIL on gender differences in foreign language learning. Forty-six students in their fourth year of compulsory secondary…

This article reports the results of two experiments using the spacing technique (Leitner, 1972; Landauer & Bjork, 1978) in second language vocabulary acquisition. In the past, studies in this area have produced mixed results attempting to differentiate between massed, uniform and expanded intervals of spacing (Balota, Duchek, & Logan,…

The present research tested the effectiveness of the word part technique in comparison with the keyword method and self-strategy learning. One hundred and twenty-one Chinese year-one university students were randomly assigned to one of the three learning conditions: word part, keyword or self-strategy learning condition. Half of the target words…

This paper aims to analyse the role of time concentration of instructional hours on the acquisition of formulaic sequences in English as a foreign language (EFL). Two programme types that offer the same amount of hours of instruction are considered: intensive (110 hours/1 month) and regular (110 hours/7 months). The EFL learners under study are…