Johann Gottfreid Herder illustrated how problematic language maintenance predictions can be with his prediction in his essay, On the Origin of Languages, stating that Hungarian would briefly disappear from the surface of the earth as if it had never existed. With over 10 million speakers today in Hungary, another 4 million outside the nation, and a growing population (Hungarians in the Outside World 1993), Herder's prediction remains hyperbolic, yet it illustrates how dangerous such predictions about language maintenance can be. Hungarian, as with other languages, has been maintained because of forces operating in the unique history of the nation.

The problems of research into communicative language teaching are a special case of the problems facing research into any kind of foreign language pedagogy. They also overlap to a considerable degree with those facing any research in teaching, regardless of subject matter. This article reviews a range of research approaches which have been, or might be, used in researching various dimensions of communicative language teaching. It draws on the general literature on educational research methods to some extent, and on the general language pedagogy research literature, as well as on the growing body of research literature on communicative language teaching. This is not an exhaustive survey, however; instead, a limited number of studies are chosen for discussion so as to exemplify the major research problems and approaches.

Magnet schools have had a significant influence on second language learning in the last two decades. Designed to reduce racial isolation by attracting students to a desegregated setting, magnet schools offer an attractive option for parents willing to consider alternatives to their neighborhood school. Since the 1970s and continuing through today, school systems have found that second language programs are an effective means of drawing parents and their children to new school settings. As a result, language magnets have proliferated and have had a profound impact on language instruction throughout the U.S.

This review has as its major scope language policy as it has been practied in the province of Taiwan of the Republic of China (ROC). Language policies of the nation from 1911 to 1949 (i.e., from the establishment of the republic in the Mainland to the time when the central goverment of the ROC moved to Taiwan) will also be reviewed as they bear significantly upon the current policies. The reason for this is quite obvious, since the current policies are the result of a continuous evolution of policies in the past. In the following sections three areas will be presented: 1) a brief sociolinguistic profile of the major and minority languages in the ROC; 2) the functional allocation of languages; 3) the language policies as actually practiced today.

Macrosociolinguistics deals with the domain of linguistic behavior in such institutions as political parties, governmental administrations, and other nationwide organizations. It has to do with the distribution of language varieties in such institutions; and it has to cope with standards of planning the language situation. It is, therefore, the area of scientific national differentiation and of the study of normative language use in large institutions.

As I write the introduction to my penultimate volume of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, I find myself grateful for three aspects of the job. First, I have learned so much about research that I did not know existed, in the case of this issue, linguistic landscape research. Second, I am grateful for colleagues who, while experts in their specific areas, have an amazing breadth of knowledge of the field of applied linguistics. Such individuals are rare finds, and I am lucky to have several such people on my editorial board. Finally, I would not be able to put together issues on certain topics without the help of colleagues whom I have called upon for brainstorming sessions. I am thankful for colleagues who are so willing to help. For this issue, I thank, in particular, Jasone Cenoz.

Various facets of the general topic of multilingualism have been dealt with in previous ARAL volumes and as a major substantive focus in Volumes 6 and 14. Nonetheless, it does not seem at all surprising that we return to the topic in Volume 17 given the worldwide incidence of the phenomenon and the attention, and often controversy, which it arouses. Despite pressures and influences toward commonality from a seemingly pervasive mass media, the residents of the world continue to speak an amazing array of mutually unintelligible languages (see, for example, Bright 1992, Cheshire 1991, Comrie 1987, Edwards 1995). These languages vary in typological characteristics, geographical spread, and number of speakers. If written, they also vary in terms of the type of system that is used to record them (e.g., alphabetic, logographic, syllabic-alphabetic).

It is quite evident that the study of phonological issues within second language acquisition [SLA] research has been vitalized in recent years and is attracting wider interest today than it did a decade ago. This can be seen in the major journals in the field, and also in the fact that compensive anthologies solely devoted to the phonological domain of SLA research have begun to appear (Ioup and Weinberger 1987, James and Leather 1987). Since this review is intended to concentrate on works from the last few years (mostly from 1986 on), it is worth pointing out that this period does not in itself mark a radical shift or reorientation towards new research issues. Rather, it is mainly a continuation of topics that originated a few years back, and a consolidation of a field of research which is gradually becoming more established.

Most of what we know about sign language we have learned over the past ten years, although the phenomenon of communicating with the hands and eyes rather than with the mouth and ears has existed, no doubt, throughout history whenever and wherever there have been groups of deaf adults and/or children. The reasons why sign language has been so neglected are intimately connected with the attitudes and beliefs society has evolved about the nature of language, both in terms of what language is and what it signifies, such as the beliefs that language is the hallmark of human evolution, language is thinking, language is an auditory and oral phenomenon. Within this context, sign language is not language, and communicating with sign language rather than spoken language comes replete with a host of negative implications. It comes as no surprise, then, that the people throughout history who have been in the best position to study and describe sign language––deaf people and people whose profession is deafness––have devoted most of their time and energy to defending sign language rather than analyzing and describing it.

Understanding social justice as it relates to linguistic discrimination and identity requires consideration of both production and perception. As linguists and cognitive psychologists become more attuned to talking about social justice, the need to discuss linguistic human behaviors through a sociocognitive lens becomes more pertinent than ever. This article offers a sociocognitive approach to linguistic analysis as a means to combat linguistic discrimination in the pursuit of social justice. Having negative ideologies about a particular group of people, especially a minoritized group, influences linguistic prediction and perceptions. Together, sociolinguistic and psychological methodologies are necessary to navigate a world in which people use linguistic knowledge to make decisions and predictions about their interlocutors. I use sociocognitive approaches as vehicles for social justice, centering African American English and Anti-Black Racism. The limited existing sociocognitive linguistic research indicates that listeners may modulate their linguistic expectations during cognitive processing based on speaker identity and stereotypes of speakers. As linguistic discrimination is ever-present in U.S. society, in addition to describing sociocognitive solutions, this article also represents a call to action for researchers to empirically test ideological claims about linguistic varieties that are passively accepted, strengthen replicability, and broaden approaches to the study of minoritized varieties more generally. Hopefully, this article will inspire linguistics researchers to consider all factors, cognitive and social, related to linguistic perception, further contributing to a greater understanding of how to combat linguistic discrimination from a multidimensional frame.

As elements of interethnic relations, multilingualism and language contact have always played important roles. Only in recent years, however, have problems of multilingualism come to the attention of the wider public and state authorities. This attention is due partly to the spread of information about multilingual affairs and partly to the demands, expressed increasingly vocally by speakers of minority languages, that their status be safeguarded. The majority of the countries in the world have a multinational and multilingual population (Mackey 1976: 68 ff., Grimes 1992:10 ff.), and the major industrialized states are no exception. The United States of America, India, China, Britain, Spain and the former Soviet Union are commonly known to be multilingual states, but the fact that France, Germany, and Japan also fall into this category, is not as commonly known.

The past decade has witnessed intensive activity in Textlinguistik (discourse analysis) among German linguists (cf., Kallmeyer and Meyer–Herrmann 1980). This, of course, is not an entirely new phenomenon. Such basic works on German syntax as Drach (1940) and Boost (1964) paid attention to relationships between sentences within discourse and/or their impact on word order.

In this survey, the demographic and linguistic consequences of recent processes of migration and minorization in Western Europe are reviewed, and a case study of the Netherlands is presented to illustrate and detail the effects of these processes on an individual European Union country. After a discussion of demographic data and criteria in a European context, linguistic issues are addressed in terms of L1 and L2 studies on immigrant and ethnic minority groups. Major demographic trends in Dutch society and education derived from these cross-national perspectives is then outlined. Specific attention is given to research and policy in the domains of Dutch as a second language and ethnic minority languages within the context of primary education.

The history of literacy in the Maghreb (Arabic, “west”) spans several millennia. Strategically located in the Northwest of Africa and on the Southern shores of the Mediterranean, the Maghreb has been a crossroads where several civilizations mingled and interacted: The Greeks, the Phonecians, the Romans, the Arabs, and more recently the Turks and the Western Europeans have all affected, to varying degrees, the history, culture, language, and literacy of the region (Al-khatib-Boujibar 1984).

Researchers in second language acquisition (SLA) have long debated the nature of human cognition and how it affects second language learning (L2L). On the one hand, and largely dominating the field of SLA, is the cognitive approach, which focuses on the brain as the unit for cognitive analysis. On the other hand, sociocultural theory holds that human cognition is mediated by cultural artifacts. These perspectives present significantly different views on interaction, understanding it as either auxiliary or instrumental in the learning process, or “fundamentally constitutive” of learning (Mondada & Pekarek Doehler, 2004, p. 502). Increasingly concerned with the role of technology in language learning, current computer-assisted language learning (CALL) research demands theoretical frameworks that account for the ecological relationship between learners, the tools they use, and the environments they inhabit. This article raises the issue of how anthropocentric perspectives on technology have permeated the field of CALL until now, inhibiting its development. I suggest the need for CALL to adopt a less instrumental, more determinist (Carr, 2010) view of the role that technology plays in language learning, by engaging in sociocognitive research (Atkinson, 2010) that embraces the transformative power that technology has over cognition.

Anyone who undertakes to do an overview of so large an area as studies on “the South Asian bilingual's verbal repertoire and the functional allocation of languages” within so small a space as permitted by this review deserves her predicament. The problem lies in the complexity and diversity of the situation, and the danger of inanity resulting from oversimplification. However, since the alternative is to wait for book-length treatments which have yet to be written, and in the meanwhile, suffer the omission of a prime example of a multilingual region from a volume devoted to multilingualism, I shall compromise by treating only the broadly representative situations and trends and ignoring the (sometimes more interesting) particularities of a given language or an individual contact situation.

Quite contrary to the presuppositions of the editors of this review, I approached the production of this chapter without the feeling of being au fait, having spent the past year on a small-is-beautiful campus with limited access to the literature, with this period having been preceded by three years in the Middle East, which is surely not a hotbed of applied microsociolinguistic research or dissemination. Additionally disabled with a shattered writing hand, I resorted to sending off thirty mimeographed requests for assitance in turning up seminal items for 1979 to sociolinguists the world over. This salvo netted thirteen replies (43% response-rate) with the following variation in content: one person telephoned from Washington, D.C. for clarification and then promptly mailed me some references; three others––one in Nigeria and two on opposite coasts of the USA––wrote back to ask what I meant by microsociolinguistics; three––one each from Israel, Jordan, and the USA––replied with friendly notes that neither mentioned my request nor responded to it; three others––from England, Tunisia, and the USA respectively––wrote to say that they had seen nothing that I would not have seen myself; and only three––one each from Guyana, Poland, and the southwest USA––provided references at first shy! Of the items mentioned by this last group, the Guyana reference fit the section in this volume on Pidginization and Creolization, and those from the southwest USA fit the section on Second-Language Acquisition/Learning, leaving my Polish correspondent as the sole collaborator––pending translation, his language being one of those more uncommonly taught abroad. I was clearly as handicapped as when I had begun, but was there really nothing to report about microsociolinguistics?

In Physical terms, the Net—a term used generically—is a global system of computer linked by optical cable, telephone connections, microwave, and satellites. It comprises a number of individual networks, from LANs (Local Area Networks in individual institutions) to the largest, the Internet. (See Appendix Glossary for terminology explanations.) In January 1993, the Matrix News estimated that the Net comprised 2,152,000 host computers and 18,150,000 users. Now, in mid-1995, these figures are 3,500,000 host computers and 55 million users world-wide. From its beginnings in the U.S. military establishment, it now reaches into education, research, business and commerce, government, and private use. France is connecting its entire education system to the Internet. And the U.S.A. is leading the way not only in numbers of connections to the Internet, but also in providing access for non-university education fields. The Net is arguably the most dramatic new communications technology of the latter part of the 20th century.

As literacy has emerged to become a major issue in the 1980s, and will continue to do so in the 1990s, the only sure claim to be made is that the notion of literacy is extremely complex and fraught with generally accepted “myths,” hidden assumptions, over-generalizations, and simple all-inclusive responses to the challenges presented. This scenario is no less appropriate to the second language learning context than it is to the first language learning context. Thus, any examination of second language literacy requires discussion of both first language and second perspectives. It is naive to assume that the difficulties, complexities, contradictions, and debates in first language literacy do not apply equally to the large majority of second language learning contexts. Accordingly, second language literacy will be discussed in light of first language perspectives on literacy, reading, and writing, expanding these perspectives into second language contexts. (It should be noted that two excellent reviews of reading and writing in a second language appeared in ARAL IX (Carrell 1989a, Hudelson 1989a). This review should be seen as complementary to these two earlier articles.)