International teaching assistants (ITAs) are Indian, Chinese, Korean, Turkish, etc. international students who have been admitted to graduate study at universities in the U.S.A. and Canada, and are being supported as instructors of undergraduate-level classes and labs in biology, chemistry, physics, and math. For the past 30 years, the number of ITAs has been increasing, and many departments at universities have come to rely largely on ITAs to cover their undergraduate teaching needs. As high-intermediate and low-advanced second language learners who must use their second language for professional purposes, ITAs face linguistic, social, professional, and cultural challenges. This is a learner population that deserves more attention, as I hope to establish here with this presentation of six research tasks. I have organized proposed research projects in such a way as to increase readers’ familiarity with this little publicized field, and also to relate the projects to different contexts of inquiry. By ‘contexts’ I mean ‘who is asking what and for what reasons.’ The two contexts of inquiry are: (1) Established areas of ITA program concern, including acquisition of fluency, prosody, and vocabulary; and (2) Working with ‘outside’ theories, such as the Output Hypothesis, and deliberate practice theory.

Research into pronunciation has often disregarded its potential to inform pedagogy. This is due partly to the historical development of pronunciation teaching and research, but its effect is that there is often a mismatch between research and teaching. This paper looks at four areas in which the (mis)match is imperfect but in which a greater recognition of research can lead to better teaching materials (high variability phonetic training, intonation, information structure, and setting priorities). Furthermore, two areas in which teaching materials are desperate for research to be carried out (connected speech and the primacy of suprasegmentals) will be discussed.

There has been a great deal of research on first language (L1) and second language (L2) learning through meaning-focused input since Nagy, Herman & Anderson's (1985) seminal study of incidental vocabulary learning through reading. Two strands of research within this area are incidental vocabulary learning through listening and guessing from context. This article discusses widely-cited studies from each of these areas – Elley (1989) and Liu & Nation (1985) – that deserve to be replicated. Both studies made important contributions to the field, were original in their designs, and advanced our understanding of how vocabulary is learned in context. The benefits of replicating these two studies are described and several suggestions are made for how the replications might be completed.

A professional journey is always part personal and mine is no exception. How does an individual from the Midwest of the United States get involved with language? It is something I have pondered for a long time along with the additional question of how that involvement translated into a profession. I hardly see it as a profession; rather, it was a life-long love of language that took me down a professional path.

The Center for Language Teaching Advancement (CeLTA) at Michigan State University (MSU) was awarded a U.S. federally funded two-year grant in 2014 to investigate the status of proficiency, and the promotion of proficiency, in foreign language programs. The grant was awarded to Paula Winke and Susan Gass, as principal investigators. The purpose of this initiative was to assess language proficiency development and to show the impact that introducing assessment practices into established language programs has on pedagogical practices and, ultimately, on proficiency outcomes. In total, three grants were awarded, one to MSU, one to the University of Utah, and one to the University of Minnesota. The overall goals were the same, although each institution approached the task in slightly different ways and with slightly different emphases.

This seminar took place at the Institute of Education, University of London, 4 July 2014 (UCL Institute of Education from 2 December 2014).

The Department of Lexicography and Lexicology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań has done extensive research on dictionary use in the context of language teaching and learning. The department forms part of the Faculty of English, which is the largest institution in continental Europe educating teachers of English at the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. levels. Therefore, it is only natural that the language-teaching potential of dictionaries is the main focus of the studies undertaken in the Department.

This paper presents a story of applied linguistics from my personal vantage point as a multilingual scholar whose career began outside the centers of research and scholarship. The article explains the assumptions and practices characterizing the foundation of the discipline in modernist discourses, and delineates the changes resulting from globalization towards postmodern discourses that question positivistic inquiry and homogeneity. As applied linguistics evolves to address diversity as the norm, the article identifies the different schools that have gradually moved the field in that direction – e.g., variationist applied linguistics (VAL), critical applied linguistics (CAL), postmodern hybridity, and translingual practice. Through these movements, the field has also evolved from linguistics applied (LA) to a more theoretically plural and, currently, to a more agentive relationship with other disciplines. Rather than simply borrowing from other disciplines, applied linguists have begun to make their own contributions to those disciplines on language-related issues.

The Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (CLAL) at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies is recognized as a ‘National Key Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China. It is the only center recognized by the Chinese Ministry of Education to have a national key research institute devoted to linguistics and applied linguistics. CLAL has cultivated a core team of scholars whose work in linguistics and applied linguistics is both prolific and broad in scope, spanning three fields of research: second language (L2) learning, societal and public discourse analysis, and theoretical linguistics.

The Language Teachers’ Target Language project (LTTL) aims to describe language teachers’ target language use domain (Bachman & Palmer 2010) and to develop a language test for future teachers of English. The team comprises four researchers from Moscow State University (MSU) and Southampton Solent University.

The seminar took place at The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, 12–13 June 2015.

The objectives of this seminar were to explore the use of eyetracking in advancing online language education, and to provide a platform for the exchange of ideas across disciplines (language, education, and computing). The overarching aim was to lay the foundations for a network to support future eyetracking research collaboration on the practical, methodological and theoretical level.

The notion of mediation has been the object of growing interest in second language education in recent years. The increasing awareness of the complex nature of the process of learning – and teaching – stretches our collective reflection towards less explored areas. In mediation, the immediate focus is on the role of language in processes like creating the space and conditions for communication and/or learning, constructing and co-constructing new meaning, and/or passing on information, whilst simplifying, elaborating, illustrating or otherwise adapting input in order to facilitate the process concerned. At a deeper level though, the notion of mediation embraces a broader spectrum of dimensions and connotations. Mediation has been defined as a ‘nomadic notion’ (Lenoir 1996) insomuch as it is at the core of a variety of scientific disciplines and the term ‘mediation’ is used in different senses in different contexts.

On 7 and 8 September 2015, the University of Roehampton hosted a BAAL/Cambridge University Press seminar, which brought together researchers from a wide range of perspectives in terms of their objects of study and modes of investigation.

The Editor, Publishers, and Board of Language Teaching would like to thank the following readers who have generously assisted with their time and expertise reviewing manuscripts in the preparation of volume 48. Reviewers are absolutely critical to the functioning of any peer reviewed journal, and we are very much in their debt.