This study examines the acquisition of English syllable codas by two native speakers of Vietnamese. Data were collected at three intervals over 1 year. Results indicate that a developmental sequence may exist and that this sequence may not be linear, with some longer (i.e., two and three member) codas emerging before some singleton codas. Furthermore, it was found that production type (e.g., with epenthesis or feature change) differed significantly by coda type and was indicative of acquisition processes. Finally, linguistic environment (preceding and following) and grammatical conditioning were found to significantly affect coda production and development.The author would like to thank Jun Liu, Mary Zampini, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.

Vivian Zamel and Ruth Spack have collected papers spanning 19 years of discussion on teaching academic literacy, offering an illuminating journey through the issues. In a postmodern spirit, the editors emphasize the multiplicity of literacies and the value of students' own ways of knowing. The question arises, though, why this should be specifically taught by applying a particular pedagogical model, because it appears to be a normal part of any intellectual process to fall back on previous knowledge and experience when faced with a new task. Indeed, weeding it out would seem a bigger problem, should anyone want to accomplish that. The recognition and appreciation of students' previous experiences and earlier knowledge is nevertheless welcome, and there are a few well-chosen papers narrating personal experiences of struggle between different cultural identities and logics. Yet many of the papers in this volume, particularly in its first half, tacitly seem to assume that English is the language of the world and that the North American context equals universal. Much of the discussion is dominated by a controversy between discipline-specific (genre-based or disciplinary community-based) and expressive writing, or, perhaps, rather a crusade against genre-based teaching, given that proponents of this orientation have not been given voice. From a North European perspective, this bifurcation into two opposing camps seems hard to comprehend—many of us have happily combined genre analysis, analysis of cultural differences in rhetoric, and critical discourse analysis with a view of writing as process and discovery.

As in most other countries, the interest in communicative language teaching has been considerable in Canada. This interest has influenced curriculum development, materials production, experimental teaching, and approaches to language testing; and a good deal of experience has been reported. As everywhere else, there is in Canada today a need to clarify what is meant by communicative language teaching (CLT). In paper appearing in the proceedings of the 1978 AILA Congress in Montreal, the present author has attempted to distinguish between the psychopedagogic and the sociolinguistic concepts under which CLT has been understood (Stern, 1978). As will be seen, the distinction underlies this discussion.

This study examined whether university students perceive holds (i.e., a listener’s temporary cessation of dynamic movement) as a visual cue of nonunderstanding. Conversations between English second language (L2) university students were sampled to extract episodes of other-initiated repair through open clarification requests (e.g., what?, sorry?). Brief, silent video clips were presented to 60 raters across two experiments who assessed the listener’s comprehension, which was their perception about how well the listener had understood the speaker. Experiment 1 tested whether raters can differentiate between the onset and release of listener holds while Experiment 2 examined whether they are sensitive to the sequential organization of holds. Results indicated that raters clearly differentiated between hold onsets and releases and were sensitive to the temporal position of holds in the entire repair sequence. Taken together, these findings suggest that holds are a reliable signal of nonunderstanding with potential implications for L2 teaching and assessment.

In this commentary, we summarize the findings of the seven included studies that examined implicit language aptitude from various perspectives and highlight issues to be resolved in the validation of this new construct in second language research. We start by providing an overview of the contributions of the studies. We then identify the lack of convergent validity of the measures of implicit aptitude reported in the included studies and problematize the equally varied nature of the measurement of implicit knowledge—the outcome variable of aptitude research—and related concepts. In particular, by drawing on empirical evidence and theoretical claims, we attempt to clarify the relationships between implicit and explicit knowledge, implicit and explicit learning, and implicit and explicit instruction. Next, we draw attention to the interactions reported by the included studies between aptitude and outcome measures and between aptitude and instruction type, emphasizing the value and importance of interactional research. We conclude by making recommendations for future research.

AN INTRODUCTION TO CONTACT LINGUISTICS. Donald Winford. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. xvii + 416. $77.95 cloth, $38.95 paper.

Winford begins with a thorough review of the literature on language contact and an outline of the areas of dispute—for instance, challenges to the family tree view of language change and the resistance of many to accept explanations for change that are not internally motivated. He believes that more debate is necessary concerning the degree of language mixing in all languages and laments the continued belief held by some historical linguists that contact-induced change plays little—if any—role in change.

Based on correlational and factorial analysis of data collected from 384 middle and high school students in South Korea, Al–Hoorie et al. (2024) claimed the existence of a discriminant validity crisis within the L2 motivational self-system research tradition and advocated for abandoning research in this area. In this response, we critically examined the evidence presented, re-analyzed their data, and argued that their findings actually support the discriminant validity of the target scales. We also discussed issues related to the design and implementation of their study and refuted their assertion regarding a discriminant validity crisis in this field. Finally, we emphasized the necessity of prioritizing definitional validity in the ongoing methodological reforms of L2 motivation research.