Studies in Applied Linguistics and TESOL

Readers’ Credits for Volume 24, Issue 2

2024-12-31T19:11:21+00:00

Study Quality in Applied Linguistics: Highlights from Dr. Luke Plonsky’s Public Talk

2024-12-31T17:14:50+00:00

On October 15, 2024, the Center for International Foreign Language Teacher Education (CIFLTE) hosted a public talk by Dr. Luke Plonsky on study quality, research methods, and ethics in applied linguistics. Faculty and students from universities around the world attended the talk via Zoom.

Dr. Luke Plonsky is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. In addition to teaching courses in second language (L2) acquisition and research methods, Professor Plonsky is a prolific researcher. With a primary focus on L2 research methodology, he has published over 100 articles, book chapters, and books. In 2024, Professor Plonsky edited the book Open Science in Applied Linguistics and co-authored the guidebook Addressing Questionable Research Practices in Applied Linguistics: A Practical Guide. Professor Plonsky currently serves as the Editor of Studies in Second Language Acquisition, as well as Managing Editor of Foreign Language Annals, and General Editor of Applied Linguistics Press.

CIFLTE extends its deepest gratitude to Professor Plonsky for his stimulating talk.

Explanations in Pedagogical Interaction

2024-12-31T17:08:49+00:00

As a method and a framework, conversation analysis (CA) has been used to uncover the tacit methods participants use to accomplish a variety of social actions, such as offering, promising, giving advice, complaining, and disagreeing. This forum explores one such action, explaining, within the context of pedagogical interaction due to its ubiquity and relevance to the project of teaching and learning. While every discipline seems to have developed critical and extensive guidance (e.g., in the form of manuals, textbooks, and curricula) on what should be taught and, by extension, explained, CA is uniquely positioned to shed light on the “how” of explanations as it shifts the analytical spotlight to how participants (e.g., students and teachers, tutees and tutors) make sense of and respond to each turn of talk. After all, teachers and tutors are not simply delivering a laundry list of facts; they are addressing the here and now, unplanned demands of learners as they arise in interaction. This forum thus aims to draw more attention to the moment-to-moment work that participants engage in when producing such explanations.

“They Leave Their Babies Where?”: The Case of Repair-Driven Learner Explanation in an Adult ESL Conversation Class

2024-12-31T17:09:48+00:00

In a world in which rampant misinformation and partial truths can spread like wildfire, adult English as a Second Language (ESL) conversation classes can become fertile ground for unplanned discussions about unexpected information. When a student introduces new information, it can lead to repair-driven side sequences in which student explanations take center stage. These moments not only help clarify misunderstandings but also provide valuable opportunities for learners to strengthen their interactional competence and navigate nuanced communication challenges in the target language.

“We Need to Think about the Grammar”: Practices for Opening Explanations on Language and Changing their Linguistic Focus

2024-12-31T17:12:43+00:00

Although the role of grammar instruction is still highly debated within the field of second language acquisition and language pedagogy (Nassaji, 2017), explanations have emerged as fruit-bearing interactional phenomena that can illustrate the “how” of explicit grammar instruction (Fasel Lauzon, 2015; Hudson, 2011; Majlesi, 2018; Matsumoto & Dobs, 2017; Ro, 2021; Romig & Horan, 2023; Rosborough, 2011; Smotrova, 2014). A key feature of explanations is their sequential organization, described by Fasel Lauzon (2015) as consisting of an opening, a core, and a closing. In a nutshell, openings involve some problematization of prior talk, cores provide a candidate solution to said problem, and closings involve acceptance of that candidate solution. Researchers have revealed much about how cores are delivered, particularly focusing on how grammatical concepts can be illustrated through a variety of multimodal resources (Hudson, 2011; Matsumoto & Dobs, 2017; Romig & Horan, 2023; Rosborough, 2011; Smotrova, 2014), but less attention has been paid to openings and closings. This is perhaps unsurprising given that the bulk of content is delivered in an explanation core, but knowing how to open grammar explanations can be of particular importance for teachers in training who may not know when an explanation is due or how to initiate one themselves. Additionally, there does not seem to be any research detailing how to make clear that an explanation of a particular language point is grammatical, and not about any other linguistic issue (e.g., meaning, pronunciation, etc.). Thus, this paper adopts a conversation analytic framework to examine how a teacher opens an explanation sequence on the use of “so” and ensures that it is about its grammatical role as a coordinating conjunction, not on its meaning.

Quoting the Academe in Writing Conference Explanations

2024-12-31T17:13:47+00:00

Writing conferences are rich pedagogical settings to explore explanations. In contrast to teachers, writing consultants are usually peer tutors, straddling the roles of instructor and fellow student (North, 1984). This creates a unique situation where consultant-writer dyads must interactionally manage questions of expertise and authority (Carino, 2003). One way consultants manage this is through intertextuality, or the voicing of others. When consultants explain writing concepts, they often juggle many voices, from those of professors to authors to the writers’ own texts. Of particular interest in the present paper is the voice of the academe. A main institutional goal of writing conferences is to help students improve their academic writing; therefore, at various points in the conferences, consultants explain the norms, language, and expectations of the target academic discourse community. While this intertextual nature of writing conferences has not yet been explored, we can expect that in order to help writers learn the target “speech genre” (Bakhtin, 1981) of the academe, consultants must inevitably connect their current explanations to prior discourse. In some ways, consultants act as information conduits, helping writers understand what is expected of them by professors or other readers of their work.

The Role of the Learner in Task-Based Language Teaching: Theory and Research Methods

2024-12-31T17:15:38+00:00

This volume, edited by Craig Lambert, Scott Aubrey, and Gavin Bui, presents a collective effort by second language (L2) scholars to explore the role of the learner in Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT). The volume stems from two colloquia––The Biennial Conference on Task-Based Language Teaching in 2015 at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and The Second Language Research Forum in 2016 at Columbia University, United States––focused on contemporary viewpoints and practices regarding the role of the learner in L2 task performance. It builds on the well-established recognition that affective and conative factors are central in L2 acquisition.