Classroom research has long been recommended as a fruitful avenue for English language teaching (ELT) in applied linguistics. Yet recognition of the value of practitioners exploring their own praxis has only recently come to the fore. In this plenary, I focus on Exploratory Practice, a form of 'fully inclusive practitioner research', in which…

Many previous studies have identified "foreign language anxiety" and "motivation" as two important areas of applied linguistics. This study aims to evaluate the pertinent literature with also providing new information and justifications in past studies on learning anxiety and motivation. In this paper, the first section…

Under the leadership of then 1st vice president and program chair Aneta Pavlenko, Temple University, the 2014 AAAL conference had as one of its focal areas the changing scene of publishing in a digital and global age. Within an array of offerings addressing the theme, this three-hour invited colloquium, organized by Heidi Byrnes, Georgetown…

The invited colloquium on New Directions in Language Assessment held at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) annual meeting in Portland, Oregon on March 22, 2014 brought together an international panel of scholars to together explore the possibilities and challenges of translanguaging and bi/multilingual approaches in…

In this study, I use a systemic functional linguistics approach to examine mathematics classroom discourse with the aim of providing a plausible explanation of how students could actively participate in productive classroom discussions without adopting ways of reasoning that were accepted in the classroom community. In this way, I work in the…

In this plenary address, I suggest that Complexity Theory has the potential to contribute a transdisciplinary theme to applied linguistics. Transdisciplinary themes supersede disciplines and spur new kinds of creative activity (Halliday 2001 [1990]). Investigating complex systems requires researchers to pay attention to system dynamics. Since…

The starting point for this project was the question in how far a Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) module in a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) course can bring the students up to the required level of being confident CALL users. The teachers' part of the TESOL Technology Standards Framework was chosen as evidence…

The Applied Linguistics Project (ALP) started at the International School of Prague (ISP) in 2013. Every year, Grade 9 English as an Additional Language (EAL) students identify an area of learning in need of improvement and design a research method followed by data collection and analysis using basic computer software tools or online corpora.…

In this research project, students in applied linguistics were asked to keep blogs over a three-month period in which they reported on their online informal learning of English through activities such as social networking, downloading films and TV series and listening to music on demand. The study is situated within the framework of complexity…