This article explores recent changes in the landscape of second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign language pedagogical (FLP) research. Firth and Wagner's (1997) proposal for the reconceptualization of SLA has been supported by SLA and FLP researchers who share the sentiment concerning the need for increased attention to social and contextual…

New trends in language teaching have resulted in a move towards research in the language classroom. For a long time, language teachers tried to train language learners who had a near native command of the language they learned. However, most of these efforts at training proficient learners were not as successful as expected. Scholars attributed…

This research review traces the current discussion on models of bilingualism to the contributions of Vygotsky and Luria. Proposes that a modular approach to studying the different aspects of bilingual development promises to chart a course toward finding a broader common ground around research findings and interpretations that appear to be…

Suggests that highest ideal of research seems to be truthfulness to the phenomenon under study. This philosophical examination looks at whether it is possible to attach these claims to professionalized and institutionalized research methods of academic disciplines, or if goals attainable through such means are of a completely different, neglected,…

Considers methodological issues related to the study of children who were raised with two languages from birth. Functions as the introduction to this special issue of the journal. (Author/VWL)

Argues that inferring the intension (meaning) of children's words solely from the words' extension (referential scope) is problematic and describes two studies of the intension of children's words which involve a different approach. (JMB)

McCaig's article, "How Not To Analyze the Syntax of Children," appears in this issue, pp. 612-18. (SW)

Reexamines the foundations of mainstream intercultural theory and research. Outlines an approach to intercultural communication from the perspective of social constructionist discourse studies. Offers empirical studies of how willpower can be related to the outcomes of intercultural communication and discusses methodological implications for…

In the past years, there have been an increasing number of instrumental investigations as to the nature of speech production errors, prompted by the concern that decades of transcription-based speech error data may be tainted by perceptual biases. While all of these instrumental studies suggest that errors are not, as previously thought,…

In this article we discuss different views about how information flows through the lexical system in bilingual speech production. In the first part, we focus on some of the experimental evidence often quoted in favor of the parallel activation of the bilinguals' two languages from the semantic system in the course of language production. We argue…

Answering the preceding article by Schank and Wilensky, the authors state that their previous article (EJ 161 384, Cognition, December 1976), suggested that the goals of artificial intelligence research are technological, not scientific. They also claim that the existence of a moderately successful program does not constitute a test of its…

Edwards (1992c) concerns data and data use rather than manuals. It presents principles to facilitate reliable archive research in an imperfect world. MacWhinney and Snow (1992) endorse the principles but disagree on important details, discussed in this response. (21 references) (KM)

Suggests that research on language and social interaction can best proceed by engaging in the puzzle-solving enterprise that characterizes normal research. Systematic explorations are needed of the language phenomena deemed relevant by the respective paradigms. (Author/VWL)

The present study investigates the use of English lexical collocations and their relation to the online writing of Taiwanese college English majors and non-English majors. Data for the study were collected from 41 English majors and 21 non-English majors at a national university of science and technology in southern Taiwan. Each student was asked…

Research possibilities for a new paradigm in rhetorical theory. (CH)