Language teachers report having limited direct contact with research and research findings despite generally positive perceptions of research (Borg 2009; Marsden and Kasprowicz 2017; Nassaji 2012). Key reasons teachers give are 1) practical - a lack of time and access, and 2) conceptual - academic papers can be difficult to read (Plavén-Sigray et…

The interaction between multilingualism and emotions has so far mostly been researched in Northern contexts. The findings obtained suggest that the first language is typically preferred for emotional and mental activities (i.e. 'first language primacy'). In this article, we extend this area of investigation to Africa. We use the Bilingualism and…

This paper outlines the history of The International Association for the Improvement of Mother Tongue Education [IAIMTE] and the International Association for Research in L1 Education [ARLE]. Delegates at a 1993 conference at UEA recognised how important research was to generate evidence about the teaching and learning of all first languages, and…

This paper explores the acquisition of personal reference terms in Thai, a language with a highly complex personal reference system. Two separate studies were conducted for this paper, each featuring two groups of participants: children with typical development (TD) and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). In each study, the…

Third language (L3) lexical acquisition is still underexplored. In this article I overview theoretical and empirical evidence on L3 lexical acquisition and the role of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in learning L3 words. I explain the mechanism of CLI as resulting from language co-activation in the multilingual learner's/user's mind.…

This article examines the use of the repertory grid technique as a method to investigate learner perceptions in language education research. An important issue raised in this article concerns how far a researcher's agenda may be unintentionally imposed onto a research study which is investigating learners' perceptions, and how far the ensuing data…

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is a core component of speech pathology practice. However, international literature has highlighted that speech language pathologists (SLPs) may not feel confident or competent in this area. Confidence and competence are critical factors in therapy as they can impact the quality-of-service…

This meta-analysis synthesized 35 English studies (130 effect sizes, N = 1,981) that employed online tasks to investigate the processing of multiword sequences (MWSs). We examined (a) to what extent MWSs enjoy a processing advantage over novel word combinations; (b) how such a processing advantage is moderated by statistical regularities (i.e.,…

This forum article is an attempt to engage in a recent exchange between Figueiredo and Martinez and Kubota whose articles were published in this journal. Bearing out the tenets of the latter author's claims regarding how to confront the dominance of white Euro-American hegemonic knowledge, Figueiredo and Martinez proposed an additional insightful…

Purpose: Core lexicon measures have received growing attention in research. They are intended to provide clinicians with a clinician-friendly means to quantify word retrieval ability in discourse based on normal expectations of discourse production for specific discourse elicitation tasks. To date, different criteria have been used to develop core…

This work categorizes Japanese Sign Language (JSL) toponyms, or place names, and examines factors that potentially affect their structure. Exonyms, influenced by the source Japanese name, and endonyms, independent JSL names, contrast structurally in that exonyms tend to emerge as compounds while endonyms conform more closely to canonical…

Increased second language acquisition (SLA) research interest in the effect of planning on subsequent L2 oral production has typically examined the effect of planning on the syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and/or fluency (CALF) of L2 production. However, the results of research in this domain are inconclusive. This study, a…

Replication is a research methodology designed to verify, consolidate, and generalize knowledge and understanding within empirical fields of study. In second language studies, however, reviews share widespread concern about the infrequency of replication. A common but speculative explanation for this situation is that replication studies are not…

There has recently been a surge of interest in improving the replicability of second language (L2) research. However, less attention is paid to replicability in the context of L2 meta-analyses. I argue that conducting interrater reliability (IRR) analyses is a key step toward improving the replicability of L2 meta-analyses. To that end, I first…

Does complexity make multilingualism special? Since there is no unequivocal notion of complexity on which researchers agree, several characteristics that have been considered crucial for complexity are brought to bear on multilingualism. While multilingualism is fairly complex in some senses, for instance, because it requires that many variables…