Second language pedagogy: Learners and teachers

Abstract

This issue of Language Teaching Research includes seven articles that address topics of great interest to second language (L2) pedagogy: the first three contributions focus more on the learner and consider the importance of individual differences such as working and declarative memory in vocabulary learning, the relationship between strategy use and linguistic knowledge for listening comprehension, and how task repetition type impacts young learners’ attention to form. The remaining four articles address topics that relate to the teacher role and consider pedagogical gestures, teachers’ engagement with digital multimodal composing, with task-based language teaching (TBLT), and with teaching for social justice. Ruiz, Rebuschat and Meurers report a study on the interaction between instruction, individual differences in cognitive abilities (working memory and declarative memory) and L2 vocabulary acquisition in the context of web-based intelligent computer assisted language learning (ICALL). A total of 127 adult participants, most advanced-level, German English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, were assigned to two experimental conditions, meaning-focused and form-focused. The linguistic target chosen was phrasal verbs because they are notoriously difficult for L2 learners due to syntactic, semantic and pragmatic considerations. The focus of instruction in the study was on the development of receptive and productive semantic knowledge of targeted phrasal verbs. In the meaning-focused group, participants read for meaning, whereas in the formfocused group, they had to interact with the texts selecting automatically generated multiple-choice options. The findings of the study suggested that (i) both working memory and (nonverbal) declarative memory were related to the lexical learning of targeted phrasal verbs, thus supporting previous research on the role of working memory as a predictor of L2 learning, and (ii) working memory appears to have a facilitative role in the form-focused condition, thus supporting the argument that instructional context can moderate the effect of working memory in L2 acquisition. From a pedagogical