This book brings together research that makes use of tasks to examine oral interaction, written production, vocabulary and reading, lexical innovation and pragmatics in different formal language learning contexts and in different languages (English, French, German, Italian and Spanish). It will be of interest to professionals and students working in SLA research and language pedagogy.

The book focuses on investigating pragmatic learning, teaching and testing in foreign language contexts. The volume brings together research that investigates these three areas in different formal language learning settings. The number and variety of languages involved both as the first language (e.g. English, Finnish, Iranian, Spanish, Japanese) as well as the target foreign language (e.g. English, French, German, Indonesian, Korean, Spanish) makes the volume specially attractive for language educators in different sociocultural foreign language contexts. Additionally, the different approaches adopted by the researchers participating in this volume, such as information processing, sociocultural, language socialization, computer-mediated or conversation analysis should be of interest to graduate students and researchers working in the area of second language acquisition.

This book provides an overview of affective individual variables that are considered relevant for second language learning and outlines a novel approach to researching them. In the first part of the book, the most prominent concepts and theories in connection with affective individual variables and tasks are discussed, followed by a literature review of the most significant empirical studies conducted on the reviewed individual variables with the help of tasks. The second part of the monograph reports the findings of a research project which investigated the relationships of motivation, emotions, flow experiences, and self-efficacy beliefs of secondary school students studying English in Hungary. These constructs are examined at two levels: in connection with learners’ English classes in general and in connection with a particular language task, thus linking task performance measures to specific affective states experienced while performing a task and their general trait versions reported in connection with the language classes. Teacher interviews provide further insights into the language tasks used by the teachers of the students taking part in the study and their affective correlates. The book offers multi-level interpretations of the results, puts forward pedagogical implications, and delineates further research directions.

The last three decades have witnessed a growth of interest in research on tasks from various perspectives and numerous books and collections of articles have been published focusing on the notion of task and its utility in different contexts. Nevertheless, what is lacking is a multi-faceted examination of tasks from different important perspectives. This edited volume, with four sections of three chapters each, views tasks and Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) from four distinct (but complementary) vantage points. In the first section, all chapters view tasks from a cognitive-interactionist angle with each addressing one key facet of either cognition or interaction (or both) in different contexts (CALL and EFL/ESL). Section two hinges on the idea that language teaching and learning is perhaps best conceptualized, understood, and investigated within a complexity theory framework which accounts for the dynamicity and interrelatedness of the variables involved. Viewing TBLT from a sociocultural lens is what connects the chapters included in the third section. Finally, the fourth section views TBLT from pedagogical and curricular vantage points.

This volume extends the Task-Based Language Teaching: Issues, Research and Practice books series by deliberately exploring the potential of task-based language teaching (TBLT) in a range of EFL contexts. It is specifically devoted to providing empirical accounts about how TBLT practice is being developed and researched in diverse educational contexts, particularly where English is not the dominant language. By including contributions from settings as varied as Japan, China, Korea, Venezuela, Turkey, Spain, and France, this collection of 13 studies provides strong indications that the research and implementation of TBLT in EFL settings is both on the rise and interestingly diverse, not least because it must respond to the distinct contexts, constraints, and possibilities of foreign language learning. The book will be of interest to SLA researchers and students in applied linguistics and TESOL. It will also be of value to course designers and language teachers who come from a broad range of formal and informal educational settings encompassing a wide range of ages and types of language learners.

This volume contains papers addressing issues in task-based research into second language learning which are essential to informed pedagogic decision-making about how best to achieve this aim. These issues include research into the design characteristics of pedagogic tasks that promote the accuracy, fluency and complexity of learner language; the role of individual differences in the motivational and other cognitive variables that demands made by pedagogic tasks draw on; the extent to which tasks, and teacher interventions during task performance, promote the quantity and quality of interaction that facilitate L2 learning; and the generalizability of task-based research in laboratory contexts to classroom settings.

Second Language Task-Based Performance is the first book to synthesize Peter Skehan’s theoretical and empirical contributions all in one place. With three distinct themes explored in each section (theory, empirical studies, and assessment), Skehan’s influential body of work is organized in such a way that it provides an updated reflection on the material and makes it relevant to today’s researchers. Also in each section, an early publication is matched by at least one later publication, followed by a newly written commentary chapter, the combination of which provides the important function of offering a wider-ranging discussion. This book is an invaluable resource for researchers interested in second language task-based research or SLA more generally.

In this book, the author analyses the nature of the science of grammar. After presenting some methodological and historical background, he sets forth a theory of language and of grammar, showing that the science of grammar is not an empirical, but a normative science, comparable to logic and philosophy, characterized by the use of the method of explication.

Understanding how task complexity affects second language learning, interaction and spoken and written performance is essential to informed decisions about task design and sequencing in TBLT programs. The chapters in this volume all examine evidence for claims of the Cognition Hypothesis that complex tasks should promote greater accuracy and complexity of speech and writing, as well as more interaction, and learning of information provided in the input to task performance, than simpler tasks. Implications are drawn concerning the basic pedagogic claim of the Cognition Hypothesis, that tasks should be sequenced for learners from simple to complex during syllabus design. Containing theoretical discussion of the Cognition Hypothesis, and cutting-edge empirical studies of the effects of task complexity on second language learning and performance, this book will be important reading for language teachers, graduate students and researchers in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and cognitive and educational psychology.

This investigation contributes to issues in the study of second language transmission by considering the well-documented historical case of Anglo-Norman. Within a few generations of the establishment of this variety, its phonology diverged sharply from that of continental French, yet core syntactic distinctions continued to be reliably transmitted. The dissociation of phonology from syntax transmission is related to the age of exposure to the language in the experience of ordinary users of the language. The input provided to children acquiring language in a naturalistic communicative setting, even though one of a school institution, enabled them to acquire target-like syntactic properties of the inherited variety. In addition, it allowed change to take place along the lines of transmission by incrementation. A linguistic environment combining the 'here-and-now' aspects of ordinary first language acquisition with the growing cognitive complexity of an educational meta-language appears to have been adequate for this variety to be transmitted as a viable entity that encoded the public life of England for centuries.