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The present paper outlines a theoretical framework for the application of dynamic assessment procedures to second language assessment and pedagogy. Dynamic assessment (DA) is grounded in Vygotsky’s writings on the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and has been widely researched in psychology and education. DA distinguishes itself from other approaches to assessment by insisting that mediation of the examinee’s performance prompts, hints, leading questions etc. – during the assessment procedure is crucial to understanding his/her abilities and for promoting development during the assessment process itself. In this paper, the major approaches to DA are reviewed and some key studies are reported on. The few language-acquisition DA studies that have been carried out to date are then considered. Th e paper concludes with a discussion of some of the criticisms leveled against DA and recommendations for further research into DA’s potential contributions to applied linguistics.

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is a widely recognized construct articulated by L. S. Vygotsky, whose scholarship inspires the approach to L2 research known as Sociocultural Theory (SCT). In a synthesis of North American L2 ZPD work, Kinginger (2002) outlined how the construct had been appropriated, focusing on three interpretations then permeating the field: skill mastery, scaffolding, and metalinguistic knowledge. Kellogg (2017) has argued that L2 research in general consistently misuses the ZPD construct and distorts its original meaning. Citing The Problem of Age (Vygotsky 1998), Kellogg claims that the ZPD was intended to model ontogenetic development from birth to around age 17. Consequently, for Kellogg, L2 research commits three fundamental errors: (i) recruiting adult learners (often undergraduate university students) rather...

This paper examines multimodal conceptual metaphors in a corpus of 32 American and Ukrainian beer commercials. The dominant metaphor in both cultures is HAPPINESS IS DRINKING BEER, with a secondary metaphor BEER IS A PERSON. The Ukrainian commercials exhibit a third metaphor that appears in a very subtle way in the American commercials: LOVE FOR THE MOTHERLAND IS DRINKING BEER. The analysis reveals cross-cultural variation in the mappings and entailments of the metaphors. We argue that this variation is not just a matter of divergent advertising strategies but is a manifestation of differences in the conceptual understandings of happiness, beer drinking, friendship, and patriotism in both cultures. Este estudio investiga las metaforas conceptuales multimodales en un corpus de treinta y dos anuncios publicitarios de cerveza estadounidenses y ucranianas. La metafora principal en ambas culturas es LA FELICIDAD ES TOMAR CERVEZA, y una metafora secundaria es LA CERVEZA ES UNA PERSONA. Los comerciales ucranianos manifiestan una tercera metafora que aparece de una manera sutil en los comerciales estadounidenses: EL AMOR A LA PATRIA ES TOMAR CERVEZA. El analisis revela una variacion transcultural en las proyecciones e inferencias de las metaforas. Proponemos que esta variacion no solo se debe a estrategias de publicidad divergentes, sino que revela diferencias en la comprension conceptual de la felicidad, tomar cerveza, la amistad y el patriotismo entre las dos culturas.

This presentation is situated within the general framework of Vygotsky's educational theory, which argues that development in formal educational activity is a fundamentally different process from development that occurs in the everyday world. A cornerstone of Vygotsky's theory is that to be successful education must be sensitive to learners' zone of proximal development. This requires the dialectical integration of instruction and assessment into a seamless and dynamic activity. The presentation includes a discussion of how the integration is systematically achieved in the process known as dynamic assessment and illustrates through analysis of data from advanced learners of French how this functions in second language education.

In this article, we extend Firth and Wagner's (1997) call for an ontological perspective that (re)unites the individual and the social by proposing some fundamental implications that this call has for second language (L2) classroom praxis and teacher education. We propose that the (re)unification of language and culture (re)establishes the unity between people and language, and thus reorients the focus of language instruction to feature centrally how meaning is situated in concrete human activity rather than in the language itself. From this stance, the goal of L2 classroom praxis is for learners to develop a conceptual understanding of how meaning gets expressed through the L2 in concrete everyday activity, and to build their capacity to make choices about how to function in and potentially alter that activity to suit their needs and goals. To make our proposal concrete, we draw on two classroom case studies: on verbal aspect in Spanish and learning to read L2 literature, as illustrations of conceptualizing learning and use as dialectically intertwined. We also focus on how foregrounding the meaning that results from the reintegration of language and culture reorients both L2 classroom praxis and how L2 teachers come to think about language, language learning, and language teaching.

I begin my necessarily brief commentary on Gregg (2000) with a confession: I am not, nor have I ever been, a practising postmodernist. I freely admit, however, that some of the ideas that have emerged from this project are sufficiently interesting to take seriously. I wrote my 1996 article to stir up the waters and to explore what a postmodernist perspective might do for, and to, second language acquisition (SLA). It can be useful for any discipline to have its accepted way of doing business interrogated and even disturbed. Judging from Gregg’s response, I seem to have succeeded. In what follows I limit my comments to some specific points that appear to have raised most of Gregg’s hackles.

Over the course of the past century, the MLJ was one of the sites where the vigorous, and often times passionate justification for, and defense of, foreign language (FL) study in the educational curriculum of the United States unfolded. Almost 10% of the slightly more than 4,000 articles published in the MLJ during the past century focused on the value and relevance of FL study in the educational enterprise. This article will focus on five major themes that surfaced throughout the 8 decades covered by our survey. The first theme comprises the general arguments offered by the profession in support of the value of FL study, most of which were impacted directly or indirectly by world events. The second and third themes document periods of general doubt and optimism about the place of FLs in the curriculum. In the fourth major theme, we describe the passionate and intense argumentation between the faculties of education and the defenders of FL study. The fifth, and final theme, addresses the question of which FLs should be taught in the schools and what contribution each might make to a student’s education. As we enter the 21st century, it seems clear that the profession still feels compelled to justify the educational merit of its subject matter. In the end, given the twists and turns that history can take, it is difficult to predict whether FL study will eventually find an uncontested place in the sun.

Although sociocultural theory (SCT) is a general theory of human mental development, it has been productively extended to include the investigation of second language (L2) development. I think it is fair to say that the catalyst for SCT-informed L2 research (henceforth, SCT-L2) in the West was the publication of Frawley and Lantolf’s (1985) study on the narrative performance of ESL speakers. Adopting the perspective of mediated-mind, the core concept of SCT (see below), Frawley and Lantolf showed how speakers lose, maintain, and regain control of their narrative performance through private speech.

This article presents a postmodernist critical analysis of the SLA theory building-literature as primarily represented in the writings of Beretta, Crookes, Eubank, Gregg, Long, and to some extent Schumann. I argue that there is no foundational reason to grant privileged status to the modernist view of SLA theory these scholars espouse. Scientific theories are metaphorical constructs that are elevated to theoretical status because they are “taken seriously” by their developers. All of which argues against cutting off any would-be SLA theory before it has the opportunity to be taken seriously (i.e., to bloom).

Rod Ellis's latest offering addresses issues relating to the interface between SLA research and language pedagogy. To this end, the book opens with an informative and thought-provoking examination of applied SLA (research simultaneously encompassing the theory and practice of SLA and pedagogy), which, following Widdowson, Ellis distinguishes from SLA applied (extension of SLA findings to teaching). In this regard he discusses the difference between technical knowledge and “confirmatory,” often experimental, research on the one hand, and practical knowledge and “interpretative,” real world, observation-interactional research on the other. According to Ellis, the confirmatory tradition, which promotes an applied science (i.e., SLA applied) view of education, has been the dominant paradigm in the field. This tradition situates researchers at the top of the research-practice hierarchy as producers of information and locates teachers lower down on the hierarchy as information consumers.

More than 75 years ago, at the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress, L. S. Vygotsky presented a paper, “Methods of Reflexological and Psychological Investigations,” in which he began to lay the foundation for a unified theory of mind. Vygotsky's concern was that psychology had lost sight of the uniqueness of human mental functioning, which for him resides in our ability to intentionally mediate, and hence regulate, our biologically specified mental systems (i.e., in today's jargon, input systems) through culturally determined means. Contemporary sociocultural psychologists, J. V. Wertsch in particular, have noted that, although Vygotsky called for the unification of psychology, in his writings, he actually paid very little attention to one part of the mental equation—the biological, or natural, mind. As it turns out, even those who fault Vygotsky for his failure here have themselves not focused much attention on the contribution of the natural, or what Frawley refers to as the computational, mind, preferring instead to concentrate on the sociocultural parameters of cognition. The present book can be seen as an attempt to bring to fruition Vygotsky's earlier vision of a unified psychology.

foreign languages is its curriculum. What courses are taught? What specializations are offered to students about to become professionals in the field? How is the curriculum meeting the changing priorities of the nation? What developments should we anticipate and realistically expect to find? The present writers have compiled some statistics and surveyed 326 centers of foreign language education in order to uncover some answers to these questions. Before we consider these matters in detail, however, it is best to review what other assessors have