Thrown in at the deep end

After completing a law degree at the University of Birmingham when I was 20 and not really knowing what I wanted to do, except that it was not law, I became an English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher accidentally through signing up as a volunteer with the British United Nations Association (BUNA), roughly equivalent to the US Peace Corps. Instead of being dispatched to assist starving people through a remote third-world community development project, as I had naively expected, I was sent on a fast-paced, two-week English as a second language (ESL) teacher-training course at a well-known private language school, International House, on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of London's West End. Then came a one-week BUNA ‘orientation’ course in the suburbs. A hundred-plus neophyte volunteers were lectured on how to deliver a baby, how to deal with snake bites, how to remove leeches using gasoline or matches (but not both), the importance of taking anti-malaria pills daily without fail (pills subsequently found to be 100% ineffective), and how to avoid schistosomiasis (snail fever). On the last day, I was informed that, contrary to what I had first been told, I would not after all be going to Afghanistan, but to Peru. A week later, I arrived in Lima, a bustling Latin-American metropolis with no shortage of mid-wives, no malaria, no snakes, no snails and not a leech in sight. In the face of pervasive poverty, corruption, violence, and illiteracy, I had been sent several thousand miles, with absolutely no understanding of how people learn languages and minimal understanding of how to teach them, to provide free English classes for the relatively wealthy, mostly middle-class faculty and students in the Faculty of Law of Peru's leading university, the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.

For a while, there was a continuous weekly cycle of one-day student strikes, often culminating in armed student takeovers of San Marcos and other Peruvian campuses for the weekend. There were barricades and shootouts between rival groups of militants, often ending with tear gas attacks on the occupied buildings by hundreds of heavily armed riot police. Amidst all the excitement, my students and I slogged away at improving their pronunciation of British English (a quite inappropriate model for Peru), supported by my crude but anatomically innovative blackboard drawings of putative human vocal organs, and at grammar translation lessons based on George Orwell's Animal Farm, the only ‘reader’ of which I could find sufficient copies in Lima at the time. If the English of my long-suffering students improved, it was through no fault of mine. Although it might be useful to them in business one day, few had any immediate need for the language, since most law books were locally written, and in Spanish. The situation was very different for students in the sciences, engineering and medicine, most of whose required reading might be in English by the final year of undergraduate studies, and almost all of it in graduate work. Mercifully for all concerned, the semester ended prematurely when, in less than 45 seconds, a major earthquake flattened the beautiful old campus in Plaza Universidad, and San Marcos staff and students were told to disappear while temporary accommodation was found.

Back at work two months later, I saw my students, and Lima itself, in a different light. In addition to early morning and late evening EFL courses at the university, I was now running a youth club in a shanty town on the city outskirts on Saturdays and teaching a variety of subjects three afternoons a week in a combination orphanage and reform school for delinquent street children in the nearby port of Callao. Neither project was part of my official assignment, but they were certainly more like what I had envisaged as the role of a volunteer. They also meant I needed to improve my Spanish. Six years of grammar translation and ‘A-level’ Spanish at school in England had meant I could struggle through Lope de Vega, but had trouble arguing with policemen. Terms like learning and acquisition, incidental and intentional learning, and explicit and implicit second language (L2) knowledge were unknown to me, but the difference between knowing something about a language and a functional ability for real-time communication was painfully real – and has stuck with me ever since. So, too, were differences between the language that had been modeled by teachers and in our textbooks back in the UK and the way native speakers actually spoke Spanish.

It was not just a matter of having learned Peninsular Spanish at school, and now being confronted with one of the Latin-American varieties; it was the artificiality and stilted nature of much of the classroom input. Because it is a pro-drop language, for example, ‘he’ is unnecessary, and the following utterance correct, in Spanish: ‘The man was waiting for a bus when _ saw a friend.’ With person markings bound to Spanish finite verb forms, native speakers only retain subject pronouns in ambiguous contexts or when doing so is pragmatically useful, e.g., for contrastive stress (He did X but she did Y). Thus, utterances like ‘Yo creo que . . .’ (I think that . . .), where the pronoun is retained unnecessarily, are marked, and come across as ego-centric. I remember feeling mortified when a Peruvian friend pointed out that that was how I sounded with all my redundant yos. Although I did not realize it at the time, the seeds of some of my intuitive beliefs about language learning in these and other areas were planted during this period. I was learning the language – really learning it this time – not by taking classes, but through hearing it and having to use it every day. Years later, at the University of California, Los Angles (UCLA), when Evelyn Hatch (Reference Hatch and Hatch1978: 404) wrote:

I needed no convincing. Many approaches to language teaching still assume just the opposite, of course: teach the grammar, piece by piece, and leave it to the students to synthesize the pieces for communication later.

Learning my trade

Influenced by those early experiences teaching English to social elites while the 99% struggled to survive, and like many language teachers and applied linguists over the years, I have tried to remain mindful of language teaching's negative, imperialist side, particularly the teaching of powerful peoples’ languages to less powerful peoples, and to do something, however insignificant, to compensate for what can otherwise easily become complicity in the abusive patterns of intra- and international coercion and exploitation that have long caused so much human suffering. Without such awareness, language teaching can morph into soft colonialism, or as Pennycook (Reference Pennycook and Tollefson1995) puts it, ‘English in the world becomes the world in English.’ For me, this effort has taken several forms, including attempts to make teaching as relevant as possible to the real needs of learners – needs analysis becoming a crucial part of the rationale for Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) – rather than those of corporate and statist forces behind the language being taught. It has meant supporting efforts to preserve and teach threatened indigenous languages, such as Hawaiian, and struggles for the rights of ethnolinguistic minorities to education through the medium of their own languages and language varieties, such as Hawai'i Creole English, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), or Ebonics, and Spanish in the USA. It has involved conducting and publishing research which might help in those efforts (e.g., Long Reference Long, Pincus and Ehrlich1999, Reference Long, Mathinson and Ross2007a; Long & Adamson Reference Long, Adamson, Valdez and Faltis2012), participating actively in progressive social movements in societies in which I have lived, and encouraging students and colleagues to consider the positive, through neutral, to negative (e.g., purely careerist) roles open to them. Politics and applied linguistics are closely related more often than not, and the relationships should be recognized.

The next few years of my professional development were like a prolonged ‘sandwich’ course. I alternately worked as a classroom teacher or teacher educator and underwent formal training at the universities of London and Essex. To begin with, I taught at private language schools – at St. Giles and International House in London, and in Oxford at the Swan School, where I learned a lot about language teaching through a brief apprenticeship to Michael Swan, and as Director of Studies for an emergency ESL program, Zaminos, set up hastily by BUNA in Oxford for 50 Czechoslovakian university students stranded in England after the Soviet invasion of 1968 – an example of the link between geopolitics and language teaching. Then came a year at the University of London Institute of Education from 1969 to 1970 earning a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) in EFL. There were inspiring lectures from the likes of Basil Bernstein and Paul Hirst, exposure to the ideas of Douglas Barnes, James Briton, Harold Rosen, and Frankie Todd on the role of student talk in learning – ideas and research findings that influence my approach to language teaching to this day – and supervised by Geoffrey Broughton and Alex Baird, a ten-week teaching practice at a secondary school just outside Barcelona. We used commercially published textbooks and our own lesson-plans. The approach was audio-visual, and classroom evaluations focused firmly on our ability to run 30+ students at a time smoothly through fast-paced sequences of structural pattern drills, with plenty of changes of activity, preferably no errors, and immediate ‘correction’ of any that slipped through.

The PGCE was followed by a summer back in Oxford with Michael Swan at the Swan School, working with Scandinavian teachers of English before taking up a position in Mexico City from 1970 to 1973 as a teacher and, later, Director of Teacher Training, at the Anglo-Mexican Cultural Institute. Teaching for me during this period meant 25 contact hours a week with classes of 20–35 students using institutionally mandated grammar-based materials, not expertly crafted by the likes of Geoffrey Broughton or Michael Swan, but poor quality, locally written ones. These I delivered through a rather flashy, International House-inspired, heavily teacher-centered pedagogy. The task was to maintain student interest in the face of leaden textbook ‘dialogs’ replete with examples of the structure du jour: ‘Hello, Mary. Hello, John. I am a student. Are you a student, Mary? Yes, I am. This is my book. Is that your book, John? Yes, it is. Goodbye, Mary. Goodbye, John.’ In a typical lesson, there would be a quantity of fast-paced, tightly controlled practice of the structure, frequent changes of activity, lots of group work – but mostly using the same textbook materials and procedures as in the lockstep phases of the lesson – and every effort to elicit immediate native-like student performance of complete sentences from the outset. I felt, and had been trained to feel, that a lesson was successful if I emerged tired and there had been lots of carefully controlled student ‘talk’ with few errors – errors that were, again, promptly ‘corrected’ if they did occur.

I returned to England to study for an M.A. in Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex in 1973–1974. In amongst courses on generative linguistics and Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, I was introduced by Sam Spicer and Peter Strevens to the innovations of the Nuffield French program, the work of the Council of Europe team on the so-called Threshold Level, learner needs identification, languages for specific purposes, notional-functionalism, an early version of Sinclair and Coulthard's research on classroom discourse, and in what was to have a lasting effect on my work, to radical ideas about education and the possibilities of classroom-centered research by Dick Allwright, surely one of the most creative thinkers in language teaching of all time.

The Essex year was my first exposure to alternatives to the structural syllabus, to the potential of student-centered classrooms, and indeed, of learner-centered language learning. Douglas Barnes’ ideas took on new relevance. Work in second language acquisition (SLA), such as Corder (Reference Corder1967), suggested a powerful cognitive contribution on the learner's part and that learner errors indicated a lot more than a simple failure to pay attention. The ideas of Leonard Newmark & David Reibel (e.g., Newmark & Reibel Reference Newmark and Reibel1968) struck a chord. Consider, for example, this quote from Newmark's paper – surely years ahead of its time – at the second International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) conference at Cambridge in 1969 (Newmark Reference Newmark, Pimsleur and Quinn1971), where he described some of the thinking behind the radically innovative, and successful, ‘minimal language-teaching program’ already up and running at the University of California, San Diego:

Back in Mexico City I put into practice at least some of what I had learned at Essex at the Xochimilco campus of the new Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, where I was in charge of a department offering English and French for academic purposes. We designed our courses based on the rather primitive needs analyses we conducted in the four faculties on campus, wrote the (notional-functional) materials, taught the classes, produced several bilingual issues of Lenguas Para Objectivos Específicos/Languages for Specific Purposes, and carried out some early classroom-based research on the end-product. The results were disappointing, suggesting that our supposedly innovative materials had not altered what went on in a typical lesson. In hindsight, this should not have been surprising, for while an improvement on a structural syllabus, our materials still entailed a synthetic approach, with a classroom focus on the language forms, albeit grouped ‘communicatively’, which realized the notions and functions.

From 1976 to 1977, I did similar curriculum development work in Montreal as Director of Studies for Concordia University's ESL program and taught methodology courses part-time in the University's Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) Centre. Despite, or perhaps because of, vague feelings of competence for the first time in my career, this was a period during which I was growing increasingly skeptical about much of what I had been taught. Firstly, the small-scale classroom research projects in Mexico City, Tabriz, and elsewhere had been showing the difficulty of translating supposedly important shifts in thinking about language teaching into real change in the classroom. Second, as I delved deeper into the literature, I had come to realize how few language teaching prescriptions and proscriptions had ever been tested empirically. Third, the studies of SLA I was reading in Language Learning and other journals (SLA coursework had not figured in my British training) were making me realize how little attention generations of language teaching gurus had paid to learners and learning processes compared with the forests they had sacrificed to empirically unsupported opinions about teaching. Fourth, the pronouncements of at least some of the gurus suggested that they had either never taught very much or else had been out of classrooms for far too long.

Since data-based SLA research was very much a North-American preserve and SLA courses virtually unknown in the UK at the time, I attended UCLA for my doctoral work. Along with the coursework, I conducted replications of some studies of morpheme accuracy orders, expertly supervised by Diane Larsen-Freeman, with whom I later wrote an introductory text on SLA research (Larsen-Freeman & Long Reference Larsen-Freeman and Long1991). Supervised and inspired by Evelyn Hatch, I switched my focus to studies of input (e.g., Long Reference Long and Winitz1981a), foreigner talk discourse (e.g., Long Reference Long1981b, Reference Long1983a), and properties of native speaker-non-native speaker conversation (e.g., Long Reference Long1983b). Much as others were showing for caretaker talk and caretaker-child conversation in first language acquisition (L1A), conversation with native speakers could serve as a crucible for adult L2 acquisition, although its effects would turn out to be only selectively facilitative (Sato Reference Sato and Day1986). Not all conversation was equally useful, however. It was when interlocutors negotiated for meaning that optimal conditions for language learning occurred, and certain types of tasks stimulated more negotiation work than others, for example, two-way more than one-way, and closed more than open, tasks. Native speakers tended not to simplify the input linguistically to facilitate non-natives’ comprehension and participation. Rather, they simplified the task and elaborated the input. By providing feedback, notably implicit negative feedback, e.g., corrective recasts, and by modifying the interactional structure of conversation through building in redundancy of various kinds, it was possible for them to achieve comparable levels of improved comprehensibility while retaining the linguistic complexity of the input, thereby exposing learners to L2 features they needed to encounter if they were ever to learn them (Yano, Long & Ross Reference Yano, Long and Ross1994). These were findings with implications for language teaching and the design of teaching materials. Then, as now, few commercial textbooks created conditions for real negotiation work in the classroom, and linguistic simplification, not elaboration, was the norm. Strict controls over grammar and vocabulary in commercial textbooks improve comprehension, but at a cost.

Subsequently (Long Reference Long, Ritchie and Bhatia1996), these ideas, known as the Interaction Hypothesis (IH), were updated to connect external behavioral moves, such as recasts, occurring during negotiation for meaning to internal cognitive processes relevant to language development, such as incidental and intentional learning, selective attention, detection, and ‘noticing’ (Schmidt Reference Schmidt1990). The IH has engendered a substantial body of research and several statistical meta-analyses in the past 30 years, most of it supportive, and constitutes one part of the cognitive-interactionist theory of instructed SLA that underpins Task-Based Language Teaching (Long Reference Long2015, chapter 3). Much work remains to be done, however, such as the identification of individual differences in such variables as working memory that facilitate or impede uptake from implicit negative feedback, and the relationships between optimal degrees of explicitness of that feedback and degrees of salience of the problematic linguistic features.

I learned much from the UCLA faculty of that period, and from my fellow students, including Charlie Sato, who was to become my wife. I worked my way through the program initially by teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) 20 hours a week in UCLA's English Language Institute, including a new course for advanced international graduate students, mostly science and engineering majors, who were having problems writing specialist term papers, theses and journal articles in English. Despite having read law as an undergraduate, it was really that course which brought home to me just how different the genres, specialist texts, and underlying communicative principles could be from one discipline to another. It was clear that one language teaching size simply would not fit all. The teaching and course design I did at UCLA and for the University's new EAP programs in Beijing and Xuangjou, however, were based on perfunctory needs and means analyses and still involved mostly content-based, notional-functional materials.

TBLT: Building the road as we travel

In 1980 I accepted a tenure-track appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Educational Linguistics Program at the University of Pennsylvania. It was during my two years at Penn that I did some serious rethinking about options in language teaching. SLA research was repeatedly demonstrating a much more powerful role for the learner's cognitive contribution than had previously been recognized in language teaching. It was visible, for example, in widely attested errors and error types, backsliding, U-shaped behavior, accuracy orders, developmental sequences, and other examples of so-called ‘autonomous syntax’ (e.g., Long Reference Long, Long and Doughty2009; Long & Sato Reference Long, Sato, Davies, Criper and Howatt1984; Ortega Reference Ortega2009). How could respect for the learner's role be reflected in methodology and syllabus design without abandoning attempts to teach the language altogether, as some were advocating in what I considered a knee-jerk response to the findings? Contrary to views fashionable at the time, instruction clearly did make a difference, if not to learning processes and the route of development, then at least to rate and ultimate attainment (Long Reference Long1983c, Reference Long and Beebe1988). Were synthetic and analytic approaches the only options? How could what Barnes (Reference Barnes1966) referred to as the ‘transmission model’ of education be replaced by one that was consistent with findings on how people learned languages? And how could it be based on a cooperative, problem-solving approach – with what philosophers of education for over a century have called l'education integrale? It was in response to these challenges that in 1980 and 1981, I developed early versions of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT).

My proposal, to use a task-based analytic syllabus with a focus on form, is an attempt to promote language teaching that is broadly compatible with what SLA research has shown about how adults acquire second and foreign languages. It seeks to avoid well-known problems with the underlying theories, implementation and results of synthetic and purely analytic approaches. What Wilkins (Reference Wilkins1976) called the synthetic (e.g., structural, notional-functional, or lexical) syllabus, typically delivered via Present – Practice – Produce (PPP) lessons, tacitly assumes a skill-building model of language development, in which declarative ‘knowledge that’ is first proceduralized to become ‘knowledge how,’ followed by automatization through massive practice. People all over the world have long tried to learn foreign languages that way, some with considerable success – although there are many more beginners than finishers. As Krashen and others have long pointed out, what is learned is mostly what I call ‘language-like’ behavior, of limited use in real-time communication.

Where classroom implementation and results are concerned, PPP textbooks provide simplified dialogs and reading passages written to illustrate the workings of the chosen form(s) or function(s) du jour. The tight linguistic controls improve comprehensibility, but deny learners exposure to unknown items, so are self-defeating, and often result in stilted models of what Widdowson (Reference Widdowson1972) termed usage, not use. The models are followed by repetitive drills and written exercises, with learning usually assessed through similarly formatted discrete-point tests. Input in PPP lessons is limited and impoverished, native-like output is demanded early and often, and the inevitable errors ostensibly ‘corrected.’ The same course is delivered to all learners, regardless of their differing L2 needs. The focus on forms approach assumes that it is possible to impose the same external linguistic syllabus, usually embodied in a commercially published textbook written by someone with no knowledge of any particular group of students or their needs, and that those students will learn the items simply because they are on the day's menu, regardless of their developmental readiness to do so. Countless SLA studies have shown that L2 development does not proceed that way, and certainly not in sudden jumps from ignorance to native-like performance one linguistic item at a time. Additional problems include the fact that even though some L2 items are simple enough, the totality of a language is far too complex, and the linguistic targets far too numerous, to be taught and learned explicitly in the time available. The time problem is most obvious with vocabulary (Nation Reference Nation2006) and collocations (Boers & Lindstromberg Reference Boers and Lindstromberg2012), but also affects many other parts of a language. The combination of synthetic syllabus, materials, methodology, pedagogy and assessment is what I refer to as focus on forms.

Theoretical motivation for the analytic syllabus and a pure focus on meaning is also problematic. Analytic approaches implicitly assume that the adult's capacity for incidental language learning (i.e., without intention, while doing something else, such as focusing on subject matter mastery) and implicit learning (without awareness) remain strong, whereas research on age effects and maturational constraints (e.g., Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam Reference Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam2009; Granena & Long Reference Granena and Long2013) clearly shows that such is not the case. The capacity for implicit learning (Janacsek, Fiser & Nementh Reference Janacsek, Fiser and Nemeth2012), and for instance learning in particular (Hoyer & Lincourt Reference Hoyer, Lincourt, Stadler and Frensch1998), declines (not disappears) after the early years, a fact with special significance for the learning of arbitrary (i.e., non-rule-based) form-meaning associations, such as L2 vocabulary items and collocations, as well as non-salient grammatical features. Moreover, incidental learning, like explicit teaching and learning, takes more than the three to five hours a week available for most foreign language courses.

Classroom implementations of analytic syllabuses are an improvement in many respects. The focus on meaning and communication, rather than code features, allows for more interesting, more motivating, lessons better able to hold students’ attention, which is vital for acquisition. However, once again, they deliver the same syllabus for everyone, without differentiation for students with varying needs, and even after several years of daily exposure, tend to produce students competent in receptive skills, but often with quite basic residual grammatical errors in their L2 speech and writing (Swain Reference Swain and Freed1991). Other problems include the excessive amount of time purely incidental learning requires, and as pointed out by White (Reference White1987), the inadequacy of positive evidence alone for ‘unlearning’ grammatical options in the L1 that are ungrammatical in the L2 when the L1 is in a superset–subset relationship with the L2.

My solution is focus on form (Long Reference Long, de Bot, Ginsberg and Kramsch1991, Reference Long, Lambert and Shohamy2000; Long & Robinson Reference Long, Robinson, Doughty and Williams1998; Doughty Reference Doughty and Robinson2001). In task-based, communicatively oriented lessons, adults’ capacity for intentional learning is recruited to compensate for their reduced (not lost) capacity for incidental learning during brief episodes in which their focal attention is drawn or directed, in context, to linguistic features and form-meaning connections, especially non-salient ones, needed to improve communicative effectiveness. Linguistic issues are dealt with at moments likely to be optimal for acquisition because triggered by learners’ processing difficulties and/or by their at least partially successful communicative attempts, meaning that negative feedback of all kinds – from explicit, on-record ‘error correction’ to implicit corrective recasts – as well as various kinds of ‘shaping’ of learner output, e.g., expansions and complexifications of learner utterances and sentences, are more likely to be usable by learners at their current developmental stage.

TBLT is not only broadly consistent with current understandings of how foreign and second languages are learned. It also reflects a set of nine core principles from the philosophy of education: l'education integrale, learning by doing, individual freedom, rationality, emancipation, learner-centeredness, egalitarianism, participatory democracy, and mutual aid and cooperation. A synergistic relationship exists between the philosophical principles and TBLT's psycholinguistic underpinnings. With very few exceptions, the implications of both converge on a coherent framework and a defensible set of criteria for evaluating practice.

An extensive literature is now available on most aspects of designing, implementing and evaluating TBLT – from methodological options in task-based needs analysis (e.g., Long Reference Long and Long2005a), through syllabus design (e.g., Robinson Reference Robinson and Garcia-Mayo2007) and methodology (e.g., Long Reference Long, Long and Doughty2009), to task-based, criterion referenced performance testing (e.g., Long & Norris Reference Long, Norris and Byram2000; Norris Reference Norris, Long and Doughty2009; Long Reference Long2015). Perhaps the two issues most in need of further empirical work are sequencing criteria for pedagogic tasks, and the transferability of task-based abilities. For a detailed overview, including a review of the generally positive TBLT program evaluations to date, see Long (Reference Long2015).

In 1982, after two years in Philadelphia, Charlie Sato and I moved to Hawai'i, Charlie's home, and to what was then the Department of ESL (subsequently renamed the Department of Second Language Studies) at the University of Hawai'i (UH), where, unlike at Penn, tenure-track positions were available for both of us. Hawai'i is a living linguistic laboratory, and another place where language and politics are deeply intertwined. A critically important applied linguistics issue, and one with clear political ramifications, is the resuscitation and development of Hawaiian, the language of the indigenous people. There are linguistic reflexes of the continuing immigration, and a desire by many new arrivals to maintain their ancestral languages. There is interest in the foreign and L2 learning that accompanies tourism, which, together with US military bases, is Hawai'i's major (mostly foreign-owned) industry, and a domain for which TBLT is well suited (Long Reference Long and Bosch Roig2013a). And finally, there is the ‘problem’ of Pidgin, or Hawai'i Creole English (HCE). Of course, the ‘problem’ is not really HCE, but so-called ‘standard English’ (despite the fact that there is no such thing as standard spoken English) operating in the USA. As usual, it is the variety spoken by the less powerful groups in a society – even when, as in the Hawai'i case, they constitute the majority – that is considered the ‘problem.’ Before her life was tragically cut short by ovarian cancer, much of Charlie Sato's scholarly work and activism on and off campus dealt with linguistic, sociolinguistic, educational, artistic, legal, and political aspects of HCE, resulting in publications relevant not only to the language situation in the Islands, but to many L2 and second dialect situations elsewhere (see, e.g., Sato Reference Sato, Wolfson and Manes1985, Reference Sato1989, Reference Sato and Cheshire1991, Reference Sato, Hyltenstam and Viberg1993).

In the summer of 2003, Cathy Doughty and I left UH to take up positions at the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park, hers as Area Director for SLA at the newly established Center for the Advanced Study of Language (CASL), mine as Professor of SLA and Director of the recently formed School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. One of my first tasks was to create a new Ph.D. Program in SLA and bring faculty to UMD to staff it. Since expanded to include a two-year M.A. and a one-year Advanced Graduate Certificate, the SLA Program is experimentally oriented, and concentrates primarily, although not exclusively, on cognitive processes in adult SLA, the acquisition of foreign languages, not just ESL, and especially, but not only, less commonly taught languages (LCTLs).

Key issues in the field

What SLA researchers consider key issues is largely determined by their theoretical allegiances, which tend to reflect the training they received at the doctoral level. (In this, as in most respects, it is hard to escape one's training, good or bad.) The major differences among the many current theories and at least seven research traditions (Laudan Reference Laudan1996; Long Reference Long and Long2007b) arguably lie in how learning is supposed to take place. Issues of importance common to a variety of theories and research traditions may be found at the level of capacity, the abilities and mental equipment that learners bring to the acquisition task, i.e., what they have to learn with. Biological and cognitive factors concern universals, so affect all learners. (Values of environmental and state variables differ greatly and will affect individuals inconsistently or only affect some of them.) The following are just a few of the key issues for most SLA researchers. All concern basic science, but each also has implications for language teaching and other socially important matters, such as immigration and educational options for ethnolinguistic minorities.

1. 1. Can learning that ostensibly requires an assumption of innate linguistic knowledge in fact be accounted for by a combination of non-language-specific cognitive abilities and implicit learning, as proposed by general nativists and emergentists, such as O'Grady (Reference O'Grady2005) and Ellis (Reference Ellis, Gass and Mackey2012).

2. 2. Is L2 learning maturationally constrained? My own view has long been, and remains, that sensitive periods are real (Long Reference Long1990, Reference Long2005b, Reference Long, Granena and Long2013b). This is still contested territory, however, and more work is needed, preferably moving on to identify maturationally robust and fragile linguistic sub-systems within linguistic domains (phonology, morphology, etc.) and within the same individuals, as in recent studies by Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam (Reference Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam2009) and Granena & Long (Reference Granena and Long2013).

3. 3. Is there such a thing as fossilization, as most in the field accept, or is it the case, as I have proposed, that interlanguages may stabilize without that ever entailing a loss of capacity to develop further (Long Reference Long, Doughty and Long2003)? Mine is very much a minority view. The fossilization issue, unfortunately, will only be resolved by detailed longitudinal case studies, which are logistically problematic.

4. 4. What is the relative importance of incidental and intentional learning, and of implicit and explicit learning, at different ages? As indicated earlier, the cognitive-interactionist theory of instructed SLA underlying TBLT (Long Reference Long2015) proposes a symbiotic role for incidental and intentional learning for adults.

5. 5. Must learners consciously notice new forms and form-meaning associations if they are to learn them, or can detection suffice, i.e., perception without awareness? Whatever the eventual answer to this question, it will have major implications for language teaching.

6. 6. Can language learning be improved sufficiently by matching (1) types of instruction with (2) learners with strengths in different kinds of aptitude or other individual difference variables to justify the added costs? Aptitude-treatment-interaction studies are appearing that address these issues (see Vatz et al. Reference Vatz, Tare, Jackson, Doughty, Granena and Long2013).

The state of SLA and applied linguistics

Several changes would, in my view, increase the institutional viability, impact and effectiveness of both SLA and applied linguistics. First, in the short term, more autonomous programs, centers and departments are needed, with their own hard-budgeted faculty lines, hard-budgeted student financial aid (fellowships, research assistantships, teaching assistantships), and budgetary authority. Housing (or in times of budgetary collapse in higher education, burying) programs and faculty within older, usually much larger, departments in the arts and humanities (English, Linguistics, World Literatures, etc.) or in Psychology or Education simply has not worked in many cases. SLA and/or applied linguistics faculty members or whole programs tend to be popular acquisitions by those older university departments because they bring with them an influx of coveted faculty lines, greater grant- and contract-winning possibilities, especially in the arts and humanities, and graduate students. (Top US Ph.D. in SLA or Applied Linguistics programs receive as many as 20 applications for every place available.) But the benefits usually flow in one direction. As a minority presence in the larger bodies, the SLA and/or applied linguistics faculty members may have little say in decisions that affect them and their students. What they do is often not understood and/or appreciated; it seems too applied, and therefore something to be looked down upon by many linguists and psychologists, or not applied enough, and thus a worry for many faculty in education. The fact that much of it is language science makes it foreign (especially if human subjects and quantification are involved), and perceived as a threat, to many faculty in host departments in the arts and humanities, where the goals, values, and research methodologies are very different. For example, it is virtually impossible to obtain tenure in a US humanities department without at least one single-author book to one's name, whereas the gold standard in SLA and applied linguistics is sustained publication of articles in peer-reviewed first-tier journals, preferably accompanied by a record of winning external grants and contracts. Books are good but an optional extra.

Second, post-M.A. coursework should become a standard requirement in doctoral programs in both SLA and applied linguistics. In addition to qualifying papers and the dissertation/thesis, US doctoral programs typically require 8–12 semester-length courses. In my view, this makes sense. To the extent that there is an accumulating body of knowledge in a field, however small that knowledge may be as yet compared to that in more mature sciences, a well-educated individual in the field should know about as much of it as possible, and not just about his or her dissertation topic, as can still be the case with graduates of some programs in some other countries whose degree is earned purely by research. Most Ph.D. students are preparing for a career in academia. Unless they are hired into a very large program, and there are very few of those, they will have to teach courses and supervise students in several areas, not just their own. For that, they need a solid grounding in the field's core knowledge bases – breadth, as well as depth – and for the same reason, a reasonable level of rigorous training in qualitative and qualitative research methods. For SLA and many areas of applied linguistics, the research methods component should include a course dealing specifically with L2, not just general, research methods. These include the creation, validation and use of measures of elicited imitation, grammaticality judgments, reaction-times, eye-tracking, language accuracy, language complexity, language acquisition and language use. It should also include a course in the history, philosophy and sociology of science; better an understanding of the ‘big picture’ – of what it means to be doing (language) science – that such a course can bring than more and more statistics courses.

Third, a mechanism is needed by which graduate programs could be formally accredited, as is routine for programs in other disciplines, as meeting minimum requirements established by one or more professional associations. This does not mean that all programs should or would be the same, but simply that at least some areas of the core knowledge base in the field should figure as part of the training all would-be scholars in SLA and applied linguistics receive. It would mean, for example, that M.A. programs purporting to graduate people planning to enter careers in language teaching would require of their students at least one course in SLA, the process instruction is designed to facilitate, in just the same way that all medical students take required courses in such areas as human anatomy or physiology before they specialize. As things stand, knowing that someone holds a masters degree or a doctorate in SLA or applied linguistics tells one little or nothing without knowing which university and program the degree was from, and in all too many cases can mean little or nothing. Accreditation, and standardizing the content and assessment of certain components in graduate programs, incidentally, would be two of several requirements if SLA, applied linguistics or language teaching ever aspired to become true professions.

Fourth, scholarly journals are needed that are democratically controlled and whose editors and editorial and advisory boards are chosen by the membership of professional associations. (Language, the major journal of the Linguistics Society of America, could serve as a model.) The journals should be wholly independent of individual university departments, quasi-governmental bodies, and, especially, of commercial publishers. Reducing the extent of commercial interests in all areas of SLA and applied linguistics would be highly desirable. For example, academic conferences should wherever possible be held on university campuses with reasonably priced accommodation available, not, as is the case with some prominent applied linguistics conferences, in luxury hotels in remote tourist destinations, with exorbitant registration fees. That is exclusionary and academically counter-productive.

Finally, most work in SLA and in some areas of applied linguistics needs to be recognized for what it is, language science, which is in turn part of cognitive science. Early signs of movement in this direction are visible on some campuses in the USA with the formation of interdisciplinary networks of language sciences faculty drawn from a wide variety of programs and departments. In some cases, the shift is accompanied by the creation of new degree programs in language and/or cognitive science. If and when autonomous Departments of Language and or Cognitive Science emerge, as I expect to happen over the coming 20 years, they will be where most SLA faculty and students, and many applied linguists will belong.