With this volume of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL), I continue the tradition of my predecessors of producing a volume on the topic second language pedagogy about every five years. Although applied linguistics encompasses more than the teaching and learning of second languages, articles on these topics tend to be among the most downloaded from the ARAL web site. I decided, however, to break with the tradition of focusing mostly on specific skill areas. Because language teaching is a situated activity that cannot be separated from its contexts and learners, the first section is devoted to language learning in or for specific contexts (secondary school settings, online, the workplace, the Asia-Pacific region, and study abroad), and the second section focuses on specific learners (young learners, adult emergent readers, and hearing learners of sign language). These are followed by a section on integrated approaches and includes articles on language-literature instruction, content and language integrated learning, the application of corpus research to language teaching, and multimodal literacy. The final section includes articles on more specific skill areas including teaching non-Roman writing systems, collaborative writing, and pragmatics.

Note that the term second language or L2 is used throughout this volume to refer to the learning of an additional language be it the second, third, or so on. It also refers to learning in second language settings, where the language being learned is spoken in the environment, as well as in foreign language settings, where it is generally not spoken, and every context in between.

As in the past, review articles in ARAL tend to focus on recent research, but because the reviews need to be comprehensible to nonspecialists in each area, the authors often need to refer to older research to define terms and explain concepts or set the context for more current research. Although each of these articles reports on research, each author has tried to keep in view the goal of facilitating language learning through instructional practices.

All of the articles in this volume were invited, but each was reviewed by a member of the board and/or outside reviewer. I am extremely grateful to my colleagues, who responded cheerfully and promptly to my requests for reviews. In particular, I thank Yuko Bulter, David Carless, Nobuko Chikamatsu-Chandler, Andrew Cohen, Senta Goertler, Greg Kessler, Eva Lam, Roy Lyster, Hiram Maxim, Kim McDonough, Yoshiko Mori, Joy Peyton, Randi Reppen, Rusty Rosen, Ann Snow, Janet Swaffar, Julie Sykes, Linda Yates, Martha Young-Scholten, Eve Zyzik, and four anonymous reviewers. All of their reviews improved the final versions of the articles. The editorial directors, too, responded promptly to requests for reviewing and, of course, contributed greatly to this volume with their suggestions of topics and authors.

In addition, I would like to thank, from Cambridge University Press, Morrell Gillette, the production manager, who responds quickly and cheerfully to emails, and Laura Etheredge, our new editor, who took off running in her new position. Finally, I thank my former graduate student, Sally Behrenwald, who kindly agreed to stay on to help edit despite now having a full-time job and despite having had to adapt to the sixth edition of the APA manual after having literally memorized parts of the index to the fifth edition. I could not do this job without any of you all.