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The Douglas Fir Group proposes a transdisciplinary framework for second language acquisition (SLA), offering four objectives to this proposal: (a) to advance fundamental understandings of language learning and teaching, including understandings of linguistic development in an additional language, taking into account forces beyond individual learners, (b) to promote the development of innovative research agendas for SLA in the 21st century, (c) to serve as a platform for the development of practical, innovative, and sustainable solutions that are responsive to the challenges of language teaching and learning in our increasingly networked, technologized, and mobile worlds, and (d) to improve communication with a wider range of audiences, especially any and all stakeholders that SLA investigates or whom it hopes to benefit, so they can use SLA work to improve their material and social conditions.

How workers experience and express status loss in organizations has received little scholarly attention. I conducted a qualitative study of a French high-tech company that had instituted English as a lingua franca, or common language, as a context for examining this question. Results indicate that nonnative English-speaking employees experienced status loss regardless of their English fluency level. Yet variability in their self-assessed fluency—an achieved status marker—was associated with differences in language performance anxiety and job insecurity in a nonlinear fashion: those who believed they had medium-level fluency were the most anxious compared with their low- and high-fluency coworkers. In almost all cases where fluency ratings differed, self-assessed rather than objective fluency determined how speakers explained their feelings and actions. Although nonnative speakers shared a common attitude of resentment and distrust toward their native English-speaking coworkers, their behavioral responses—assertion, inhibition, or learning—to encounters with native speakers differed based on their self-perceived fluencies. No status differences materialized among nonnative speakers as a function of diverse linguistic and national backgrounds. I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for status, achieved characteristics, and language in organizations.

Through its mobility of people and capital, its global technologies, and its global information networks, globalization has changed the conditions under which foreign languages (FLs) are taught, learned, and used. It has destabilized the codes, norms, and conventions that FL educators relied upon to help learners be successful users of the language once they had left their classrooms. These changes call for a more reflective, interpretive, historically grounded, and politically engaged pedagogy than was called for by the communicative language teaching of the eighties. This special issue will explore how we are to conceive of such a pedagogy.

Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

A series of discoveries in the past two decades has changed the way we think about bilingualism and its implications for language and cognition. One is that both of the bilingual's languages are always active. The parallel activation of the two languages is thought to give rise to competition that imposes demands on the bilingual to control the language not in use to achieve fluency in the target language. The second is that there are consequences of bilingualism that affect the native as well as the second language: The native language changes in response to second-language use. The third is that the consequences of bilingualism are not limited to language but appear to reflect a reorganization of brain networks that hold implications for the ways in which bilinguals negotiate cognitive competition more generally. The focus of recent research on bilingualism has been to understand the relations among these discoveries and their implications for language, cognition, and the brain across the life span.

This article offers a capacious view of technology to suggest broad principles relating technology and language use, language teaching, and language learning. The first part of the article considers some of the ways that technological media influence contexts and forms of expression and communication. In the second part, a set of heuristic questions is proposed to help guide language teachers and researchers in determining how to incorporate technology into their teaching practice or research agenda and evaluate its suitability and impact. These questions are based primarily on the goal of helping learners to pay critical attention to the culturally encoded connections among forms, contexts, meanings, and ideologies that they will encounter and produce in different mediums, both traditional and new.

This study systematically investigates how language barriers influence trust formation in multinational teams (MNTs). On the basis of 90 interviews with team members, team leaders and senior managers in 15 MNTs in 3 German automotive corporations, the authors show how MNT members' cognitive and emotional reactions to language barriers influence their perceived trustworthiness and intention to trust, which in turn affect trust formation. The authors contribute to diversity research by distinguishing the exclusively negative language effects from the more ambivalent effects of other diversity dimensions. Their findings also illustrate how surface-level language diversity may create perceptions of deep-level diversity. Furthermore, their study advances MNT research by revealing the specific influences of language barriers on team trust, an important mediator between team inputs and performance outcomes. It thereby encourages the examination of other team processes through a language lens. Finally, their study suggests that multilingual settings necessitate a reexamination and modification of the seminal trust theories by Mayer, Davis and Schoorman, and by McAllister. In terms of practical implications, the authors outline how MNT leaders can manage their subordinates' problematic reactions to language barriers, and how MNT members can enhance their perceived trustworthiness in multilingual settings.

Adults are notoriously poor second-language (L2) learners. A context that enables successful L2 acquisition is language immersion. In this study, we investigated the effects of immersion learning for a group of university students studying abroad in Spain. Our interest was in the effect ofimmersion on the native language (LI), English. We tested the hypothesis that immersion benefits L2 learning as a result of attenuated influence of the L1. Participants were Englishspeaking learners of Spanish who were either immersed in Spanish while living in Spain or exposed to Spanish in the classroom only. Performance on both comprehension and production tasks showed that immersed learners outperformed their classroom counterparts with respect to L2 proficiency. However, the results also revealed that immersed learners had reduced LI access. The pattern of data is most consistent with the interpretation that the LI was inhibited while the learners were immersed.

This study examined willingness to communicate (WTC) in English among Iranian EFL learners in the classroom context. For this purpose, a second language willingness to communicate (L2WTC) model based on WTC theory (MacIntyre, Clément, Dörnyei, & Noels, 1998) and empirical studies was proposed and tested using structural equation modeling (SEM). This model examined the interrelationships among WTC in English, communication confidence, motivation, classroom environment, attitudes toward learning English, and English language achievement. A total of 243 English-major university students in Iran completed a questionnaire. The proposed SEM model adequately fitted the data. Results of the SEM indicated that classroom environment was the strongest direct predictor of L2WTC; communication confidence directly affected WTC; motivation indirectly affected WTC through communication confidence; English language proficiency indirectly affected WTC through communication confidence; and the classroom environment directly affected attitudes, motivation, and communication confidence.

The article reports on research that questions commonsense understandings of a bilingual pedagogy predicated on what Cummins (2005, 2008) refers to as the \"two solitudes\" assumption (2008, p. 65). It sets out to describe a flexible bilingual approach to language teaching and learning in Chinese and Gujarati community language schools in the United Kingdom. The authors argue for a release from monolingual instructional approaches and advocate teaching bilingual children by means of bilingual instructional strategies, in which two or more languages are used alongside each other. In developing this argument, the article takes a language ecology perspective and seeks to describe the interdependence of skills and knowledge across languages. (Verlag, adapt.).