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The series Trends in Applied Linguistics meets the challenges of the rapidly growing field of applied linguistics. In a very broad sense, applied linguistics is understoodby focusing on the application of theoretical linguistics to current problems arising in different contexts of human society. Given the interdisciplinary character of applied linguistics, the series includes cognitive, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and educational perspectives. The following topicsare included in the series: Second language acquisition and the acquisition of additional languages Bilingual and multilingual education Language planning and language policy Literacy skills Second/foreign language pedagogy Translation and interpretation Language for specific purposes Discourse analysis Language testing and assessment Child language Language and gender Pragmatics and rhetorics Corpus analysis Critical pedagogies Research methodology in applied linguistics Language and technology.

The ability to understand others' mental states carries profound consequences for mental and physical health, making efforts at validly and reliably assessing mental state understanding (MSU) of utmost importance. However, the most widely used and current NIMH-recommended task for assessing MSU - the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (RMET) - suffers from potential assessment issues, including reliance on a participant's vocabulary/intelligence and the use of culturally biased stimuli. Here, we evaluate the impact of demographic and sociocultural factors (age, gender, education, ethnicity, race) on the RMET and other social and non-social cognitive tasks in an effort to determine the extent to which the RMET may be unduly influenced by participant characteristics. In total, 40 248 international, native-/primarily English-speaking participants between the ages of 10 and 70 completed one of five measures on TestMyBrain.org: RMET, a shortened version of RMET, a multiracial emotion identification task, an emotion discrimination task, and a non-social/non-verbal processing speed task (digit symbol matching). Contrary to other tasks, performance on the RMET increased across the lifespan. Education, race, and ethnicity explained more variance in RMET performance than the other tasks, and differences between levels of education, race, and ethnicity were more pronounced for the RMET than the other tasks such that more highly educated, non-Hispanic, and White/Caucasian individuals performed best. These data suggest that the RMET may be unduly influenced by social class and culture, posing a serious challenge to assessing MSU in clinical populations given shared variance between social status and psychiatric illness.

Applications of locative media (e.g., place-based mobile augmented reality [AR]) are used in various educational content areas and have been shown to provide learners with valuable opportunities for investigation-based learning, location-situated social and collaborative interaction, and embodied experience of place (Squire, 2009; Thorne & Hellermann, 2017; Zheng et al., 2018). Mobile locative media applications' value for language learning, however, remains underinvestigated. To address this lacuna, this study employed the widely used construct of language-related episodes (LREs; Swain & Lapkin, 1998) as a unit of analysis to investigate language learning through participation in a mobile AR game. Analysis of video-recorded interactions of four mixed-proficiency groups of game players (two English language learners [ELLs] and one expert speaker of English [ESE] per group) indicates that LREs in this environment were focused on lexical items relevant to the AR tasks and physical locations. Informed by sociocultural theory and conversation analysis, the microgenesis of learners' understanding and subsequent use of certain lexical items are indicated in the findings. This understanding of new lexical items was frequently facilitated by ESEs' assistance and the surrounding physical environment. A strong goal orientation by both ESEs and ELLs was visible, providing implications for task-based language teaching approaches.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the effectiveness of transformational leadership behaviors are moderated by a country’s cultural values and cultural practices. Design/methodology/approach The authors describe a meta-analytic review of the relationship between transformational leadership and employee performance (task performance and OCBs) using data from over 57,000 individuals, 215 samples and 34 countries. The authors examine whether this relationship is moderated by the cultural values and practices of the country in which the study was located – after first controlling for methodological factors. Findings The authors find that cultural values and practices moderate the transformational leadership – employee performance relationship such that the relationship is much stronger in countries whose culture is incongruent with transformational leadership. Research limitations/implications Data were only available for 34 countries and it is unclear what role industry type and job type play in determining transformational leadership effectiveness or if these situational variables are confounded with culture. The findings call into question the generalizability of transformational leadership across countries and cultures. Practical implications The findings suggest that the value of transformational leadership behaviors may be limited in developed economies such as Western Europe and North America, while transformational leadership is most effective in Africa, the Middle East, South America and parts of Southeast Asia. Originality/value This is the first paper to examine the generalizability of transformational leadership across 34 countries and is by far the largest review ever conducted into the relationship between transformational leadership and subordinate performance.

This study explored the impact of feedback-supported tasks and peer-work activities on language learners’ engagement, self-esteem, and language growth in a university setting in Saudi Arabia. Employing a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, 45 participants in the experimental group and 43 in the control group underwent 15 sessions of treatment, while traditional instruction was provided to the control group. Pre- and posttests and semi-structured interviews were employed for data collection. Results indicated a significant increase in engagement and self-esteem among experimental participants compared to the control group. Language growth, assessed through a teacher-made test, also demonstrated a significant improvement in the experimental group. The findings align with Vygotsky’s Socio-Cultural Theory and Long’s Interaction Hypothesis, emphasizing the pivotal role of collaboration in language learning. However, limitations include the specific context and the absence of a delayed posttest. Implications for educators, syllabus designers, curriculum developers, and policymakers underscore the importance of integrating collaborative and feedback-oriented strategies into language instruction for enhanced learning outcomes. This research contributes valuable insights for shaping effective language education practices, while suggestions for future research encourage a more comprehensive exploration of long-term effects and contextual variations.

This study was an attempt to investigate Iranian EFL learners’ private speech across proficiency levels and gender while doing reading comprehension tasks. Moreover, it was an attempt to examine the different forms of private speech produced by Iranian English learners. Six forms of private speech were coded and analyzed: affective markers, sub-vocalization, switch from L2 to L1, repetition, unfinished sentences, and self-directed questions. It was a descriptive correlational research. The participants of this study were ninety female and male EFL learners at three levels of foreign language proficiency from two schools in Lahijan, Iran. They were selected from 110 students by administering an Oxford Quick Placement Test. Next, reading comprehension tests were administered to the participants. In order to gather data, each participant was equipped with a MP3 voice recorder to keep track of very low private speech markers while performing reading tasks. Pearson Chi-Square test was utilized to determine the probable relationship between the six forms of private speech and learners’ proficiency levels and gender. The results revealed that there was statistically significant relationship between the forms of private speech produced by Iranian EFL learners and their foreign language proficiency. However, the outcomes did not yield a significant correlation regarding gender and the forms of private speech. It can be concluded that private speech is responsible for both regulating mental ability in complex tasks and facilitating internalization of mental ability. In second /foreign language learning, externalized private speech functions not just as a self-regulatory mechanism aiding problem-solving but as a tool in learning and internalizing the L2.

Three- to 5-year-old (N = 61) religiously schooled preschoolers received theory-of-mind (ToM) tasks about the mental states of ordinary humans and agents with exceptional perceptual or mental capacities. Consistent with an anthropomorphism hypothesis, children beginning to appreciate limitations of human minds (e.g., ignorance) attributed those limits to God. Only 5-year-olds differentiated between humans' fallible minds and God's less fallible mind. Unlike secularly schooled children, religiously schooled 4-year-olds did appreciate another agent's less fallible mental abilities when instructed and reminded about those abilities. Among children who understood ordinary humans' mental fallibilities, knowledge of God predicted attributions of correct epistemic states to extraordinary agents. Results suggest that, at a certain point in ToM development, sociocultural input can facilitate an appreciation for extraordinary minds.

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) has strong links to practical activities in the real world, and TBLT theory and research contributes to pedagogical practice. The relationship between theory and practice is primarily one way, according to Bygate (2016), who argues that TBLT theory is tested in practice more often than practice is shaped by TBLT theory. It is a different matter, however, if one focuses on TBLT research conducted in sociocultural theory, which addresses the relationship between theory and practice through praxis, the idea that theory guides practice and practice shapes theory. In this article, Feryok focuses on how sociocultural theory, contributes to TBLT through praxis.

Prior studies have reported inconsistent findings with regard to the effects of small-group student talk on developing individual students’ English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) writing ability. To further explore the question under discussion, we designed a quasi-experimental study that included a pretest, a posttest, and a delayed posttest, and implemented it in two English-major groups at a university in China. We randomly assigned the students to an intervention group and a comparison group to investigate whether employing structured small-group student talk as collaborative prewriting discussions would effectively facilitate individual students’ EFL writing development and whether such effects could be retained. The immediate and sustained effects after the quasi-experimental study was completed were measured by the analytic scores on five components of the writing task (content, organization, vocabulary, language, and mechanics) and the holistic writing scores cumulated of all these components. Statistical analyses revealed that the two groups were significantly distinguished by their analytic and holistic scores, indicating that students in the intervention group outperformed their comparison group peers in writing performance. The effects of collaborative prewriting discussions in the form of structured small-group student talk were found statistically significant in facilitating students’ writing improvement in the content, organization, vocabulary, and language use, but not mechanics. The effects on content, organization, and vocabulary were retained as seen from the delayed posttest, while those on language use were not. The comparison group showed little improvement in their writing performance across the three tests. We concluded this study with a discussion on the implications for English-as-a-second/foreign-language (L2) writing instruction.

A considerable body of research within the interaction framework (Long, 1996) has centred on the language-related episodes (LREs) which occur when learners topicalize a specific linguistic item while they are engaged in meaning-focused tasks. Several studies have shown that the production of LREs may be influenced by the proficiency level of the learners (Kim McDonough, 2008; Leeser, 2004). Sociocultural theory (Lantolf Appel, 1994) has also explored collaborative work and the effect that pairing learners with the same proficiency levels or different patterns of interaction (Storch, 2002) has on the production of LREs (e.g., Mozaffari, 2017; Storch Aldosari 2013), but little research has compared the effect of the pair formation method (student-selected vs. proficiency-matched) on young learners’ production of LREs and pair dynamics. This study compares young CLIL learners (aged 10-12) in student-selected and proficiency-matched pairs in task-based interaction. Results indicate that learners produce more meaning-based than form-based LREs, regardless of their pair formation method. The percentage of meaning-based LREs which are resolved accurately is much higher in proficiency-matched dyads than in student-selected ones. As for the patterns of interaction (Storch, 2002), the dynamics of proficiency-matched dyads are of a more collaborative nature than those of self-selected pairs.