The study investigates the relationship between English Philology students’ motivation for studying Business English and their actual knowledge of business terminology, some underlying economic concepts and basic rules of business correspondence. It is hypothesized that students who have higher motivation also possess more extensive knowledge of Business English, yet motivation alone is not enough but must be accompanied by a real effort put in studying the language. The study consisted of a test focusing on business terminology, the correction of errors in a business letter, and a test of selected economic concepts, followed by a questionnaire. As the results show, both the students’ motivation and knowledge of Business English are varied. In particular, their knowledge varies between years of studies and areas of terminology or skills. In fact, some of the terms proved difficult even for relatively advanced students. Thus, even though motivation does play a role, its role does not seem to be decisive, as Business English is a complex field whose mastery requires extensive study and a lot of sustained effort. However, their awareness of their language needs is quite high, so they are likely to remain motivated and to attain a high level of competence in Business English.

This paper reports on two ways in which success and failure can be operationalized and quantified in a non-institutional L2 learning context such as language tandem setting. We draw on the SITAF database, where we gathered 25 hours of video-recorded conversations held by 21 pairs, each consisting of a native speaker of English and a native speaker of French. The tandems performed collaborative tasks in both languages, thus giving each participant ample opportunity to be both the ‘expert’ and the ‘novice’ (learner) part of the dialogue. The tandem partners met regularly and autonomously outside of the recording sessions, and making progress in their L2 was one of their declared goals. Two possible measures of success in achieving this goal are: (1) the quality and quantity of learner uptake which followed the expert’s corrective feedback (CF) during the recorded conversations. Significant differences between the two L1 groups were observed: while 52% of the CF given by the native French speakers met with total uptake, over 52% of the English CF generated no uptake at all; (2) the participants’ own narratives of progress, as both the experts and the learners, obtained through questionnaires they filled out at the end of the program. Our study aims to contribute to the discussion on the stakes of successful L2 informal learning (with a focus on the acquisition of L2 pronunciation) by adopting a perspective which combines learners’ spoken output data and learners’ perceptions of their own language learning activity.

This is a book review of Zoltán Dörnyei and Katerina Mentzelopoulos. Lessons From Exceptional Language Learners Who Have Achieved Nativelike Proficiency: Motivation, Cognition and Identity. Multilingual Matters. 2022.

The qualitative study presented in this paper aimed to collect beliefs about learning and teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) from individual representatives of the generation frequently referred to as the millennials. The participants were 47 pre-service EFL trainee teachers from four socio-cultural contexts: Finnish, Israeli, Polish, and Spanish. Their voices have been considered because beliefs are dynamically related to actions and soon the millennial EFL teachers may implement them in the course of their teaching. The contextual approach, followed in this research, provided opportunities for discussing similarities and differences in the beliefs of Finnish, Israeli, Polish, and Spanish pre-service teachers. The identified similarities lead to outlining a tentative picture of a universal, future, post-pandemic EFL classroom.

Generative note taking, being one of the strategies applied to manage difficult texts, requires not only comprehension and selection of information but also production. The current study focuses on note taking formats for a text read with the intention to summarise. Its focal aim is to improve both practical and theoretical understanding of this activity. It involves 103 second year English Department students, investigating how readers of FL engage with complex texts, how they were instructed in note taking and what note taking strategies they employ for comprehending academic texts.
 The analysis of the collected data attempts to indentify how readers’(n=103) translanguaging and transmedia (n=103) note taking formats help increase their engagement in and access to difficult texts in L2. It shows that the subjects have not transitioned from the paper interface to the digital one, since they still display the screen inferiority effect in their reading habits. The collected data shows that only some subjects (n=42/103) received some form of instruction in paper note taking techniques or digital applications facilitating note taking. The students were not able to enumerate more than 4 note taking applications which would be conducive to their formation of a coherent interpretation of the digital text they read.
 The author contends that overt note taking instruction in both paper and digital mode will create avenues for encouraging, interacting and engaging in reading. Instruction in that field needs to be modified with regard to digital note taking/annotating tools to make use of the note taking formats available for processing digitally interfaced texts.

The growing number of EMI courses offered across Europe is increasing the opportunities for student exchanges. This study follows the progress of three students from Universitat de Lleida after their Erasmus experience at three different European universities, two in Milano and one in Macerata. The students took a monological English oral test before and after their stay abroad, and fluency and accuracy measures have been calculated from it. The students were also interviewed and participated in FG discussions. The measures from the two students who went to Milano show an improvement in their English level, whereas the student who went to Macerata performs even worse on his return. However, the experience from the two students in Milano was substantially different from the one who went to Macerata. Using the ethnographic information and the qualitative data available, we bring forward arguments that can help to account for these different outcomes.

Gender is a key factor in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), where its impact on language learning strategies (Aslan, 2009; Oxford & Nyikos, 1989; Sumarni & Rachmawaty, 2019) and productive vocabulary (Canga Alonso & Arribas García, 2014; Fleckenstein, 2018; Jiménez Catalán & Moreno Espinosa, 2004) has been investigated. However, to our knowledge, there is a lack of research of gender on language learning strategies in relation to productive vocabulary in English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The present study aimed to pursue three objectives. The first one was to ascertain whether males or females employed more language learning strategies. The second objective was to determine whether males or females had more productive vocabulary. Finally, the third objective was to investigate whether there was a statistically significant relationship between language learning strategies and productive vocabulary. The sample consisted of 51 EFL learners (20 males and 31 females) at the second year of Spanish non-compulsory Secondary Education (equivalent to 12th grade). The Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) questionnaire (Oxford, 1990) and the Productive Vocabulary Levels Test (PVLT) (Laufer & Nation, 1995, 1999) were the instruments employed in order to measure informants’ language learning strategies and productive vocabulary respectively. Afterwards, students’ answers were processed electronically and analyzed quantitatively. Results revealed that females use language learning strategies significantly more than males, but there were not statistically significant differences between them regarding productive vocabulary. Moreover, a positive correlation was found between language learning strategies and productive vocabulary.

Language teacher educators train pre-service teachers in numerous theories and pedagogical practices of language learning and language teaching. They expect that their student teachers will translate this conceptual and practical knowledge into action during their practicum. However, in the process of determining pre-service teachers’ readiness for the field experience and the profession in general, methods classes measure only their conceptual knowledge and omit looking at their student teachers’ belief system about language teaching and learning. This belief system is a strong indicator of how the students organize their knowledge for application (Borg, 2003) and may help teacher educators gauge students’ read ness in the use of new pedagogies that these pre-service teachers may not have experienced before. Using two reflective essays and a piece of authentic assessment as instruments to gather data, as well as Jürgen Habermas’s theory on cognitive interests as a framework to explore the espoused beliefs of nine pre-service language teachers at the end of a methodscourse, this qualitative study addressed the following questions: What levels of cognitive interests do the nine pre-service world language and ESL teachers exhibit prior to student teaching? To what extent do the students’ levels of cognitive interests change during the methods course called Teaching a Second Language? What are the most common cognitive interests regarding such areas of teaching performance, such as methodology and assessment among the participants? The results show that the nine pre-service teachers held mostly technicaland some practical cognitive interests at the beginning of the semester. In the end, most of the participants held practical interests, and three out of the nine pre-service teachers held elementary emancipatory beliefs. One pedagogical recommendation is to include experiences in the training of pre-service teachers that promote emancipatory beliefs that could support teachers in their pursuit of transforming challenging social conditions while examining and adopting new pedagogies.

This journal came out for the first time in 2015.It was founded on our belief that although Poland has a strong presence among second language acquisition and multilinguality researchers, which is demonstrated by the large number of conferences and also book publications appearing every year, academic journals like this one, concerned with both theoretical issues and the practical concerns of SLA, are not that numerous.The initial success of the journal is demonstrated by the fact that despite its short life, it is already indexed in several databases and made its first appearance in Scopus in 2018.Thanks to this, it is also recognized by the Polish Ministry of Higher Education as a scholarly journal in linguistics.It is of importance that the Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition journal is published by the prestigious Polish academic publisher, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu lskiego (University of Silesia Press).We can also ascribe the origins of our journal to the success of the International Conference on Second/Foreign Language Acquisition (ICFSLA), an academic event that has been organized for over thirty years by the Institute of English at the University of Silesia in Katowice (the Institute of Linguistics since 2020).ICFSLA regularly brings together many Polish and foreign academics every May.Its focus is on new trends in SLA research, but it also prides itself on promoting fairly under-researched and new issues in SLA.Although the conference always has a leading theme, scholars are also invited to present their research even if it falls outside the scope of the main topic.Our journal has become an accepted channel for the publication of selected conference papers of a high academic standard.At the same time, we warmly welcome other contributions, those not connected with the conference itself.In fact, in recent issues most publications were submitted by authors who did not participate in the conference, mainly because in 2020 it had to be cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.In addition to theoretical and research-related papers, we also accept for inclusion in each volume reviews of academic books recently