About the Journal
The mission of Applied Language Learning is to promote professional communication within the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center and academic communities on adult language learning for functional purposes. The Editor encourages the submission of pedagogy-related research and review manuscripts from areas such as: (1) instructional methods and techniques; (2) curriculum and materials development; (3) testing and evaluation; (4) implications and applications of research from related fields in linguistics, education, communication, psychology, and social sciences; and (5) assessment of needs within the profession.
To see issues of Applied Language Learning published prior to 2025, please visit https://www.dliflc.edu/resources/publications/applied-language-learning/.
Current Issue
This issue addresses key questions facing language teachers today. Placement into higher education world language courses is notoriously challenging, leading to Swanson and LeLoup’s article exploring the usefulness of the Seal of Biliteracy for language programs. This Seal is awarded by a state department of education or local district to recognize students who have attained proficiency in English and in one or more other world languages; concerns with standardization across states and districts prompted this practical, quantitative study.
Matouq and Alqabba provide a user-friendly guide with examples into the often hidden world of corpus linguistics, outlining the steps to preparing and using your own corpus to study language. This article is useful for researchers and teachers alike and rings particularly salient with the rise of data-driven instruction.
The potential and identity of heritage speakers in the language classroom is an area of growing interest, as education systems continue to diversity. Richey and LeLoup seek to utilize the strengths of heritage speaking university students at their institution by having them work with their non-native speaker peers on their target language pronunciation. This quasi-experimental research has implications for teachers of all languages in that they could potentially be able to leverage heritage- and native-speaker students as resources in the classroom while providing them with instructional leadership opportunities without a sacrifice in instructional quality.
Two book reviews close this issue, the first being Wang’s Review of Developing Writing Competence in L2 Chinese Classrooms: Research and Application, edited by Li Yang and Laura Valentín-Rivera and published by Multilingual Matters (2023). Given that studies about how learners develop writing skills in Chinese are still in an emerging stage, readers will appreciate the book’s “cutting-edge empirical research and insightful teaching methods and strategies” (per the book cover). Interactional competence continues to be a priority in language teaching and learning, yet it remains challenging to assess. Kim et al.'s Review of Assessing Interactional Competence: Principles, Test Development and Validation through an L2 Chinese IC Test addresses this concern. Authored by Dai (2024) and published by Peter Lang, this book includes findings that challenge traditional assessment paradigms.
We hope readers will enjoy this issue, focusing on key challenges and opportunities facing language teachers today and into the future. The full issue is available here or access each article below.
