[EDLING:1595] TESOL Quarterly Special Topic Issue September 2008 - Psycholinguistics

[Tamara Warhol]

Call for Abstracts
TESOL Quarterly Special Topic Issue September 2008
Psycholinguistics in TESOL
Edited by John Field

TESOL Quarterly seeks abstracts for its 2008 special topic issue on the 
relevance of psycholinguistic theory to English language teaching. This 
special issue will focus specifically on cognitive concerns. It will 
enable researchers to present new studies of second language (L2) skills 
development and use that draw on psycholinguistic principles.

Articles might compare first and second language processing, with a 
focus on the cognitive challenges that language learners are likely to 
encounter when acquiring vocabulary, grammar, or one of the four skills. 
Articles might also examine major concepts from cognitive psychology, 
such as attention, automaticity, and working memory, and consider their 
impact on L2-classroom or real-world performance. Also of interest will 
be articles that explore the implications for TESOL pedagogy of recent 
psycholinguistic theories of instance-based learning and formulaic 
storage or that apply current models of lexical storage or processing. 
Articles selected for the issue should make psycholinguistic theory and 
terminology clear to readers outside the field and support 
psycholinguistic concepts with concrete evidence drawn from L2 learners’ 
behaviour. Articles should also spell out the implications for practice, 
with a special emphasis on critically evaluating current methods and 
presuppositions. Authors may wish to make clear that psycholinguistic 
inquiry seeks to represent general processes that reflect how the human 
brain operates, but that these representations allow for differences in 
individual learning styles, communication strategies, and contextual 
constraints.

Abstracts should describe previously unpublished work with implications 
for a variety of TESOL professionals. In addition to full-length 
articles, the issue will include shorter articles about ongoing studies 
in Brief Reports and Summaries and about current issues of debate in the 
Forum. Please send a 600-word abstract for a full-length article, and a 
300-word abstract for a Brief Reports or Forum contribution.

Please submit one copy of the abstract without author name(s) and a 
second copy with each author’s name, affiliation, mailing address, 
e-mail address, telephone and fax numbers, and a 50-word biographical 
statement to John Field. Abstracts may also be mailed: Send three copies 
of the abstract with author details on a separate sheet to John Field, 
Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Reading, Whiteknights, 
Reading RG6 6AA, UK.

Deadline for abstracts: December 31, 2006