While second-language learners are encouraged to focus on communication, they also need to learn grammar. Yet some grammatical forms are problematic for learners regardless of how they are taught, leading to the following question: "Could learners be more strategic in learning the grammar needed for effective communication?" Perhaps too much attention has been focused on the teaching of grammar and not enough on just how learners are to go about learning and performing it. When learner strategy instruction does take place, it often focuses on skills other than grammar learning (e.g., listening, speaking reading, writing, or vocabulary learning). Perhaps this is because neglected grammar cross-cuts these other skills. The problem is that various grammar forms are not just magically acquired, but rather their learning calls for conscious attention.
The presentation reports on the construction of a website to provide learners with strategy ideas for learning and performing challenging grammatical structures more effectively. While focused on the learning and use of Spanish grammar, the website uses English to convey the grammar strategy information, and is intended to serve as a template for the construction of a similar website for learners of any language. The website has video and audio-clip descriptions from learners and nonnative teachers of Spanish about strategies for successfully learning problematic grammar forms, as well as strategies for producing them in an error-free fashion in speaking or writing. The website also includes diagrams, mental maps, charts, visual schemes and drawings used to convey strategy information. The website can be used get ideas about strategies to facilitate the learning of grammar forms in general or for obtaining strategies to enhance the learning of specific grammar forms.
The talk is intended to provide a model as to how others could construct similar websites with strategies for enhancing the learning of grammar in other languages. The principle goal of the website is to complement classroom instruction with supplementary input, aimed at what may be a crucial need for some students, namely, finding ways to deal successfully with the need to be grammatical.

Since 2001 the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: learning, teaching and assessment (CEFR) has been disseminated widely and has been translated into approximately 30 languages. It has now become a common reference instrument for organising language teaching and certification in many member states of the Council of Europe and there is also growing interest in many other parts of the world.
However, immediately after its publication there was criticism of the CEFR with regard to its empirical basis; the validity and psychological reality of the proficiency levels; and the cross-linguistic alignment of proficiency levels. The English Profile, which started in 2005, can be seen as reaction to such comments. Its main goal is to gain a more refined understanding of English proficiency levels which are described in the CEFR in terms of general “can-do” statements. It is a long-term endeavour to develop and refine Reference Level Descriptions for English covering all six levels of the CEFR from A1 to C2, in line with the Council of Europe’s recommendations.
In this paper we propose to give some information regarding the reasons for embarking on this programme and the research topics studied by the researchers within the different strands. In particular we will focus on one strand which uses data from the Cambridge Learner Corpus to look for criterial features in the written language of L2 learners from a wide variety of backgrounds (L1s and countries of origin). This strand involves contributors from Cambridge ESOL, Cambridge University Press, the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics and members of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory.
Since 2005, the project has grown, research has led to first results, and new strands have emerged, resulting in a wider reach and range of interest. Results will be discussed, and future plans will be presented.

Although the ability to use language in social situations is part of all the major models of communicative competence, it is not well represented in language tests. This presentation will review some of the key issues in the area of testing pragmatics and social language use and show how studies done in this area have attempted to deal with them and what gaps still remain.
One central issue in testing social language use is the tension between the contextual boundedness of social language use and the decontextualized nature of the language testing situation. Role plays allow simulated interaction (Hudson et al., 1995; Yamashita, 1996) but suffer from lack of practicality and the situational context still has to be imagined. Also, if the role play is done as part of an oral proficiency interview, the assessment focus tends to be on language code features rather than pragmatic aspects of use. DCTs and multiple choice tests are more practical but establishing situational context is even more difficult than for role plays.
Another important issue is L1 influence. Some pragmatics tests are specifically designed for learners from a certain L1 background, others claim to be universal. Both approaches raise concerns, the former with regard to practicality, the latter in terms of DIF.
Finally, design issues in pragmatic assessment are still not very well understood: what makes items difficult or easy? How can rater agreement be ensured?
The presentation will also give some suggestions for future research in pragmatics assessment.

As a result of thirty years’ efforts, Applied Linguistics has become a well established field of study in Mainland China, with a large number of scholars working in the field, numerous programmes accredited to offer MA and PhD degrees in Applied Linguistics, special academic periodicals, and several national research centres in the filed.
In its narrow sense, Applied Linguistics studies the theory, principles, and methodology of language teaching in general, and the teaching of English in particular, aimed at improving teaching quality and learning effectiveness.
In this paper the authors discuss how the Chinese scholars used the theories and methods available in AP to find solutions to the pending problems in the practice of English language teaching, taking College English Teaching as an example. In the early 80’s a drastic change took place in the methodology, from viewing the teaching of English as imparting a body of English grammar and vocabulary knowledge to developing language communicative ability among the learners. Large scale needs analysis on the basis of questionnaire survey was carried out in the defining of the teaching objectives. Quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted in deciding on the teaching contents, yielding a service word list, inventories of micro-skills, notions and communicative functions, and grammatical structures included in the syllabus as appendixes. In 1985, The National College English Teaching Syllabus was approved and promulgated by the Ministry of Education, which provides a scientific basis for English teaching, materials development, and language testing. Shortly afterwards, the National College English Testing programme was started. As a form of psychometric exercise the CET test meets all the professional requirements of large-scale standardized testing and has soon won public accreditation and has produced profound social impact. Efforts in word frequency study evolved into a well-established field of study as corpus linguistics. Research projects range from the study of EAP, Chinese Learner Corpora, Chinese Learner Spoken English Corpora, the study of prefabricated chunks, semantic prosody, collocation, etc. Corpus linguistics has become a bustling field of Applied Linguistics in China, shedding lights on the nature of English language learning. The past thirty years witnessed a tremendous progress of English language teaching and the college students’ English communicative ability in Mainland China. College English teaching is a piece of virgin land for Applied Linguistic study and practice.
Despite the progress that has been made, there are still a lot for the Applied Linguists to continue their enquiry, including an in-depth understanding of the nature of Chinese Learner inter-language, the establishment of a unified framework of English proficiency level, the national standards for standardized testing, principles for the development and use of multi-media materials in English language teaching and learning, to list but a few. However, it is a common understanding that Applied Linguistics plays an important role in English language teaching.

Individualization and the Challenge of The Long Tail in Language Education

With the communicative turn in language pedagogy in recent decades and its increasing focus upon the learner, there have been mounting calls for language teachers to individualize instruction. While injunctions from second language researchers to individualize instruction are common, viable proposals for how to accomplish this individualization in real pedagogical practice are rare. In this talk, I frame the issue of individualization by borrowing Chris Anderson’s notion of The Long Tail (Anderson 2006) and applying it to two sorts of language learning ecology. The first ecology I consider is the noisy digital environment of the Web and the practices that it has spawned. The fact that all access to Web content is mediated by browser technologies has created an opportunity to exploit this access point as a means to achieve what I call incidental individualization, which piggybacks on users’ unrestricted browsing. I describe digital tools that my collaborators and I have created in order to achieve this. The second ecology I consider is institutional, specifically the university setting in Taiwan. The recent increase in pressure on universities to raise students’ English language proficiency has arguably created disequilibrium in these learning ecologies in their push to find ways to meet this demand. The pressures to create results on a school-wide scale carry the potential for discouraging or extinguishing individualization of language learning experiences. I describe an approach under which these can instead have the opposite effect and lead to an unprecedented variety of language learning experiences tailored to individual students.