This volume offers a selection of papers presented at the 14th International Conference on English and American Literature and Language hosted by the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, from 20 to 22 April 2017. Since its launch in 1978, the conference has continued to attract scholars from all over the world working in various fields of English and American Studies. The 14th edition of the conference brought together 160 presenters from nine countries, who participated in general and thematic sessions. Without their involvement this meeting would not have been such a successful academic event.

Volume 2 of the Conference Proceedings features contributions related to linguistics. The 13 chapters that follow vary in their research topics and methodologies. They have, however, been broadly divided into two sections. Part 1 (chapters 1–8) includes analyses of diverse linguistic phenomena identified in naturally occurring data whereas Part 2 (chapters 9–13) focuses on applied linguistics and as such, it is especially relevant to teachers and other educators. The text types explored in Part 1 of the volume range from online charity materials and Facebook posts through political texts and obituaries to tourism advertisements and nail polish labels. The phenomena investigated, in turn, encompass multimodal persuasion, loanwords, military terms, constructional idioms and the English modal can, to name but some of them. Part 2 takes a closer look at the role of critical cultural awareness and the development of summarization strategies in the EFL context as well as examines the usefulness of new vocabulary learning tools like Memrise. It also introduces readers to the challenges facing PhD candidates outside academia and raises awareness of the benefits of Active Learning in tertiary education.

The contributions presented in this volume have been selected for publication after a double blind peer review. Naturally, their publication would not have been possible had it not been for the authors and the reviewers. We would therefore like to thank all the contributors for submitting their work and sharing their research findings as well as express our gratitude to the reviewers for devoting their time and offering insightful comments. We hope that the volume will be an intellectually stimulating read and that it will inspire PhD students, researchers and educators.