Now in its second edition, this handbook is a current overview of second language (L2) research, providing state-of-the-art synopses of recent developments in each subarea of the field and bringing together contributions by emerging scholars and experts in second language acquisition (SLA). Since the first edition, broad sociopolitical movements, alternative views of bilingualism, emergence of global markets, vast expansion of electronic resources, the development of social media and the availability of big data have transformed the discipline, and this edition has been thoroughly updated to address these changes. It is divided into six main parts: Part I situates SLA in terms of research and practice; Part II explores individual cognitive, age-related and neurolinguistic similarities and differences; Part III outlines external, sociocultural and interactive factors; Part IV presents profiles of bilinguals who take differing paths of acquisition; Part V describes interlanguage properties; and Part VI comprises clear models of L2 development.

Only the very best proposals even have a chance of success, and many that meet all of the scientific criteria for funding are not funded, simply because of a lack of money. Therefore, it is important to know how to write a grant proposal to maximize your chances of getting funded. In this chapter, we describe some basics of proposals, some keys to writing good proposals, and some things that agencies look for in making funding decisions.

The chapter provides an introduction to the sociocultural analysis of second language (L2) acquisition as a process of socialization by and through the learning of an additional language. It offers a discussion of socio-cultural institutions and communities involved in L2 learning as well as a description of the development of language repertoire in additional language learning as a social accomplishment. The chapter opens on a summary of the controversy that arose in the early 2000s between the cognitive and the socially-oriented Second Language Acquisition (SLA) paradigms. Bypassing this divisive debate, the chapter focusses on the diversity of approaches to additional language learning within the sociocultural paradigm. Key concepts of sociocultural SLA research such as social integration, agency, identity and power relations as well as affordance and language repertoire are defined. A framework of analysis for the learner’s language repertoire is presented. Finally, the chapter recalls issues in the study of naturalistic SLA as a privileged area of research in light of the sociocultural paradigm. Longitudinal data from one migrant worker are analysed to illustrate the social and linguistic development of his language repertoire. In conclusion, the chapter charts some pending issues for the sociocultural analysis of L2 socialization.

This chapter investigates the ways in which Percy and Mary Shelley engaged with the idea of witchcraft. In The Witch of Atlas Percy Shelley playfully poses the question: what if God (or Christ) was a witch with a sense of humor? Like her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other Romantic-era women, Mary Shelley was suspicious of representations of female magic. All her novels chronicle how women who have or pretend to possess power, supernatural or otherwise, are inevitably sidelined or written out of the narrative by the men they love and the collusion of the social and historical contexts in which they find themselves. The chapter concludes with an extended analysis of her novel, Valperga, arguing that the introduction of the figure of the witch enables Shelley to finish the novel that she struggled with and to find a way to avenge the wrongs done to the other two female characters.

Between World War II and independence, roughly 1945 to 1960, anticolonial activists successfully elucidated a link between the spread of Europhone education and freedom from colonial rule. This chapter frames African decolonization as also a Black Atlantic emancipation to reveal why educational aspirations were so central to mid twentieth-century anticolonial imaginings.

This chapter further explores the necessary structural and conceptual contours for the development of a normative framework of rules addressing both (i) taking and (ii) presentation of evidence. In doing so, emphasis is placed on the absence of a universally recognized framework purporting to constitute a uniform set of international rules of evidence. Moreover, the hybrid nature of ICA, straddling the space between a private adjudicative dispute resolution system and one that necessarily must operate within a framework of a national arbitral law (lex arbitri), as well as a treaty-based enforcement regime that hardly is immune from idiosyncratic public policies of signatory States, is identified as a source of indeterminacy that clouds the necessary risk assessment conducive to settlement. In this same vein, evidentiary rules themselves are identified as partaking in a duality that also leads to indeterminacy.