This seminar was hosted by York St John University, UK, from 24–26 June 2015, and the co-ordinators were Chris Hall and Rachel Wicaksono (aided by Indu Meddegama, Clare Cunningham, Vicky Crawley, Ruth Ataçocuğu and Christian Sims). The seminar aimed to share diverse understandings of the ontological status of ‘English’ and to stimulate debate regarding the ways in which the language can be most effectively conceptualised for first language and second language learning, teaching and assessment. The seminar was organised around five sessions representing different frameworks. Following each session, an invited discussant highlighted major themes and led a general discussion. Individual papers are reported on below and the conclusion suggests their implications for applied linguistics.

The Editor and Board of Language Teaching are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2015 Christopher Brumfit thesis award is Dr Armin Berger. The thesis was selected by an external panel of judges based on its significance to the field of second language acquisition, second or foreign language learning and teaching, originality and creativity, and quality of presentation.

How death should be measured was a subject of intense debate during the late 1960s, and one in which transplant surgeons had a particular interest. Legislation required a doctor to first pronounce ‘extinct’ the patients from whom ‘spare parts’ were sought for grafting. But transplant surgeons increasingly argued the moment of death was less important than was the moment of establishing that a patient was beyond the point of no return in dying, at which time she or he should be passed to the transplant team. This raised concerns that people identified as being a potential source of organs might not be adequately cared for in their own right. In 1968 the World Medical Association issued an international statement on death at its meeting in Sydney, Australia following a debate between delegates about how and by whom death should be assessed prior to organ removal. Soon afterwards Australian surgeons performed two of the one hundred and five heart transplants carried out around the world that year, dubbed by the New York Times to be one during which an ‘international epidemic’ of such grafts were carried out. This essay examines debates about death and transplanting, then analyses the pioneering Australian heart transplants, in the context of the Declaration of Sydney and continuing international discussions about whether these operations were moral and legal.

Multilingualism is now seen as the norm rather than the exception in an age of migration and supranational entities, and where minority language rights and the consequent educational policies have become more common. The field of applied linguistics reflects that transition: second language acquisition (sla) research is slowly being replaced by research on multilingualism, which includes third language (L3) acquisition. Indeed, there is a growing list of studies that are ‘normalizing’ third language acquisition by studying bilinguals learning a new language but not considering bilingualism a variable (e.g. Stafford, Sanz & Bowden 2012; Lado et al. 2014; Pérez-Vidal 2014; Cox & Sanz 2015). In this modern global context, researchers have produced empirical research on L3 acquisition that can be divided into three main categories depending on its focus: (a) classroom studies conducted in bilingual communities and schools with students learning a third language as part of the school curriculum (Cenoz 2013); (b) research on cross-linguistic influence investigating sources of transfer from L1 or L2 into the L3 (e.g. Sanz, Park & Lado 2014) and other possible directions for transfer (González Alonso et al. 2016); and (c) laboratory research – that is, studies outside of classroom or immersion contexts, in which dependent and independent variables can be tightly controlled by the researcher – conducted within a cognitive approach, the focus of this timeline. Despite its potential diminished ecological validity, this last strand is characterized by the robustness of its design and its improved overall validity, and by the manipulation of external conditions and the measurement of internal variables related to cognition.

This article outlines an argument against religious belief: the X-claim argument. The argument is novel at least in the sense that it has not yet been clearly articulated or addressed before in the philosophical literature. However, the argument is closely related to two more familiar varieties of argument currently receiving philosophical attention, namely: (i) arguments from religious diversity, and (ii) naturalistic debunking arguments (e.g. Freudian, Marxist, and evolutionary). I set out the X-claim argument, show that it has some prima facie plausibility, distinguish it from these other two arguments with which it might easily be confused, and, finally, explain why it has some significant advantages over these more familiar arguments against religious belief.