There are long and diverse strands of thinking about how schools and schooling, teaching, curriculum, and learning could be conceptualized and developed so as to foster what is often loosely called social justice. Many of these strands go back (in Europe) at least to the French Revolution. The original term that encompasses this area is ‘radical pedagogy’ (that is to say, a pedagogy suitable for radicals or radical purposes; cf. Crookes, 2009). Emerging out of this area in the post-World War Two era, one version of this thought and practice that has become somewhat influential in language teaching is ‘critical pedagogy’, and ‘critical language pedagogy’ (CLP) is a key term used to refer to applications of the concepts of critical pedagogy to second language (L2) contexts.

The paper reviews eight topics in the area of second language critical pedagogy: (i) historical inheritances and lines of development associated with critical pedagogies; (ii) advocacy (and the need for critical language teachers to engage in it); (iii) the diverse institutional contexts that could be explored for critical language pedagogy; (iv) the range of languages within which critical approaches have been explored; (v) EFL critical pedagogy; (vi) the broad range of categories of oppression addressed by critical language pedagogy; (vii) materials for critical language pedagogy, and (viii) the role of the ‘imaginary’ in encouraging critical language pedagogy. I suggest that these constitute matters which, if given attention by critical language pedagogy specialists, could enhance the perceived practicality and/or relevance of the area.

This is an excellent and stimulating book, if like me you have been disturbed at how little material can be found relating the broader psychological processes of learning a second or foreign language to the field of psychology. Narrow cognitive or psycholinguistic treatments of the area are about all that is to be found, and even they are very few in number. (A very distant predecessor of this book would be Steven McDonough's no longer viable Psychology in foreign language teaching.)

The connection between SLA research and second and foreign language (S/FL) teaching is discussed in this paper, from the viewpoint that such a relationship is desirable and that it is advantageous to see it as one mediated by a variety of factors. At the same time, it is asserted that the relationship is presently often weaker than it should be. The conditions under which S/FL language teaching take place are identified as strongly contributing to this state of affairs, though other aspects of SLA research that might have limited its relevance to teaching are also considered. A call is made for empirical studies into the use by teachers of research.

This paper reviews work in the philosophy of science pertinent to theory formats and relates it to recent second language acquisition (SLA) theories. Recent developments in philosophy of science and science studies have shown that the theory format advocated by philosophy of science for much of this century is unhelpful; developments in theory format in cognitive science, particularly psychology, artificial intelligence, and linguistics, have proceeded on lines independent of the older tradition in theory format. The naturalization of philosophy of science has resulted in improved understandings of what is necessary in a theory if it is to be adequately explanatory. SLA theory development has largely taken place in ignorance of such recent developments, and initial critiques of SLA theory from within the field reflected the earlier conception of theory. However, SLA research has reached the stage where a meta-understanding of theory formats, in terms of the components of a theory and the language in which a theory is couched (its formalism), is badly needed to facilitate theory development.

Recent SLA theory development, supported by related developments in cognitive psychology, has made the study of SL speech production, hitherto neglected, a promising area of work. Recent developments in L1 production studies have provided a gradually strengthening foundation for investigations of L2 production with both use and acquisitional concerns. This article briefly sketches the current first language position as a necessary preliminary to a critical discussion of recent SL production research with particular regard to methodology.

Having focused previously on attention, cognitively oriented investigations of interlanguage variation and development are turning toward other possible explanatory variables, such as planning. The present study reports on an experiment in which two groups of 20 Japanese learners of English as a second language performed two monologic production tasks with and without time for planning. It was found that providing learners with time to plan their utterances results in interlanguage productions which are more complex in the short run.