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Learning foreign languages: pedagogical tools, emotional understanding and parents’ discourse

This issue of Language Teaching Research includes seven articles, all of them focusing on issues pertaining to the learning of foreign languages (English and Spanish) and providing rich insights into how we can benefit from research findings to improve their teaching. In their contributions Zhang and Gallego consider the importance of collaborative writing (CW) and learners’ engagement within the language-related episodes (LREs) (Swain & Lapkin, 1998) they generate and how CW positively affects L2 morphosyntactic development, respectively. Qin and Zhang explore the importance of pre-task planning on the selection of referential expressions in an oral narrative; Icht and Mama analyze how vocal production is a useful vocabulary learning strategy and Alasmary provides a corpus-driven expert-approved list of lexical bundles useful for language programs for mathematic students. In their contribution, Fernández-García and FonsecaMora establish a connection between emotional understanding and speaking proficiency. The final paper in this issue analyzes the importance of parents’ discourse in the teaching of English to young learners. As just mentioned, the first two contributions focus on different aspects of CW, defined by Storch (2019) as “an activity that requires the coauthors to be involved in all stages of the writing process, sharing the responsibility for and the ownership of the entire text produced” (p.40). In her article Zhang investigates how learners’ collaboration may influence the quantity, quality, focus, and outcome of LREs. As she rightly points out, assigning learners to work on a writing task does not automatically entail that the benefits attributed to CW will occur. One critical factor is the nature of the learners’ collaboration during the task, and, more specifically, the nature of learners’ engagement