ISLA research: Toward a more curricular and pedagogical perspective

ISLA has been in existence for over three and a half decades yet it is still conflated with SLA despite the obvious differences in affordances and type of processing between these two areas. Indeed, one major challenge in ISLA lies in an understanding or minimal acknowledgment of what comprises the real instructed setting, especially when viewed from a contextual, processing, and curricular perspective. A contextual perspective (instructed vs. naturalistic setting) clearly notes that the affordances provide in the latter are not remotely similar to those in the former. A processing perspective (explicit vs. implicit learning) reveals that in ISLA the former clearly predominates in the formal setting. A curricular perspective raises the simple question of where the language classroom is situated, that is, within a language curriculum that has, for example, goals, syllabi, textbooks, tests, and learning outcomes that place a serious demand on ISLA research to address them. To this end, how classroom-based research is viewed, with or without pedagogical ramifications derived from experimental findings, will have clear methodological implications for future ISLA research, especially in light of research designs (e.g., one-shot laboratory-based studies that do not hold potential pedagogical implications vs. longitudinal studies that are embedded within the language curriculum and do hold pedagogical implications). This presentation will make the argument for dividing ISLA into two sub-strands, namely, (1) instructed ISLA, studies that investigate the many variables in the instructed setting and (2) ISLA applied, studies that seek to inform pedagogical practice via instruction or, as Loewen (2015) puts it, “the systematic manipulation of the mechanisms of learning and/or the conditions under which they occur” (p. 2) to promote L2 development in the instructed setting. To address all these issues discussed above, an exemplar of a longitudinal study embedded within the language syllabus and curriculum will be presented.