Chapter 1

Current research on instructed second language learning

In this introductory chapter we provide a picture of recent research on instructed second language learning (ISLA), not about its findings, but about what questions it addresses, on what aspects of the second language, and with what methodologies. We also address some potential reasons for why ISLA research is a relatively small part of the SLA research published in the leading journals, and for why a rather small part of that ISLA research is carried out in actual classrooms. We then present a set of questions about research methodology and generalizability of results that we asked the authors of each empirical chapter in the book (Chapters 2–9) to address, and we provide a brief overview of where the various contributions fall on the spectrum from least to most instructional intervention, which in turn largely determines their answers to the questions we asked them to address.