Addressing themes from the Douglas Fir Group's (2016) transdisciplinary framework, this paper bridges boundaries between cognitive and social disciplines by showing how social contextual factors can affect the psycholinguistic development of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in learner language. Sociolinguistic and sociocultural frameworks are blended with use of a multidimensional psycholinguistic frame, CAF, to analyze speech samples produced by 10 adult learners of English across different developmental levels as they all produced narratives containing constructed dialogue. Learners enacted imagined ‘voices’ that were significantly more accurate and fluent compared to their narrative baseline voices. Our findings suggest that emerging L2 proficiency consists of many distinct voices that can significantly differ in accuracy of grammatical forms and fluency; related studies show they also differ in suprasegmentals, nonverbals, discourse style, and expressed social stance. Learners’ ability to produce such voices in constructed dialogue supports a view of their proficiency as heteroglossic, complex, dynamic, and holistic, and of language play as facilitative of SLA. Theoretical and practical implications for L2 learning, instruction, and assessment are considered.

The present study addresses an issue of the English language that has been discussed at length for the past several decades: Which pronoun should one use when referring to a singular, genderless antecedent (e.g., student)? Though much has been written on the subject of the use of the generic masculine, singular they, and he or she constructions in published works, and other studies have looked at how English speakers process and interpret the aforementioned pronouns in writing, few studies have researched the use of these pronouns in free response to questions including a singular, genderless referent. The present study contributes to the last of these three methodologies by exploring which pronouns native English speakers use when writing about a genderless person (i.e., “the ideal student”). The results of this study indicate that a large majority of participants (79%) include a gender-inclusive approach (he or she type constructions or singular they) when referring to a singular, genderless antecedent; 68% use singular they. However, participants note that he or she type variations do not include some who may not identify within the gender binary.

There are two broad approaches to the research and teaching of second-language (L2) pronunciation—‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’—which roughly align with structural and communicative approaches to language teaching. A bottom-up approach, explicitly focusing on de-contextualised linguistic forms, is structuralist and predominated in the second half of the 20th century; a top-down approach to L2 pronunciation takes a more communicative orientation, defining the instructional goal not as acquiring a native-speaker accent, but rather as ‘intelligibility.’ In consideration of this pronunciation goal (i.e. intelligibility) and recent L2 acquisition theoretical frameworks emphasising the role of social and contextual factors in shaping interlanguage (IL) systems, we argue that a top-down approach is paramount to L2 pronunciation instruction. Drawing on variationist research on IL phonology and a brief recount of International Teaching Assistant pronunciation course programs in the US, we present the Mirroring Project as an effective top-down pedagogical approach for L2 pronunciation instruction.

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