This book is open access under a CC BY licence. It spans the areas of assessment, second language acquisition (SLA) and pronunciation and examines topical issues and challenges that relate to formal and informal assessments of second language (L2) speech in classroom, research and real-world contexts. It showcases insights from assessing other skills (e.g. listening and writing) and highlights perspectives from research in speech sciences, SLA, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, including lingua franca communication, with concrete implications for pronunciation assessment. This collection will help to establish commonalities across research areas and facilitate greater consensus about key issues, terminology and best practice in L2 pronunciation research and assessment. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, this book will appeal to a mixed audience of researchers, graduate students, teacher-educators and exam board staff with varying levels of expertise in pronunciation and assessment and wide-ranging interests in applied linguistics.

Using Priming Methods in Second Language Research is an accessible introduction to the use of auditory, semantic, and syntactic priming methods for second language (L2) processing and acquisition research. It provides a guide for the use, design, and implementation of priming tasks and an overview of how to analyze and report priming research. Key principles about auditory, semantic, and syntactic priming are introduced, and issues for L2 researchers to consider when designing priming studies are pointed out. Empirical studies that have adopted priming methods are highlighted to illustrate the application of experimental techniques from psychology to L2 processing and acquisition research. Each chapter concludes with follow-up questions and activities that provide additional reinforcement of the chapter content, while the final chapter includes data sets that can be used to practice the statistical tests commonly used with priming data.

Using Priming Methods in Second Language Research is an accessible introduction to the use of auditory, semantic, and syntactic priming methods for second language (L2) processing and acquisition research. It provides a guide for the use, design, and implementation of priming tasks and an overview of how to analyze and report priming research. Key principles about auditory, semantic, and syntactic priming are introduced, and issues for L2 researchers to consider when designing priming studies are pointed out. Empirical studies that have adopted priming methods are highlighted to illustrate the application of experimental techniques from psychology to L2 processing and acquisition research. Each chapter concludes with follow-up questions and activities that provide additional reinforcement of the chapter content, while the final chapter includes data sets that can be used to practice the statistical tests commonly used with priming data.