Introduction to the guest‐edited issue: Synergies in second language acquisition and teaching (SLA/T)

Intellectuals in every field are familiar with frequent complaints about the isolation of various disciplines into insular silos of self-reflexive chatter, more-or-less immune from the cross-pollination of ideas.This has been particularly true of the field of psychology.(. ..)Increasingly, though, psychological researchers and practitioners are coming to chafe under this restrictive intellectual regime, and one hears increasing calls for approaches that can remedy this situation.However, to paraphrase Mark Twain's comment about the weather, everyone complains about it, but nobody does anything about it.The purpose of this volume is to begin to redress that problem.A typical handbook in a given discipline pulls together collections or summaries of the latest research findings, adding new data to the existing corpus or new thinking to the existing framework.However (. ..) there is not an existing corpus of work in integrative psychology that can simply be summarized.The goal here is precisely to encourage the building of such a body of work.(p.xii) Our aim in this guest-edited issue of The Modern Language Journal (MLJ) both resembles and differs from those of the just-quoted handbook.Like the handbook, we seek to promote integrative efforts in a field where they are badly needed: second language acquisition and teaching (SLA/T) studies. 1 As support for the claim that integrative efforts are needed in our field, consider that handbooks in SLA studies frequently collect chapters on different kinds of research, but less frequently attempt to integrate or treat them seriously together (nor is this their task; Routledge's Handbooks in Second Language Acquisition series is a case in point).Additionally, even where such attempts are made, they still often seem like side dishes to the main course of highlighting various perspectives.Our aim in this special issue is to reverse this emphasis.Different from the above quoted handbook, our aim is not to build a new field or body of work but rather to stimulate movements already underway, as discussed in the next two sections.