In this issue's state-of-the-art article, Larry Vandergrift suggests that L2 listening remains the least understood and the least researched of all four skills. His paper focuses on a number of areas central to the topic, including the implicit nature of the listening product and process, the cognitive dimensions of the listening skill, listening tasks and the assessment of the skill.The present issue of Language Teaching sees the start of a new series, surveying recent research in some of the most widely-taught L2s. It can be argued that nowadays too much L2 research is focussed on English, and there is very often an implied assumption that ‘one size fits all’ in methodological terms for all languages, which is clearly not the case. We also feel that this journal needs to serve its readers more comprehensively by providing an accessible and regular means of obtaining information about research into languages other than English. Michael Evans opens the series with a review of research on L2 French; reviews of research into L2 German, Spanish, Japanese, Italian and Chinese are currently being prepared.This issue also sees the start of another regular section, wherein we will be publishing plenary and invited speeches from recent language teaching and second language acquisition conferences around the world. Many of these speeches are of fundamental interest to a community wider than those present at such events. To begin the series, Fred Davidson with Glenn Fulcher discuss the flexible language of the Common European Framework of References for Languages and explore the pragmatic utility of such language to guide language test development, and William Littlewood discusses the problems encountered in incorporating new methodologies developed in Europe into East Asian educational institutions. In future issues, we will be presenting speeches from events as diverse as the annual conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and the conference of the Applied Linguistics Association of New Zealand, and papers based on the invited speakers' lecture series at the University of Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Richard Johnstone's article in which he reviews research on language teaching, learning and policy published in 2004 and 2005 is available online in Language Teaching 39.4 (2006), at http://journals.cambridge.org/jid_LTA.
Reflections on 40 Years in the Hazards and Disasters Community