Language Teaching Research Quarterly

The breadth of topics covered in this volume gives some sense of the range of Brian MacWhinney’s perspectives on and contributions to our understanding of language -- how it is learned, represented, and studied. My brief personal reflections will focus on this latter contribution – how language is studied, and how researchers can be supported in studying the acquisition and use of language, with appropriate attention to variation due to the language features themselves, the learner’s stage of development, the linguistic context, the activity being engaged in, and the presence of clinical impairments.