This volume contains papers addressing issues in task-based research into second language learning which are essential to informed pedagogic decision-making about how best to achieve this aim. These issues include research into the design characteristics of pedagogic tasks that promote the accuracy, fluency and complexity of learner language; the role of individual differences in the motivational and other cognitive variables that demands made by pedagogic tasks draw on; the extent to which tasks, and teacher interventions during task performance, promote the quantity and quality of interaction that facilitate L2 learning; and the generalizability of task-based research in laboratory contexts to classroom settings.

Peter Robinson is Professor of Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition in the Department of English, Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo. His research is into such issues as task-based language learning, the structure of aptitudes for instructed learning, and the role of attention and awareness during implicit and explicit learning. His books include Cognition and Second Language Instruction (2001), Individual Differences and Instructed Language Learning (2002), The Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (with Nick Ellis) (2008), and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Second Language Acquisition (to appear, 2012).