Michael Sharwood Smith Award

On behalf of the SLR Editorial team, we are pleased to announce the establishment of the Michael Sharwood Smith Award for the best article published in Second Language Research in the previous two years, to be presented biennially. The pool of scholarly work to be considered comprises all articles that have appeared in the previous two volumes of the journal, including full-length research or keynote articles, research notes, review articles, and discussion and commentary.

The award recognizes Founding Editor and current Editor Emeritus Michael Sharwood Smith for his 30 years of leadership of Second Language Research and his contributions to the field of second language acquisition. The winning article will be announced every two years on the journal’s website, in March of the subsequent year. Its author/s will be awarded a prize of £100 in the form of books from the SAGE catalogue and a one-year online subscription to SLR.

The editorial team selected a long list of twelve articles published in 2017 or 2018 (Volumes 33 and 34), based on their quality and potential impact on the field of second language acquisition. A short list of six articles was presented to a panel of referees drawn from the Editorial Board. The referees considered the salience of the research questions an article poses; the sophistication, rigor, and innovation of the research methods employed; and the significance of the article’s implications for theory formation.

Winner of the MSS Award

It is our pleasure to announce that the first winner of the Michael Sharwood Smith Award is the article entitled:

Phrase frequency, proficiency and grammaticality interact in non-native processing: Implications for theories of SLA

by Kailen Shantz. It appeared in vol. 33(1). Shantz’s article will be available to read free of charge for one year.

Runners-up

The impact of focus on pronoun resolution in native and non-native sentence comprehension

by Clare Patterson, Yulia Esaulova and Claudia Felser

Polarity-item anything in L3 English: Where does transfer come from when the L1 is Catalan and the L2 is Spanish?

by Eloi Puig-Mayenco and Heather Marsden

Short List

The basic continuity hypothesis of L1 to L2 production

by Francesco Romano

Emergent knowledge of a universal phonological principle in the L2 acquisition of vowel harmony in Turkish: A ‘four’-fold poverty of the stimulus in L2 acquisition

by Öner Özçelik and Rex A. Sprouse

The influence of finiteness and lightness on verb placement in L2 German: Comparing child and adult learners

by Sarah Schimke’s and Christine Dimroth

The runners-up and the rest of the shortlisted articles will be available to read free of charge for one month.

We congratulate the winning articles’ authors and express our deep gratitude to the Editorial Board panel who refereed this competition.