Michael Sharwood Smith Award

On behalf of the SLR Editorial team, we are pleased to announce the second Michael Sharwood Smith Award for the best article published in Second Language Research in the previous two years. 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 is announced every two years on the journal’s website, in April of the subsequent year.

The pool of scholarly work considered comprised all articles that had 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 editorial team considered a long list of fifteen articles published in 2019 or 2020 (Volumes 35 and 36), 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 second winner of the Michael Sharwood Smith Award is the article entitled:

Lexical accent perception in highly-proficient L2 Japanese learners: The roles of language-specific experience and domain-general resources, by Seth J Goss and Katsuo Tamaoka, vol. 35, 3: pp. 351–376.

Goss and Tamaoka’s article will be available to read free of charge for one year.

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