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Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching 
Department of English Studies, Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts, Adam Mickiewicz University, Kalisz 

SSLLT 1 (2). 187-188 
http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl 

 
 
 

Editorial 
 

The  current  issue  of  Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching brings 
together six contributions written by scholars from Poland and abroad which 
deal with a wide array of issues related to learning and teaching additional lan-
guages in different educational contexts. First, Weronika Szubko-Sitarek reports 
the findings of two experimental studies conducted within the lexical decision 
task paradigm which aimed to investigate the cognate facilitation effect in the 
process of recognizing words in a third language by Polish unbalanced trilinguals 
who, in addition to their mother tongue, were proficient in English and had vari-
able command of German. In the next paper, Sane M. Yagi and Saleh Al-Salman 
make a strong case for the use of tracking software in writing pedagogy as a tool 
for providing invaluable insights into the process of composing texts, but also a 
method of stimulating reflection and promoting strategic learning. The re-
search-based contributions by Ewa Waniek-Klimczak and Aleksandra Wach, in 
turn, shift the emphasis to sociolinguistic issues. The former presents the find-
ings of a qualitative study which examined the acculturation patterns of three 
recent Polish immigrants to the United Kingdom, who were expert users of Eng-
lish, in relation to their formal and informal language learning experiences, 
while the latter uses questionnaire data obtained from a respectable sample of 
Polish-speaking English majors to shed light on their preferences concerning 
pronunciation norms based on the native-speaker model and the Lingua Franca 
Core. The last two papers included in this issue report the findings of studies 
exploring the role of anxiety in learning foreign language skills and subsystems. 
In the first of these, Christina Gkonou examines the interfaces between speak-
ing and writing anxiety manifested by Greek learners of English as a foreign lan-
guage in a private school setting and, in the second, Magdalena Szyszka taps the 
relationship  between  the  level  of  anxiety  of  Polish  advanced  learners  studying  
English in a teacher-training college and their self-evaluation of the segmental 
and suprasegmental aspects of their pronunciation. I believe that the broad 



 

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range of issues tackled in the individual contributions, the diversity of the theo-
retical perspectives and research paradigms adopted, and the valuable peda-
gogical implications offered will all make this issue of SSLLT an engaging and 
stimulating reading for a variety of audiences. 
 

Miros aw Pawlak 
Adam Mickiewicz University, Kalisz, Poland 

pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl