201 Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching Department of English Studies, Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts, Adam Mickiewicz University, Kalisz SSLLT 6 (2). 2016. 201-202 doi: 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.2.1 http://www.ssllt.amu.edu.pl Editorial The second 2016 issue of SSLLT brings together six contributions, most of which are reports of original research projects. In the first paper, Justyna Leśniewska addresses the question as to whether the correct use of articles in English is determined solely by grammar rules or, rather, it is also mediated by the formu- laic nature of the target language, demonstrating, on the basis of data obtained from 90 Polish students majoring in English, that the latter may in fact be the case. In the next contribution, Dmitri Leontjev reports the results of a study which sought to find out whether derivational affixes differ in their difficulty, thus putting to the test the order of teaching of English affixes proposed by Bauer and Nation (1993). The analysis of the data gleaned from 62 Estonian and Russian upper-secondary school students by means of a word-segmentation task showed that the proposed classification indeed is able to account for the diffi- culty in recognizing such affixes, with the effect that it can provide a point of refer- ence for future empirical investigations. Subsequently, Maria Pia Gomez-Laich shifts our attention to the domain of pragmatics by synthesizing the empirical studies concerning why learners may consciously choose to ignore the prag- matic norms of the target language, concluding that this phenomenon is likely to stem from divergence of L1 and L2 pragmatic norms, a clash with self-identity or the way learners see themselves with respect to the target language commu- nity. The next paper by Jenni Alisaari and Leena Maria Heikkola focuses upon the impact of different pedagogical techniques on written fluency and shows through an intervention study carried out among 67 learners of Finnish that singing may have a beneficial effect in this respect. The study undertaken by Richard J. Sampson, in turn, is devoted to investigating the changes in the motivation of a teacher of English as a foreign language working in a technical college in Japan, who was the author himself, with the assistance of an introspective journal, adopting Ushioda’s (2009) person-in-context perspective and taking into account the tenets of com- plex dynamic systems theories (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). It turned out 202 that motivation is the outcome of an intricate interplay of affect and identity, with major differences being observed between roles played by different stu- dents. Finally, Jill Surmont, Esli Struys, Maurits Van Den Noort and Piet Van De Craen attempt to explore the effect of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) on the performance in mathematics by Dutch-speaking secondary school learners educated in French, finding both a short- and long-term advantage for the CLIL group. I am confident that all of the papers included in this issue will provide food for thought and a source of inspiration for researchers wishing to pursue similar lines of inquiry, thereby enriching our knowledge of second lan- guage learning and teaching, no matter whether the emphasis is laid on gram- mar, lexis, pragmatics, the impact of individual learner differences or the appli- cation of different forms of content-based instruction. Mirosław Pawlak Adam Mickiewicz University, Kalisz, Poland State University of Applied Sciences, Konin, Poland pawlakmi@amu.edu.pl References Bauer, L., & Nation, I. S. P. (1993). Word families. International Journal of Lexi- cography, 6(4), 253-279. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Complex systems and applied linguis- tics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ushioda, E. (2009). A person-in-context relational view of emergent motivation, self and identity. In Z. Dörnyei & E. Ushioda (Eds.), Motivation, language identity and the L2 self (pp. 215-228). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.