Preface The present issue of Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition completes the seventh year of publishing this journal. It was founded as a forum of discussion for Polish as well as foreign scholars and seems to have fulfilled its mission as a journal on the rise. The journal has become more and more popular as we get more and more interesting submissions from both Polish and foreign researchers. Indeed since its foundation, every consecutive issue of the journal has welcomed contributions from many renown researchers, such as Peter MacIntyre, David Singleton, Larissa Aronin, Sarah Mercer, Tammy Gregersen, and Jean-Marc Dewaele, to name just a few. Also, a fast growing number of OA uploads has been observed as an indication of the journal’s popularity, as is the queue of the articles already accepted and awaiting their turn to be included in the next volumes to be published. It is the journal’s ambition to demonstrate new trends and unknown venues for research in SLA, focusing both on theoretical discussion and the practical solutions to problems based upon them. We aim not only to publish and share with our readers con- tributions from well-known and respected scholars but would like to promote young researchers, who often present fresh and innovative ideas or open up new perspectives on issues already researched. In other words, the journal hopes to become a venue for the exchange of ideas between well-established academ- ics and those inspired by them. In terms of its content, the journal presents contributions on issues ranging from purely linguistic and cognitively-oriented research on language acquisition processes to psycho and sociolinguistic stud- ies, always trying to feature the most recent developments in terms of topic choice, as well as in the methodology of research they employ. We publish our journal through an open access system, where the entire production process is executed online and the final product is available to everyone, thus offering an opportunity to share ideas through a broad, effective, and economical mode of dissemination. We aim at keeping high standards and quality, which are Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition vol. 7 (2), 2021, pp. 5–8 https://doi.org/10.31261/TAPSLA.11585 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en 6 Preface guaranteed by the international Editorial Board of TAPSLA, whose members are well-known Polish and foreign experts on a wide range of second language acquisition issues. The journal is indexed in numerous databases, including Scopus. As the journal is published by the prestigious Polish academic pub- lisher, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego (University of Silesia Press in Katowice), the copyediting and technical side of the production are done by an experienced team of editors at the University of Silesia Press in Katowice. Updated information and all the issues published so far are available on the journal webpage at www.tapsla.us.edu.pl. The topics of the present volume range from those discussing individual learner differences from a variety of perspectives and settings to the develop- ment of language skills and different forms of instruction, presenting some in- novative ideas in face-to-face and online mode of teaching a foreign language. The opening text “Using Character Strengths to Address English Writing Anxiety: A Mixed-Methods Study” by Tammy Gregersen, Peter D. MacIntyre, and Rachel Buck is quite an innovative way of looking at foreign language instruction, which employs elements of positive psychology in the language classroom to create a context of well-being for the learners. The authors not only introduce some of the seminal ideas taken from positive psychology, but most of all, they demonstrate in a practical way how the main assumptions of positive psychology can be applied in a classroom. The case study presented focuses on one of the pillars of positive psychology—character strengths—and through pedagogical intervention points out benefits of the intervention implemented for the learner. The topic of positive reinforcement is a widely-discussed issue not only in psychological research, but also in the context of educational theory and practice in the classroom. The next article is an example of how such positive reinforcement, that is, praise, is being investigated by means of a pedagogical experiment. Adrian Leis, in his text entitled “Praise in the EFL Classroom: A Growth Mindset Perspective,” demonstrates the role of giving positive feed- back in the form of praising and how it affects those who do not receive such feedback. The results of this interesting and well-designed experiment lead the author to highlight practical implications and offer advice on how to give feed- back effectively. In the text entitled “The Relationship between Attention and Extraneous Load: Bridging Second Language Acquisition Theory and Cognitive Load Theory,” Christopher J. L. Hughes, Jamie Costley, and Christopher Lange argue convincingly for an integration of cognitive load theory of Sweller (2017) into second language acquisition practices to facilitate the learning process. The context described is that of asynchronous video instruction at a Korean cyber-university and the data collected comes from a learner survey carried out by the authors. The results clearly indicate that there is a statistically sig- nificant relationship between distraction and extraneous load, which allowed the researchers to construct an explanatory model explaining this relationship. 7Preface The authors offer us the pedagogical implications of this in the context of multimodal language instruction. The next text “Gender-based Differences in EFL Learners’ Language Learning Strategies and Productive Vocabulary” by Alejandra Montero-SaizAja considers one of the most significant individual learner differences, that is, gender, and its impact on various aspects of lan- guage learning processes. The author suggests that one of the under-researched areas in this respect is productive vocabulary use and strategies employed in an EFL context by male versus female learners. The study based on The Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) (Oxford, 1990) and the Productive Vocabulary Levels Test (PVLT) (Laufer & Nation, 1995, 1999), reports on the relationship between language learning strategies and productive vocabulary in the case of male and female learners. The findings show that female learners in the study used more strategies than the male ones, however, there were no statistically significant differences in terms of productive vocabulary. Next, Carla Ferrerós Pagès, in her text “Conceptual and Linguistic Transfer from L2 (Catalan) to L1 (Amazigh) within the Context of Migration,” looks at the phenomenon of lexical and semantic transfer between L2 (Catalan) and L1 (Amazigh). The analysis focuses on a selected semantic field of body parts to demonstrate the possibility (or otherwise) of conceptual transfer between these two languages. The author discusses various factors that may have an impact on this transfer such as the amount of exposure to L2, language context or the status of the languages and the characteristics of speakers. The next article en- titled “Effects of Using Corpus-based Instructional Mediation on EFL Students’ Academic Writing Skills Improvement” by Amare Tesfie Birhan, Mulugeta Teka, and Nibret Asrade describes a quasi-experimental study carried out in the context of EFL mechanical engineering students. The results of the study and statistical analysis confirm the hypothesis that corpus-based instructional mediation results in a more effective development of FL writing skills in learn- ers in such important aspects as text construction, its content, communicative value, structure and grammar, and vocabulary usage. Thus, the authors conclude by calling for the “inclusion of corpus-based authentic linguistic elements in their teaching material when teaching academic writing courses in the EFL context” (p. 133). The last text in this issue, authored by Xiaoyan Li and entitled “Learning Japanese Onomatopoeia through a Narrative-Evaluation E-Learning System,” introduces a wholly different learning context, where online instruc- tion is implemented in teaching Japanese as an FL. It focuses on an interesting but troublesome for learners aspect of Japanese—onomatopoeia—expressing feelings and experiences. The author proposes an online learning system to teach Japanese onomatopoeia via three-step instruction in the form of “narra- tive strategies to mimic the process by which native speakers learn” (p. 133). The system consists of teaching the formal rules with nuances involved—the creation of individual onomatopoeia by learners and teacher feedback in a form 8 Preface of narrative interpretation. The effectiveness of an e-learning system was con- firmed in the study, in which the experimental group outperformed the control group in their understanding and use of Japanese onomatopoeia. The present issue also includes two book reviews. The first review by Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska presents the monograph by Timothy Reagan Linguistic Legitimacy and Social Justice, which comments on current discus- sions of selected topics in critical language pedagogy from the perspective of ideologies, language norms, and uses and, consequentially, also language education practices. The book makes an attempt to answer important questions on language norms and language use and how they translate into a speaker’s social position. Ultimately, the answers to the questions posed have a bearing on the teaching of certain versions of a language, which may contribute to social (in)equality. The other book, reviewed by Katarzyna Ożańska-Ponikwia, looks at one of the most important individual learner differences—language anxi- ety. The book, authored by Christina Gkonou, Mark Daubney, and Jean-Marc Dewaele and entitled New Insights into Language Anxiety: Theory, Research and Educational Implications, offers a new perspective on studying language anxiety. It is a dynamic perspective, which requires an interdisciplinary ap- proach and knowledge of varied research paradigms. This issue therefore offers both theoretical overviews and practical reflec- tions based on individual researcher’s empirical work and experiences in the realm of teaching and learning foreign languages—in traditional as well as in less-conventional e-learning contexts. We hope that this innovative and crea- tive research (in its outcomes and its implications) will be of interest to other scholars. Also, the practical solutions to problems proposed by some of the authors can be adapted for other teaching and learning contexts. We hope that all types of readers—researchers, teachers and students—will find the articles not only useful but also inspirational. More than anything else, we would like to thank all the authors in this volume and, as is our usual practice, to extend our invitation to all Polish and foreign researchers and academics to share their work with us by submitting it to our journal. Danuta Gabryś-Barker Adam Wojtaszekhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0308-4337 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-0703