In this globalized era, many individuals around the world are becoming members of multiple language and sociocultural networks due to factors such as socioeconomic and geopolitical restructuring, increased international migrant mobility, growing minority rights movements, and revolutionary communication technologies.

This book follows the structure of the seminal book by Peter Skehan (1989), Individual Differences in Second Language Learning. The objective of Dörnyei’s book is to provide a single-authored monograph on language individual differences (ID) research.

In a recent search in the ERIC Database, I found roughly 1,500 papers related to the issue of a teacher’s national origin. Despite this huge amount of information, numerous essays, opinion papers, and so on, it seems that there is not any way to agree about who is the better teacher. When preparing this column, I had the opportunity to speak to a TESL-EJ fan, Nick Kearney, who is the Director at the Center of Languages at Florida University College in Valencia, Spain.

In Making Multicultural Education Work, Stephen May offers a critical examination of the gap between what multicultural education has promised and what it has delivered. He discusses why that gap exists and looks closely at one school’s efforts to bridge that distance. Educators and educational administrators are the intended audience for this book, particularly those who teach and administer in multicultural settings.

Not long after I graduated with my MA, I asked a head teacher if he would be interested in helping me set up an applied linguistics discussion group. The idea was to air theories about language acquisition and to see what methods could be integrated into our teaching activities. He gave me a haunted look and said “I don’t know why you would come to me with a suggestion like that.”