Dr. Phil Hiver’s research and teaching expertise lies in two main areas. Within the first area, instructed second language acquisition, he is interested in issues related to personal and programmatic engagement and participation in additional language (L2) learning. His work adopts an explicit focus on context, temporal change, and complex causality to study how individual, group, and contextual factors impact the quality of students’ engagement and subsequent learning. His work also addresses how teacher thought and action, broadly conceived, contributes to language learners’ engagement and learning.
The second area relates to methodological innovation and meta-research. Dr. Hiver’s work addresses issues of precision and rigor through open science practices in language learning research, and explores the contribution of methods from complexity theory/dynamic systems theory to tackle “wicked” problems in language education and use. His scholarship uses methods for identifying temporal structure and variation, quantifying trends, estimating complex causality, capturing group membership, applying spatial analysis, tracing dynamic processes, and investigating networked and nested phenomena.
In addition to more than 80 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, Dr. Hiver’s published work includes books such as the Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Individual Differences (2022, Routledge), Student Engagement in the Language Classroom (2021, Multilingual Matters), and Research Methods for Complexity Theory in Applied Linguistics (2020, Multilingual Matters). He is a past recipient of the International Association for the Psychology of Language Learning’s Early Career Scholar Award and the Instruments for Research into Second Language Learning (IRIS) Replication Award.
Dr. Hiver is incoming co-editor in chief of The Modern Language Journal, the field’s longest continuously-published journal (published since 1916 on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations), and Associate Editor of the journal System. In addition to co-chairing the Open Applied Linguistics Research Area Network (AILA), he serves on the editorial boards of Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, and Research Synthesis in Applied Linguistics.