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 recent work brings together established research from task-based language teaching and individual differences to investigate learners’ proactive language learning and use. His work adopts an explicit focus on context, temporal change, and complex causality to examine learners’ intentional effort and deliberate involvement in language education (e.g., questions of 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 is part of a broader pivot to acknowledge interconnectedness and change using 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.
Dr. Hiver has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles and chapters in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language Teaching, and the Modern Language Journal. He is co-author of Research Methods for Complexity Theory in Applied Linguistics (2020, Multilingual Matters), and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Individual Differences (2022, Routledge). He received 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. He currently serves as associate editor of the journal System, and is on the editorial boards of Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, and Research Synthesis in Applied Linguistics.