Luke Plonsky
Luke Plonsky is an American applied linguist and Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. He has become one of the most visible voices of the methodological reform movement within SLA, pushing the field toward cumulative evidence, transparent reporting, replication, and honest effect-size interpretation.
Plonsky's reform programme has several parts. He has produced a long series of meta-analyses on feedback, study abroad, instruction, and research design. He has mapped the field's methodological tendencies, often unflatteringly, in large-scale synthesis studies. And he has pushed for changes in how journals require authors to report effect sizes, confidence intervals, and sampling details. Much of the current methodological self-awareness in SLA is downstream of work he has led or co-led.
Career
- PhD in Second Language Studies from Michigan State University
- Former faculty at Georgetown University; now at Northern Arizona University
- Co-editor of Studies in Second Language Acquisition
- Co-author (with Gass, Behney, and Plonsky) of later editions of the standard SLA textbook
Published Work
- Advancing Quantitative Methods in Second Language Research (ed., 2015)
- Plonsky, L. & Oswald, F. L. (2014). "How big is 'big'? Interpreting effect sizes in L2 research." Language Learning, 64.
- Numerous meta-analyses on feedback, interaction, study abroad, and digital tools
- The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Research Methods (co-ed.)
Influence
- Led the meta-analytic and open-science turn inside applied linguistics
- Shaped how graduate programmes teach quantitative methods and how journals review them
- Provided the benchmarks that are now routinely used to interpret effect sizes in SLA research