IEA's Studies of Language Education: their scope and contributions

The paper reviews the IEA second language studies. It emphasises the wide scope of these studies and the way in which they provide a large and unique data source for both practical and methodological exploration. The paper emphasises the problems of cross‐system comparisons, not least because of sampling difficulties, and points to the usefulness of within‐system analysis. The paper summarises the main results from existing IEA second language studies and points out that many contemporary views about language learning derive from the work of the IEA. Finally, the paper discusses the relationship between the IEA studies and contemporary views of second language learning.