Keywords word frequency and co-word analysis are adopted in an attempt to to investigate the focuses and fronts of inter-national second language acquisition (SLA) researches by analyzing the key words in articles published in the intationally re-nowned SLA academic joal Language Leing from 2012 to 2016. It is found that the best researched topics in SLA are vocabu-lary acquisition, explicit knowledge, form-focused teaching, language use, and so on, among which leers language attracts the most attention. In terms of research methods, they become more diversified and interdisciplinary, as empirical studies take a domi-nant position and experiments still play a leading role, displaying an interdisciplinary feature.