A volume on second-language acquisition theory and pedagogy is, at the same time, a mark of progress and a bit of an anomaly. The progress is shown by the fact that the two disciplines have established themselves as areas of study not only distinct from each other, but also different from linguistic theory. This was not always the case, at least not in the United States. The anomaly results from the fact that this book deals with the relationship between L2 theory and pedagogy despite the conclusion that there is currently no widely-accepted theory of SLA.
Grouped into five sections, the papers in this volume:
* consider questions about L2 theory and pedagogy at the macro-level, from the standpoint of the L2 setting;
* consider input in terms of factors which are internal to the learner;
* examine the question of external factors affecting the input, such as the issue of whether points of grammar can be explicitly taught;
* deal with questions of certain complex, linguistic behaviors and the various external and social variables that influence learners; and
* discuss issues surrounding the teaching of pronunciation factors that affect a non-native accent.

Designed to provide practical information to those who are concerned with the development of young children, this book has three goals. First, the authors offer details about patterns of language development over the first three years of life. Although intensive studies have been carried out by examining from one to 20 children in the age range of zero to three years, there has been no longitudinal study of a sample as large as this--53 children--nor have as many measures of language development been obtained from the same children. Examining language development from a broad perspective in this size population allows us to see what generalizations can be made about patterns of language development.
This volume's second goal is to examine the impact of such factors as biology, cognition, and communication input--and the interaction of these factors--which traditionally have been held to play an important role in the course of language development. The comparative influence of each--and the interaction of all three--were examined statistically using children's scores on standard language tests at age three.
The volume's third goal is to provide information to beginning investigators, early childhood educators, and clinicians that can help them in their practice. This includes information about what appear to be good early predictors of language development at three years; language assessment procedures that can be used with children below age three, how these procedures can be used, what they tell us about the language development of young children; and what warning signs should probably be attended to, and which can most likely be ignored. In addition, suggestions are made about what patterns of communicative interaction during the different periods of development seem to be most successful in terms of language development outcomes at three years, and what overall indications the study offers regarding appropriate intervention.

For effective use, this book should be purchased alongside the illustrated picture book Harry's Story. Both books can be purchased together as a set, Supporting Children with DLD: A Picture Book and User Guide to Learn About Developmental Language Disorder [978-0-367-70920-4]. Supporting Children with DLD, has been developed to help raise awareness of Developmental Language Disorder, and to highlight the impact of the condition from the child's point of view. With activities, prompts and sample questions, this is an essential resource to enable adults to understand the reality of living with DLD, helping children feel heard and respected, as well as providing a solid foundation for tailoring support to individual needs. Drawing on specific examples from Harry's Story, the book does not assume any prior knowledge of DLD and is designed to offer the reader accessible information and practical advice, teaching as you go. This book: Highlights the link between spoken and written language, addressing the need to recognise the literary difficulties faced by children with DLD Provides practical activities and worksheets that can be used to help children express themselves and ask for help Offers strategies for supporting children's understanding of language, based on common situations and experiences explored in Harry's Story Written to be an accessible introduction to DLD and its effect on children's lives, this is an essential resource for parents and professionals looking to understand the condition.

This book provides an in-depth exploration of psychological phenomena affecting language learning within a social learning space. Drawing on the literature from identity in second language learning, communities of practice and learner beliefs, in conjunction with other individual difference factors, it uncovers perceptions and assumptions that language learners have of the space and how they affect their relationship with it and the people within it. Readers will gain a greater understanding of how psychological phenomena shape a space and how a learning space can contribute to a wider learning ecology. This book will appeal to researchers interested in language learning beyond the classroom and psychological aspects of language acquisition, as well as to practitioners and professionals who are supporting learners outside the classroom.

Salience in Second Language Acquisition brings together contributions from top scholars of second language acquisition (SLA) in a comprehensive volume of the existing literature and current research on salience. In the first book to focus exclusively on this integral topic, the editors and contributors define and explore what makes a linguistic feature salient in sections on theory, perpetual salience, and constructed salience. They also provide a history of SLA theory and discussion on its contemporary use in research. An approachable introduction to the topic, this book is an ideal supplement to courses in SLA, and a valuable resource for researchers and scholars looking for a better understanding of the subject.

Most research on children's lexical development has focused on their acquisition of names for concrete objects. This is the first edited volume to focus specifically on how children acquire their early verbs. Verbs are an especially important part of the early lexicon because of the role they play in children's emerging grammatical competence. The contributors to this book investigate:
* children's earliest words for actions and events and the cognitive structures that might underlie them,
* the possibility that the basic principles of word learning which apply in the case of nouns might also apply in the case of verbs, and
the role of linguistic context, especially argument structure, in the acquisition of verbs.
A central theme in many of the chapters is the comparison of the processes of noun and verb learning. Several contributors make provocative suggestions for constructing theories of lexical development that encompass the full range of lexical items that children learn and use.

Each child is spoken to by genetic heritage and by the rich current set of interactional environments -- familial, local community, and broader cultural voices. Using past structures and paradigms of scholarship, scholars seek to understand what the child achieves in language and how. The tools available for this research are not static but evolve jointly through the sharing of information, and with each "brief moment in time" in efforts to look at children's languages "just as they are."
Containing a wide range of contributions from developmental approaches to phonological ability, the lexicon, the grammar as well as conversation and sign language, this text details the interrelated research and theorizing discussed at a recent Budapest conference. The meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Languages was particularly rich in the diversity of scholars present, which is highly appropriate because such diversity is integral to an informed study of children's language.

Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory of both the fundamental principles for all possible languages and the language faculty in the "initial state" of the human organism. These two volumes approach the study of UG by joint, tightly linked studies of both linguistic theory and human competence for language acquisition. In particular, the volumes collect comparable studies across a number of different languages, carefully analyzed by a wide range of international scholars.
The issues surrounding cross-linguistic variation in "Heads, Projections, and Learnability" (Volume 1) and in "Binding, Dependencies, and Learnability" (Volume 2) are arguably the most fundamental in UG. How can principles of grammar be learned by general learning theory? What is biologically programmed in the human species in order to guarantee their learnability? What is the true linguistic representation for these areas of language knowledge? What universals exist across languages?
The two volumes summarize the most critical current proposals in each area, and offer both theoretical and empirical evidence bearing on them. Research on first language acquisition and formal learnability theory is placed at the center of debates relative to linguistic theory in each area. The convergence of research across several different disciplines -- linguistics, developmental psychology, and computer science -- represented in these volumes provides a paradigm example of cognitive science.

Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory of both the fundamental principles for all possible languages and the language faculty in the "initial state" of the human organism. These two volumes approach the study of UG by joint, tightly linked studies of both linguistic theory and human competence for language acquisition. In particular, the volumes collect comparable studies across a number of different languages, carefully analyzed by a wide range of international scholars. The issues surrounding cross-linguistic variation in "Heads, Projections, and Learnability" (Volume 1) and in "Binding, Dependencies, and Learnability" (Volume 2) are arguably the most fundamental in UG. How can principles of grammar be learned by general learning theory? What is biologically programmed in the human species in order to guarantee their learnability? What is the true linguistic representation for these areas of language knowledge? What universals exist across languages? The two volumes summarize the most critical current proposals in each area, and offer both theoretical and empirical evidence bearing on them. Research on first language acquisition and formal learnability theory is placed at the center of debates relative to linguistic theory in each area. The convergence of research across several different disciplines -- linguistics, developmental psychology, and computer science -- represented in these volumes provides a paradigm example of cognitive science.

This book relates the author's stories about how languages have integrated her being, and defined and formed her sense of self. The idea of writing autobiographical stories of her multilingual life came from her long-term commitment to foreign language teaching and from a recent, extremely rich and valuable experience teaching English to immigrants in the U.S. While reading and studying various aspects of second-language-related-theory -- linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and sociolinguistics literature -- the author realized how estranged language learners are from all the research, speculations, hypotheses, and achievements of scholarship. A Russian immigrant, the author tells stories to her ESL students to help them understand why and at what price successful language acquisition and acculturation is realistic. Not only can students learn from her stories which encourage discoveries about their own behaviors or problems, but they might want to respond and tell about their own struggles with a foreign language. By becoming writers and interpreters of her text and by making it their own, students can construct their own virtual texts. The stories told throughout are those of a language learner, who is also a linguist and language teacher. As such, they can bridge the gap between second language research and practical teaching and learning. Moreover, this book can help initiate language learners along with their teachers into scholarship. Second language teachers and graduate students preparing for a teaching career might see this book as an illustration and validation of the studied theory and an inner voice of their students at the same time. Multidisciplinary by nature, it can also be used in several college courses such as cultural anthropology, anthropo- and socio-linguistics, sociology, multicultural education, ethnography, bilingualism, and the study of immigrant experience. There are numerous applications of the book in the education

Contextualizing College ESL Classroom Praxis: A Participatory Approach to Effective Instruction provides pre-service and in-service teachers with a model for engaging in effective instruction with the variety of students encountered in college English as a second language or foreign language classrooms. Along with the model, the text is designed to help readers develop the tools to use it within a participatory approach. This approach, based on the principles of Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy, is combined with multicultural education and the general tenets of a communicative approach to language teaching. From the philosophical to the theoretical to the practical, these strands are combined into a cohesive whole.The underlying premise is that the best way to develop an understanding of a participatory approach is to engage in it. Throughout the book, readers are asked to apply problem-posing--a learning process that begins with naming issues, reflecting on them and possible solutions, and acting upon one's ideas. Questions addressed include:What is the nature of process over product?Is a new definition of effective instruction necessary?What are the factors that can affect second language acquisition?What do teachers believe about effective language instruction?What do students believe about effective language instruction?What makes pedagogy effective?How do teachers and students relate in the classroom?What does instruction mean for students?How can effective praxis be adapted to various contexts?Each chapter includes Pre-Reading Questions, Post-Reading Questions, a topic for a Reflective Journal, and Follow-Up Activities. These provide opportunities to enhance comprehension of the material, to co-construct new knowledge with classmates, and to review personal beliefs and ideas in an effort to modify or reinforce them in one's own de

This book compiles original studies investigating crosslinguistic child phonological development in typical and atypical settings, that is, protolanguage phonology. The chapters address topics and issues not widely or exhaustively reported in the literature, such as research on under-represented languages and foci of interest, as well as information that has remained little-known to the field. It documents recent developments on typically developing populations, and atypical developmental speech in children with autism, developmental language disorder affecting speech, childhood apraxia of speech, phonological assessment and intervention, phonological awareness in (a)typical contexts affecting literacy, and motor speech analysis in speech sound disorders. The book will be of interest to linguists and academic researchers, as well as postgraduate students who are investigating child language acquisition in monolingual settings.

Second Language Learning is an up-to-date survey and analysis of second language acquisition theory, from the early seventies through to the present day. It discusses the development of ideas in this expanding area of language study and looks at the implications of these ideas and directions for future research. Requiring some previous knowledge of second language acquisition research, this book will be of interest to advanced students and teachers of applied linguistics, second language learning and language pedagogy. Its study questions and activities, together with its useful bibliography and list of resources for the researcher, provide practical opportunities for replicating and extending the studies reported, as well as exploring further the principles presented in the book.

Who compiles dictionaries and other reference works? Which are used by whom? How do they achieve their purpose?Lexicography is a very important subject and the product of lexicography, the Dictionary, is a valuable resource in language learning.Teaching and Researching Lexicography explains the relations between lexicographic practice (dictionary-making) and theory (dictionary research), with special reference to the perspectives of: dictionary history dictionary criticism dictionary typology dictionary structure dictionary use The final section of the book contains a variety of useful resources, including relevant related websites, a glossary of terms and a bibliography of cited dictionaries. This section can also be found on the Teaching and Researching Lexicography companion web-site.Written in a highly accessible style, Teaching and Researching Lexicography provides the most comprehensive, up-to-date and international coverage of this field in English, and will be of great interest to lexicographers, language teachers and applied linguists.

This volume addresses salient theoretical issues concerning the validity of research methods in second-language acquisition, and provides critical analysis of contextualized versus sentence-level production approaches. The contributors present their views of competence versus performance, the nature of language acquisition data, research design, the relevance of contextualized data collection and interpretation, and the desirability of a particularistic nomothetic theoretical paradigm versus more comprehensive consideration of multiple realities and complex influencing factors. This book presents varying and antithetical approaches to the issues, bringing together the thinking and approaches of leading researchers in langauge acquisition, language education, and sociolinguistics in an engaging debate of great currency in the field.

This volume addresses salient theoretical issues concerning the validity of research methods in second-language acquisition, and provides critical analysis of contextualized versus sentence-level production approaches. The contributors present their views of competence versus performance, the nature of language acquisition data, research design, the relevance of contextualized data collection and interpretation, and the desirability of a particularistic nomothetic theoretical paradigm versus more comprehensive consideration of multiple realities and complex influencing factors. This book presents varying and antithetical approaches to the issues, bringing together the thinking and approaches of leading researchers in language acquisition, language education, and sociolinguistics in an engaging debate of great currency in the field.

The papers in this volume examine strategies for language acquisition and language teaching, focusing on applications of the strategic interaction method.

This edited book is a collection of studies on protolanguage phonology, referring to the development of children's autonomous linguistic systems from their first meaningful forms to complete cognitive and articulatory acquisition of language. The volume comprises chapters on child bilingual phonological development, understood as the acquisition or use of more than one linguistic code, whether actual languages, dialects, or communication modes, in an array of contexts. Such contexts include endogenous and exogenous bilingualism, heritage language, bilectalism, trilingualism, and typical and atypical use. The contributed works here will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students investigating language acquisition in bi-/multilingual settings, as well as those working on child phonological development across a variety of languages.

Over the last twenty years a major area of cognitive psychology has developed centred upon research into the issues of how visually presented words are processed so that they can be read and understood. The focus has been on how words are stored in the mental lexicon and retrieved during the reading process. If we possessed no mental lexicon, we would be unable to read. This book dedicates itself to a critical evaluation of the ideas that have emerged from this body of research. The text outlines the major models of lexical processing that have been put forward in the literature, and how they explain the basic empirical findings that have been reported. It then goes on to consider the possible influence that sentential context has on lexical processing, the impact of the pronunciation of a word on its visual processing, and the role played by internal word structure (i.e., syllables and morphemes) in the recognition of a word. A connectionist style model emerges during the course of the evaluation of these issues. This book is suitable for advanced students and researchers, and is intended to serve as a springboard for discussion and an inspiration for empirical research.

After decades of research most scholars generally agree that language acquisition is a complex and multifaceted process that involves the interaction of innate biologically-based mechanisms devoted to language, other non-linguistic cognitive and social mechanisms, linguistic input, and information about the social and physical world. Theoretical work in the field of language acquisition now needs to focus in greater depth and detail on some specific aspects of this general model, which is the main goal of this book. The chapters in this volume provide some new insights into one of the most remarkable accomplishments achieved by almost all children.
The particular questions that are raised by contributors include:
* What kinds of constraints operate on the process of language development?
* Which aspects of the acquisition process depend on language-specific mechanisms?
* Are there critical brain structures necessary for the acquisition of language?
* What role do cognitive and social mechanisms play in language development?
* How critical is perceptual input about the physical and social world?
* What is the specific role played by linguistic input in the child's construction of a linguistic system?
Questions are addressed from the perspective of children who come to the task of acquiring language with many hurdles to overcome, including deafness and blindness, mental retardation, autism, and prenatal or perinatal brain damage involving the left hemisphere.
Each section contributes some insight on how an innate language-specific biological substrate interacts with cognitive and social factors, as well as external information, to support the child's construction of a linguistic system. Studies of atypical children offer a singular contribution to this enterprise by allowing us to see the specific influences of each component, and in turn, they shed new light on how all children are able to acquire language so effortlessly and during such a brief period of development.

The world can seem strange and lonely when you step away from your family and everything you have tried to call your own. Yet beauty may also appear. In the autumn of 2019 Xiaolu travelled to New York to take up her position as a visiting professor for a year, leaving her child and partner behind in London. The encounter with American culture and people threatens her sense of identity and throws her into a crisis - of meaning, desire, obligation and selfhood. This is a memoir about separation - by continents, by language, and from people. It's about being an outsider and the desperate longing to connect. Xiaolu uses her exploration of language (one of the meanings of the word 'radical' is the graphic component, or root, of Chinese characters), and her own life, to create this unique text. At once a memoir, a dictionary, and an ardent love letter, it is an expression of her fascination with Western culture and her nostalgia for Eastern landscapes, and an attempt to describe the space in between. An archive of an artist's search for creative freedom, it is above all else an intimate account of her efforts to carve out a life of her own.

Anglophone students abroad: Identity, social relationships and language learning presents the findings of a major study of British students of French and Spanish undertaking residence abroad. The new dataset presented here provides both quantitative and qualitative information on language learning, social networking and integration and identity development during residence abroad. The book tracks in detail the language development of participants and relates this systematically to individual participants' social and linguistic experiences and evolving relationship. It shows that language learning is increasingly dependent on students' own agency and skill and the negotiation of identity in multilingual and lingua franca environments.

The correct use of English verb argument structure is crucial for foreign learners of the English language. Based on an experimental study recruiting 162 Chinese English learners at different proficiency levels, this book suggests that the acquisition of English transitivity alternation follows as a consequence of the cognitive processing of language input, which is induced by the nature of task requirements in different learning conditions and influenced by individual differences in language learning aptitude and proficiency level. Readers of this book will have a deeper understanding of all these variables involved and will learn that pedagogical issues should be considered in a more thorough, comprehensive manner to explore better solutions for English learning and teaching.

Originally published in 1983, the aim of this book was to discuss some fundamental problems of cognitive developmental psychology at the time. The theme which underlies the discussion is that scientific knowledge of the cognitive characteristics of other people starts from the cognitive instruments that we psychologist employ, viz. our theories, models, assumptions, methods of enquiry etc. Thus our scientific cognitive equipment not only provides the format in which cognition in other people is expressed, it also exemplifies, in some abstract sense, this cognition. The first part of the book deals with the concept of development in relation to the structure of developmental theories. It is argued that theories originate from (implicit) conceptual analyses of (implicit) final state definitions. Starting from this specific view on the nature of developmental theories, the second part of the book discusses perception and perceptual development.

Originally published in 1982, the editors felt that their field was clearly in need of explanatory accounts for many different areas. This volume presents statements of the status of research in several areas by scholars at the forefront of the discipline. It tries at the same time to juxtapose theoretical and experimental perspectives in order to display some of the major lines of tension in the field. Divided into 5 parts it covers: Theoretical Perspectives; Experimental Studies in Processing; Neuropsychological Studies in Processing; Studies in Development; followed by Commentary on some specific chapters.