Books in the Second Language Acquisition series

This book provides an overview of current thinking and directions for further research in applied linguistics. The range of perspectives, original research agendas, innovative methodological approaches and productive research designs will make it a useful reference and stimulus for students, researchers and professionals.

This book introduces an innovative collection of easy-to-use computer programs that have been developed to measure and model vocabulary knowledge. It aims to help second language acquisition researchers explore some new instruments for L2 vocabulary research, providing examples of how the tools might be used in real research projects.

This book highlights the pivotal role that nonverbal behavior plays in target language communication, affect and cognition. It integrates research tenets and video demonstrations of nonverbal behavior with structured activities that will guide teachers and learners to capitalize on the nonverbal means at their disposal.

This book presents research on the learning of foreign languages by children in primary school settings. It covers issues that have been under-researched within this group of learners such as implicit/explicit learning, interaction, feedback provision, first language use, metalinguistic awareness, noticing and individual variables.

This book examines key issues in theories of what language is and what happens in the mind during second language acquisition. Chapters provide cutting-edge insights and new empirical findings spanning formal and cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and second language development, to understand the role of learner-internal factors in SLA.

This book is one of the few empirical studies to capture an in-depth understanding of the study abroad experiences of newly-arrived international students in higher education. It closely examines their changing learning goals, underlying motivations and strategy uses during both short and long academic programmes in a study abroad context.

This interdisciplinary book brings together a selection of theoretical and empirical approaches to second language (L2) fluency. The volume includes chapters approaching fluency from an SLA perspective and integrates perspectives from related fields, such as psycholinguistics, sign language studies and L2 assessment.

This book presents an array of new research on several current theoretical debates in the field of SLA. The studies address questions relating to ultimate attainment, first language transfer, universal properties of SLA, processing and second language (L2) grammar, and explore a number of grammatical features of the L2.

This book reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of pragmatic markers in written discourse in a third language (English) by secondary students living in the bilingual (Spanish and Catalan) Valencian Community in Spain. It examines pragmatic transfer, specifically positive transfer, in multilingual students from a holistic perspective.

The comprehension, retention and production of idiomatic expressions is one of the most difficult areas of the lexicon for second language learners to master. This book investigates this under-researched and interesting aspect of language acquisition, shedding light on conventional uses of idiomatic expressions as well as creative variant forms.

This book is the first in-depth examination of the application of theories of space to issues of second language learning. The author outlines a new conceptual framework for researching SLA that centres on the idea of 'language learning environments' and demonstrates that where people learn languages is equally as important as how they do so.

This book offers new insights into the language gains of adult learners enrolled in an English-medium instruction degree programme. It provides longitudinal evidence of the phonological gains of the learners and investigates whether increased exposure to the target language leads to incidental learning of second language pronunciation.

This is the first book to investigate the field of phraseology from a learner corpus perspective. It includes cutting-edge studies which analyse a wide range of multiword units and extensive learner corpus data to provide the reader with a comprehensive theoretical, methodological and applied perspective onto L2 use in a wide range of situations.

This book explores the motivations of adult second language learners in continuing education settings. It focuses on their learning trajectories and related dynamics of identity development and will be useful to language teachers and researchers interested in the role of affective elements in successful adult language learning.

This book examines the evidence relative to the idea that there is an age factor in first and second language acquisition, evidence that has sources ranging from studies of feral children to evaluations of language programmes in primary schools. It goes on to explore the various explanations that have been advanced to account for such evidence. Finally, it looks at the educational ramifications of the age question, with particular regard to formal second language teaching in the early school years and in 'third age' contexts.

Within the complex process of second language acquisition there lies a highly variable component referred to as the silent period, during which some beginning second language learners may not willingly produce the target language. Silence in Second Language Learning claims that the silent period might represent a psychical event, a non-linguistic as well as a linguistic moment in the continuous process of identity formation and re-formation. Colette Granger calls on psychoanalytic concepts of anxiety, ambivalence, conflict and loss, and on language learning narratives, to undertake a theoretical dialogue with the learner as a being engaged in the psychical work of making, and re-making, an identity. Viewed in its entirety, this study takes the form of a kind of triangulation of three elements: the linguistically described phenomenon of the silent period; the psychoanalytically oriented problem of the making of the self; and the real and remembered experiences of individuals who live in the silent space between languages.

This book explores the importance of cross-linguistic similarity in foreign language learning. While linguists have primarily focussed upon differences between languages, learners strive to make use of any similarities to prior linguistic knowledge they can perceive. The role of positive transfer is emphasized as well as the essential differences between comprehension and production. In comprehension of related languages, cross-linguistic similarities are easily perceived while in comprehension of distant languages they are merely assumed. Production may be based on previous perception of similarities, but frequently similarities are here merely assumed. Initially, effective learning is based on quick establishment of cross-linguistic one-to-one relations between individual items. As learning progresses, the learner learns to modify such oversimplified relations. The book describes the ways in which transfer affects different areas of language, taking account of the differences between learning a language perceived to be similar and a language where few or no cross-linguistic similarities can be established.