Investigations in Instructed Second Language Acquisition

Alex Housen, Michel Pierrard

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9783110197372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

Methods in current instructed second language acquisition research range from laboratory experiments to ethnography using non-obtrusive participant observation, from cross-sectional designs to longitudinal case studies. Many different types of data serve as the basis for analysis, including reaction times measurements, global test scores, paper and pencil measures, introspective comments, grammaticality judgements, as well as textual data (elicited or naturalistic, oral or written, relating to comprehension or production). Some studies rely on extensive quantification of data, while others may favour a more qualitative and hermeneutic analytic approach.
Many of these issues and methods are exemplified by the contributions to this volume. Data-based studies included here deal with the acquisition of specific linguistic phenomena (e.g. verb and noun morphology, lexicon, clause structures) in a range of target languages (e.g. English, French, German, Russian) from a variety of settings involving different instructional approaches (e.g. traditional foreign language classes, immersion classes, intensive ESL classes, content and language integrated language classes). Collectively, the chapters in this book illustrate the productivity and diversity of current research on instructed second language acquisition. As such they serve as a valuable resource for researchers in SLA, psycholinguistics, linguistics, and language education.

Table of contents

• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Investigating Instructed Second Language Acquisition
• Instructed learners’ fluency and implicit/explicit language processes
• Psycholinguistic aspects of gender acquisition in instructed GFL learning
• Language analytic ability and oral production in a second language: Is there a connection?
• Formal instruction and the acquisition of verbal morphology
• Teaching marked linguistic structures – more about the acquisition of relative clauses by Arab learners of English
• The importance of form/meaning mappings in explicit form-focused instruction
• Structure complexity and the efficacy of explicit grammar instruction
• Focus on formS as a means of improving accurate oral production
• Instructed Second Language Vocabulary Learning: The fault in the ‘default hypothesis’
• Negative feedback and learner uptake in analytic foreign language teaching
• Noticing and the role of interaction in promoting language learning
• Interactional strategies for interlanguage communication: Do they provide evidence for attention to form?
• Assessment of the role of communication tasks in the development of second language oral production skills
• Language learning in content-based instruction
• Effects of teacher discourse on learner discourse in a second language classroom
• Second language acquisition in a study abroad context: A comparative investigation of the effects of study abroad and foreign language instruction on the L2 learner’s grammatical development
• The effect of type of acquisition context on perception and self-reported use of swearwords in L2, L3, L4 and L5
• Backmatter