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THEORIES IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: AN INTRODUCTION. Bill VanPatten and Jessica Williams (Eds.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2008

Enchao Shi
Enchao Shi
Affiliation:
California State University, Northridge
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THEORIES IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: AN INTRODUCTION.Bill VanPatten and Jessica Williams (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2007. Pp. xiv + 261. $32.50 paper.

This volume consists of chapters contributed by a group of SLA experts whose work has had a significant influence on the field of contemporary SLA research. Its goal is to provide readers with accessible synopses of various approaches to the study of later language development. Twelve chapters define language either as a computational system that exists beyond general human cognition or as a dynamic system that links the two inextricably. All of them nonetheless presuppose that adult SLA is distinct in that its initial state is constitutive of a completed grammatical system. Each chapter, except for the introduction and the conclusion, follows the same format: introduction of the theory or approach, verification of its validity, discussion of its limitations, an illustrative study, and discussion of the theory's relevance to some of the SLA issues identified by VanPatten and Williams in the introduction. Each chapter ends with discussion questions and further suggested reading.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 265 - 266
Copyright
© 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

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