Investigations in Instructed Second Language Acquisition

This book gives an overview of current research on instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). Data-based studies included in this book 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 instructional settings involving different instructional approaches (e.g., traditional foreign language classes, immersion classes, intensive ESL classes, content and language integrated language classes). Several of the chapters focus on the role of form-focused and meaning-focused instruction in L2 learning, but other issues such as the role of crosslinguistic influence, awareness, implicit and explicit processing mechanisms, memory and the properties of classroom input are also discussed. Although the interest in instruction in this volume is acquisitional rather than pedagogical, and all the chapters address theoretical questions, several also suggest pedagogical implications for language educators. As such this volume will be a valuable resource for researchers in SLA, psycholinguistics, linguistics, and language pedagogy.

Alex Housen is Lecturer at the University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Michel Pierrard isProfessor of Linguistics at the University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)