Talking About Second Language Acquisition

This book includes interviews with fourteen internationally-acclaimed leading figures in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), who speak on seminal issues in the field as well as their own contributions to SLA scholarship. As well as covering the contributors’ backgrounds and academic achievements, the interviews also delve into their areas of expertise, current theoretical and practical considerations, and contemporary questions, developments and challenges in SLA. The author probes their views on current topics including input and interaction, vocabulary acquisition, teaching pronunciation, writing development, syntactic processing, multilingualism, L1 attrition, complex dynamic systems, processing instruction, instructed second language acquisition, and technology in language teaching. An introduction by the author draws out the key themes and debates in the field today, and highlights areas for future research and further exploration, and a foreword is provided by Rod Ellis. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Applied Linguistics, Teacher Education and Methodology, and Second and Foreign Language Education.