AILA Review - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2006

This paper presents an overview of what has come to be known as the Interaction Hypothesis, the basic tenet of which is that through input and interaction with interlocutors, language learners have opportunities to notice differences between their own formulations of the target language and the language of their conversational partners. They also receive feedback which both modifies the linguistic input they receive and pushes them to modify their output during conversation. This paper focuses on the major constructs of this approach to SLA, namely, input, interaction, feedback and output, and discusses recent literature that addresses these issues.

This article examines a variety of options for conducting investigations of the effects of interventionist form-focused instruction (FFI). Constructs related to three key areas of form-focussed instruction are presented; (1) the type of instruction, (2) the target of the instruction, and (3) the definition and measurement of ‘language acquisition’. The constructs are illustrated by drawing on a representative set of FFI studies. The overall aim is to draw a conceptual map that can inform meta-analytical surveys of existing studies and the conceptualisation of new studies.

Ever since the early days of its existence, the field of psychology has been trying to achieve two different and somewhat contradictory objectives: to understand the general principles of the human mind and to explore the uniqueness of the individual mind. The latter direction has formed an independent subdiscipline within the field, usually referred to as individual difference (ID) research. IDs are a prominent feature of SLA because a great deal of the variation in language learning outcomes is attributable, either directly or indirectly, to various learner characteristics. This paper first provides an overview of the five most important ID variables (personality, aptitude, motivation, learning styles and learning strategies) and then concludes by describing certain common themes in contemporary ID research.

The study of language development in second language acquisition naturally leads to information about linguistic processes of second language acquisition, but it also sheds light on learners’ individual differences. This article examines the acquisition of the future in L2 English and explores how learners in a longitudinal study respond to input, instruction, and the general task of learning a second language through the lens of their grammatical development.

As one of several approaches to SLA as social practice, Conversation Analysis (CA) has the capacity to examine in detail how opportunities for L2 learning arise in different interactional activities. Its particular strength, and one that distinguishes it from other social practice approaches, is its consistent focus on the orientations and relevancies that participants display to each other through their interactional conduct. CA thus affords a distinct perspective on L2 learning as object and process. It enables researchers to reconsider such established SLA topics as fluency, correction, or the benefits of tasks for L2 learning, but also offers an acquisitional perspective on interactional conduct whose potential for L2 learning has been largely unexplored.

This paper outlines current cognitive perspectives on second language acquisition (SLA). The Associative-Cognitive CREED holds that SLA is governed by the same principles of associative and cognitive learning that underpin the rest of human knowledge. The major principles of the framework are that SLA is Construction-based, Rational, Exemplar-driven, Emergent, and Dialectic. Language learning involves the acquisition of constructions that map linguistic form and function. Competence and performance both emerge from the dynamic system that is the frequency-tuned conspiracy of memorized exemplars of use of these constructions, with competence being the integrated sum of prior usage and performance being its dynamic contextualized activation. The system is rational in that it optimally reflects prior first language (L1) usage. The L1 tunes the ways in which learners attend to language. Learned-attention transfers to L2 and it is this L1 entrenchment that limits the endstate of usage-based SLA. But these limitations can be overcome by recruiting learner consciousness, putting them into a dialectic tension between the conflicting forces of their current stable states of interlanguage and the evidence of explicit form-focused feedback, either linguistic, pragmatic, or metalinguistic, that allows socially scaffolded development. The paper directs the reader to recent review articles in these key areas and weighs the implications of this framework.