Summary:
The volume consists of articles on issues relating to the morphosyntactic development of foreign language learners from different L1 backgrounds, in many cases involving languages which are typologically distant from English, such has Polish, Greek and Turkish. It highlights areas which may be expected to be especially transfer-prone at both the interlingual and intralingual levels. The articles in the first part report empirical studies on word morphology and sentence patterns and also look at the interface of lexis and grammar in the discourse and syntactic processing of foreign language learners. The second part elaborates on pedagogical issues concerning the acquisition of difficult grammatical features such as the English article system or the 's' ending in the third person singular. It also comments more generally on the way pedagogic grammar functions in the learning of the L2.
Review:
This volume should be of interest not only to linguists and applied linguists, but also to graduate researchers of SLA since many of the contributions include reviews of the relevant theoretical issues. It is an excellent volume with challenging insights that should lead to a new thinking on morphosyntax development in SLA and to a departure from more traditional empirical data measurement to newer introspective-type research instrumentation.
Dr Muiris Ó Laoire, Department of Languages, Institute of Technology, Tralee, Ireland
Author Biography:
Danuta Gabrys-Barker is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland and also a teacher trainer and senior lecturer at Teacher Training College in Gliwice. Her main areas of interest are: multilingualism (especially at the level of mental lexicon), neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics (modalities and learner profiles), research methods in SLA (mainly introspective methods), reflective teaching and the role of action research in teacher development; and more recently researching syntactic issues in SLA. She has published numerous articles in these research areas as well as the book Aspects of multilingual storage, processing and retrieval, Katowice: University of Silesia Press, 2005.
Readership Level:
Postgraduate, Research / Professional
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