Themes in SLA Research: AILA Review, Volume 19 (review)

This book will be most welcomed by those interested in a recent overview of main themes in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Many of these themes have been the focus of research and teaching in the Canadian context as well.

Themes in SLA Research is a collection of papers presented for the symposium Main Themes in Second Language Acquisition Research, organized by Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig and Zoltán Dörnyei at the Fourteenth World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA), held in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2005. The contributors to this symposium were all leading scholars in SLA: Susan Gass and Alison Mackey, Rod Ellis, Zoltán Dörnyei, Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig, Gabriele Kasper, and Nick Ellis. These scholars summarized, clarified, and expanded their symposium presentations with the aim of providing an overview of their respective themes in SLA: (a) input, interaction, and output; (b) form-focused instruction; (c) individual differences; (d) interlanguage development; (e) conversation analysis; and (f) cognitive perspectives on SLA. It is fair to say that all the strands in this book are among the most researched areas in SLA over the last decade.

Gass and Mackey provide an overview of the roles of input, interaction, and output in second language (L2) acquisition. They begin with a brief discussion of the Interaction Hypothesis, which subsumes Krashen's Input Hypothesis and Swain's Output Hypothesis. This is followed by a section on how communicative interaction facilitates L2 learning by focusing on key constructs that have been widely discussed in the last decade and will be researched in the coming years: noticing, recasts, language-related episodes, and learners' perception of corrective feedback.

R. Ellis offers a framework that can help SLA researchers make methodological choices in researching the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) on L2 acquisition. In his framework, he addresses three methodological concerns in FFI studies: (a) the type of instruction, (b) the choice of target structures, and (c) the measurement of acquisition. It has been increasingly important for researchers to define these constructs a priori in conducting valid and reliable FFI research. This chapter also clarifies confusing terminology in FFI research (e.g., focus-on-form vs. focus-on forms, explicit vs. implicit instruction).

Dörnyei provides an overview of individual differences (IDs) in SLA, with a brief introduction of IDs literature in psychology. The most important individual differences in learner characteristics are (a) personality traits, (b) language aptitude, (c) language learning motivation, (d) language learning styles, and (e) language learning strategy. Dörnyei also identifies three important themes to be explored in SLA: (a) the context-dependent/situated nature of IDs, (b) combined effects of various ID factors on the prediction of L2 performance, and (c) integration of ID research and mainstream SLA research, such as Interaction (see Gass & Mackey) and FFI (see R. Ellis).

Bardovi-Harlig analyzes acquisitional sequences in interlanguage development (future expressions in English) in her longitudinal study and shows what learners share and where they differ. Like Dörnyei, she concludes that future research on interlanguage development should explore many other aspects that have already been researched in mainstream SLA (e.g., noticing, the type of instruction, the role of output) and IDs research (e.g., motivation, attitudes).

Kasper highlights the importance of conversation analysis (CA) in SLA. The basic tenet of CA in SLA is that L2 learning is 'socially constituted in and through interaction in situated activities' (p. 83). Kasper begins with a brief history of CA in sociology and CA in SLA, which is followed by a section on how the CA perspective leads to the reconceptualization of the object and processes of L2 learning from intra-individual-oriented to inter-individual-oriented dimensions. Kasper concludes with two potential ways to address both inter-and intra-individual aspects of L2 learning: (a) by linking CA with sociocultural theory or language socialization and (b) by extending the scope of CA itself from the perspective of socially distributed learning...