Applying Language Science to Language Pedagogy: Contributions of Linguistics and Psycholinguistics to Second Language Teaching

This book establishes a bridge between current research in Linguistics and Psycholinguistics and language pedagogy in the classroom. It reformulates the debates about teaching approaches by calling the reader’s attention to discoveries about the structure of grammar, the universals of language, mind processes while comprehending, producing and storing language, and facts about learning.The popularization of L2 teaching brought with it a need to find efficient teaching methods. Debates have hinged mainly around the alleged advantages of communicative vs. traditional methods. However, most approaches have their roots in linguistic and psychological theories that have been questioned by language researchers. Some language teachers are probably unaware of these advances and to that extent, continue to adhere to teaching approaches mainly based on intuitions. Consequently, evaluating materials may be often performed in rather uninformed circumstances.The book contains chapters on relevant issues by leading researchers, classified into three main areas. The editors contribute a chapter to each of these sections about the implications for second language teaching.This book facilitates an approximation between researchers in the theoretical and experimental fields of language and those responsible for innovation in language teaching. It is designed so that L2 teachers can adopt and adjust the knowledge drawn from the book to their particular environment and group of students.

About the Author :
Montserrat Sanz holds a PhD in Linguistics and Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She is a Full Professor in the Spanish Department at the Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, Japan. Her research on theoretical linguistics has focused on the syntax/semantics interface under the Minimalist framework. She authored the book Events and Predication: A New Approach to Syntactic Processing in English and Spanish, and has published articles on linguistics and psycholinguistics in several journals. Since the year 2000, she has directed a research team that explores the acquisition of Spanish by native speakers of Japanese.José Manuel Igoa holds a PhD in Psychology. He teaches Psycholinguistics and related subjects, like Cognitive Psychology, Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition, to undergraduate and graduate students at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. He co-authored a Spanish handbook on the psychology of language and has published book chapters and journal articles on word and sentence comprehension and production, figurative language understanding and bilingual language processing. His research interests cover various topics in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics.

Review :
'It is exciting to see, at long last, a collection of papers making explicit connections between practice in language instruction and research on linguistic theory, language acquisition, and language processing. The contributors to this volume ask how the scientific study of language can be applied in language classrooms, and offer delightfully diverse yet highly coherent answers to this question, spanning a range of topics that include the acquisition of syntax and the lexicon, the development of discourse processing and literacy, and sociocultural and communicative aspects of linguistic performance. This book foreshadows an imminent revolution in language instruction, where intentional pedagogies will be grounded on empirical evidence about how people learn and use language, and will be designed to instigate faster and easier paths to fluency and accuracy in the target language. Readers will not only benefit from the areas where stable findings in the literature can improve current practices and help develop new ones, but will also find of interest the multiple suggestions of new avenues for research on adult language acquisition and processing.'—Eva Fernández, Associate Professor, Linguistics & Communication Disorders, Director, Center for Teaching & Learning, Queens College, City University of New York'An important review of the implications of modern language science for informed language instruction' —Nick Ellis, University of Michigan'Second language learning is an active and promising area of research which is key to our understanding of human language. While the second half of the 20th century provided the conceptual and experimental tools for fascinating findings on how children develop language, this first half of the 21st century is already witness to surprising discoveries about how adults learn languages they did not grow up with. This book constitutes an excellent showcase of current research on second language learning, and anyone seeking to be seriously informed about frontier research on this topic, be it student, language teacher or researcher would be well adivised to read it, because it seeks to connect research findings and teaching, that is, to transfer what we know to what we do regarding teaching and learning languages.'—Itziar Laka, Full Professor, Linguistics, Director of The Bilingual Mind research group, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)