Contemporary Approaches to Second Language Acquisition in Social Context:Crosslinguistic Perspectives: Crosslinguistic Perspectives

Contemporary Approaches to Second Language Acquisition in Social Context contains new research in the area of social context and second language acquisition. In the past twenty years, an explosion of research is resulting in a better understanding of the total process of acquisition from multiple perspectives: cognitive, linguistic and social. Recently, the important implications of social factors in acquisition are being recognized. The book contains work by leading researchers in the field. It deals with an unusually wide variety of target and source languages, including English-speaking children acquiring Irish, Chinese adults acquiring Hungarian, Moroccan children acquiring Dutch and Dutch learners acquiring French.

Table of Contents:
The development of L2 acquisition of Moroccan children in the Netherlands, Petra Bos; speech rate variation in two oral styles of advanced French interlanguage, Jean-Marc Dewaele; language and identity in immigrant acquisition and use - a framework for integrating sociological, psychological and linguistic data, Norbert Dittmar, Bernard Spolsky and Joel Walters; what makes us think that students who study abroad become fluent? Barbara F. Freed; early immersion in Ireland, the Naionra experience, Tina Hickey; temporal reference in story retellings, comparison between French and American native speakers and French advanced learners of English, Monique Lambert; "aha" as a communication strategy - Chinese speakers of Hungarian, Juliet Langman; second language learning through interaction - multiple perspectives, Teresa Pica; the visible loanword - processes of integration seen in bare English-origin nouns in Ukrainian, Shana Poplack and Svitlana Budzhak-Jones.

Review :
"this collection gives a fascinating overview of the relationship between social context and second language acquisition which promises valuable insights for language teachers on the one hand and those interested in language and language acquisition on the other." Rachel Hoare, Trinity College Dublin The Irish Yearbook of Applied Linguistics 1999 "The variety of methodologies, correctly and imaginatively used, and the interest of the conclusions, both from the more empirical and the more reflective chapters of this book make it extremely useful for every scholar interested in second language acquisition." Richard Towell, University of Salford French Studies, LIV (1) 2000 "a well organized and well edited volume... For its range of topics and methods involved in the studies included in the volume, this book is to be recommended for graduate classes in SLA, providing good case studies for discussion." Daniel Veronique Universite de Paris VIII