Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-r6qrq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T21:23:01.802Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

SLA RESEARCH AND LANGUAGE TEACHING.Rod Ellis.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. viii + 280. £19.10 paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2000

James P. Lantolf
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University

Abstract

Rod Ellis's latest offering addresses issues relating to the interface between SLA research and language pedagogy. To this end, the book opens with an informative and thought-provoking examination of applied SLA (research simultaneously encompassing the theory and practice of SLA and pedagogy), which, following Widdowson, Ellis distinguishes from SLA applied (extension of SLA findings to teaching). In this regard he discusses the difference between technical knowledge and “confirmatory,” often experimental, research on the one hand, and practical knowledge and “interpretative,” real world, observation-interactional research on the other. According to Ellis, the confirmatory tradition, which promotes an applied science (i.e., SLA applied) view of education, has been the dominant paradigm in the field. This tradition situates researchers at the top of the research-practice hierarchy as producers of information and locates teachers lower down on the hierarchy as information consumers.

Type
REVIEWS
Copyright
2000 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)