INTRODUCTION

Second language acquisition (SLA) is a relatively new discipline, dating back only some 40-odd years. It seeks to describe and explain how learners acquire a second language (L2). In this sense, second refers to any language other than the learner’s first language (i.e., it includes foreign as well as third or fourth languages).

Initially SLA was closely connected with language pedagogy as many of the early researchers involved were language teachers or teacher educators. Increasingly, however, SLA has become an autonomous field of study, drawing on a number of other disciplines – linguistics, psychology, sociology, as well as education. In its current form it constitutes a rich and far-reaching discipline, addressing a wide range of issues, not all of which are of relevance to teacher education. In recent years, a number of distinct branches of SLA have developed, one of which – instructed SLA – concerns the relationship between instruction and L2 acquisition. Arguably, it is this area of study that is of most immediate relevance to teacher education.

Language teacher education – the core topic of this book – embraces both pre- and in-service education in courses of varying lengths – ranging from a year or longer to a few hours. Thus, although most teacher educators would acknowledge that language teachers need an understanding of how learners learn an L2, there can be no single recipe for incorporating SLA into a teacher education course. In the following sections I will offer a number of different approaches for utilizing the findings of SLA in teacher education programs.

SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS

WHAT DO TEACHERS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SLA?

The main areas of inquiry in SLA are now well established. Widely used textbooks in language teacher education, such as Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991), Ellis (1985, 1994, 1997, 2008), Towell and Hawkins (1994), and Gass and Selinker (2001), all cover the topics listed and described in Table 1, although they label them somewhat differently (e.g., where Ellis has a chapter on “variability” Gass and Selinker’s corresponding chapter is called “interlanguage in context”). Judging from these standard textbooks, then, these are SLA topics that teachers need to know about. It can be argued, however, that not all of them are of equal relevance to language teachers.