Multilingual Matters Input Matters in SLA (Second Language Acquisition): 35

Product Description This volume bridges the gap between theory and practice by bringing together well-known and new authors to discuss a topic of mutual interest to second language researchers and teachers alike: input. Reader-friendly chapters offer a range of existing and new perspectives on input in morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology. Review This book has the great merit of appealing to quite different kinds of reader. To delve into technically complex issues, second language researchers had to part company some time ago with the more practically oriented world of language pedagogy. Without understanding what happens in people s minds when they process what they are exposed to, we cannot make real progress in shaping efficient learning programmes but still we really need books like this one to bring issues of theory and issues of practice together. Input Matters covers a diversity of topics. Part 1 deals with more general issues and features some key players in the history of input studies, notably Stephen Krashen and Bill VanPatten. Kees de Bot and colleagues also provide a fresh new way of looking at how input is organised in the mind, providing diversity as well as depth to this first part of the book. Part 2, also featuring prominent researchers, focusses on phonology so speech input is the dominant theme. This book will have great appeal to theorists and practitioners alike. --Mike Sharwood Smith About the Author Thorsten Piske is affiliated with the University of Education in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany. His research focuses on first and second language acquisition and on bilingual education. He is well known for joint work with James E. Flege on factors affecting degree of foreign accent in a second language. He has done research on the production and perception of first and second language speech sounds and on the effectiveness of bilingual programs in kindergartens and primary schools. Currently at Newcastle University in England, Martha Young-Scholten works on morpho-syntax and phonology. She is well known for joint work with Anne Vainikka on uninstructed adults development of morpho-syntax in German. Prosodic structure, orthographic input and the phonological awareness of low-literate immigrant adults are some of the lines of research she pursues in the second language acquisition of phonology.