The volume consists of articles on issues relating to the morphosyntactic development of foreign language learners from different L1 backgrounds, in many cases involving languages which are typologically distant from English, such has Polish, Greek and Turkish. It highlights areas which may be expected to be especially transfer-prone at both the interlingual and intralingual levels. The articles in the first part report empirical studies on word morphology and sentence patterns and also look at the interface of lexis and grammar in the discourse and syntactic processing of foreign language learners. The second part elaborates on pedagogical issues concerning the acquisition of difficult grammatical features such as the English article system or the ‘s’ ending in the third person singular. It also comments more generally on the way pedagogic grammar functions in the learning of the L2.
Danuta Gabryś-Barker is Professor of English at the University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland, where she lectures and supervises MA and PhD theses in applied linguistics and psycholinguistics, with a particular focus on second language acquisition and multilingualism. She has published numerous articles and books including The Affective Dimension in Second Language Acquisition (co-edited with Joanna Bielska, 2013) and Morphosyntactic Issues in Second Language Acquisition (2008). She is the co-editor of the International Journal of Multilingualism (Taylor & Francis) and the co-founder and the co-editor of the journal Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition (University of Silesia Press).