Theories in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction

This third edition of the best-selling Theories in Second Language Acquisition surveys the major theories currently used in second language acquisition (SLA) research, serving as an ideal introductory text for undergraduate and graduate students in SLA and language teaching.

Designed to provide a consistent and coherent presentation for those seeking a basic understanding of the theories that underlie contemporary SLA research, each chapter focuses on a single theory. Chapters are written by leading scholars in the field and incorporate a basic foundational description of the theory, relevant data or research models used with this theory, common misunderstandings, and a sample study from the field to show the theory in practice.

New to this edition is a chapter addressing the relationship between theories and L2 teaching, as well as refreshed coverage of all theories throughout the book. A key work in the study of second language acquisition, this volume will be useful to students of linguistics, language and language teaching, and to researchers as a guide to theoretical work outside their respective domains.

Bill VanPatten was a professor of Spanish at Michigan State University, where he was also an affiliate faculty in the Department of Cognitive Science. He is currently an independent scholar while he also pursues fiction writing in both English and Spanish. His primary areas of research within second language acquisition are the acquisition of formal properties of language, language processing and parsing, and the interface between processing and acquisition.

Gregory D. Keating is an associate professor of Linguistics at San Diego State University. His research interests include second language acquisition, heritage language bilingualism, sentence processing, and online methods. He is an associate editor of Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

Stefanie Wulff is an associate professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Florida, and between 2019 and 2023, Professor II at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Her research interests are in second language learning, quantitative corpus linguistics, and student writing development. She is the editor-in-chief of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (de Gruyter Mouton).