Universal Grammar and the Initial State of Second Language Learning : Evidence of Chinese Multidialectal Children's Acquisition of English at the Synt

Under the Universal Grammar (UG) framework, this book discusses the latest research on the role of L1 bidialectism in L2 acquisition, with a particular focus on early Chinese(L1)-English(L2) learners. Responding to the long-standing concern of whether L2 learners have access to UG in the target language, it provides evidence of the positive role of L1 multidialectism in L2 learning and confirms the role of UG in L2 acquisition. This book is essential reading for postgraduates and researchers in language education, linguistics, applied linguistics, speech-language pathology and psychology. The clarification of Chinese as L1 is also of interest to language educators in multilingual contexts.

​Dr Weifeng Han currently lectures on linguistics and phonetics in speech pathology at Flinders University in South Australia. His teaching and research interests encompass what and how linguistics may contribute to what SLPs need for practice in multilingual and multicultural contexts. He is currently working on a series of projects investigating how the ability to use multiple dialects in the first language may affect the learning of English as a second language among Chinese child learners, and how this will have implications for speech and language diagnosis and assessment. He is an expert on the application of mixed methods in data analysis and discussion.