Customer Reviews

The Age Factor in Second Language Acquisition (Multilingual Matters)

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This book is wonderful.

This is an academic book addressing not only second language acquisition (SLA) in reference to age, but it also acknowledges a need for the adoption of an interdisciplinary approach for SLA research. There is a lot of reference made to the works of Penfield, Milner, and Hebb for example. Despite the large volume of books on SLA - this is quite a specialty.

One very important area addressed is a "kind of" criticism on research that is currently conducted in that most SLA oriented research (perhaps it would be safe to say educational research: in general) is based on short-term studies hence short-term memory and the explicit dimension of memory. This is quite a flaw in research, and unfortunately a lot of untrained linguists conduct such research and jump to conclusions that inform the field. This book addresses this and having read this over a decade ago had a great influence on how I approached my thinking/conclusions regarding perceptions and views within SLA discussion.

It also looks at the familiar area of "focus on form" and "consciousness-raising" as it was written before Sharwood-Smith detracted the term and replaced it with input enhancement. So - if you are interested in either: noticing, consciousness-raising, or input enhancement, this may also be of value to you.
This is an academic resource, a very good one, but not popular fiction here. For the great majority this would not be a good read - I recommend this for those with deep interests in linguistics, SLA, or age-language matters. If this is your cup of tea this book may be a sugar cube for it.