Customer Reviews

Psycholinguistics (Oxford Introductions to Language Study)

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The Oxford Introductions to Language Study are known to be very dense, giving birth to many ideas on each turn of a page. "Psycholinguistics" is not an exception to this rule.

The book's structure is very well organized, allowing the reader to focus on his own interests. There are four sections as usual (Survey, Readings, References and Glossary). The Survey is the core of the text. In the Readings section, the reader is asked some interesting questions that may be the subject of hours of discussion -- this is one of the book's qualities. The References, however are usually to quite expensive technical books (with a few exceptions), so that the reader is disencouraged to go further on his studies. The Glossary is quite clear, but you keep going back and forward through it as the entries interlink.

This is a book for you to think about language. I do highly reccommend it if you are into linguistics and you want to experience a flavor of psychology and even philosophy.

Be careful and note for whom this book is intended.

It is supposed to be a concise introduction to psycho-linguistics for people training to be ESL and EFL teachers.

I found it way too concise--that is, lacking too much.

It is also out of date on some key issues, such as categorical perception and the existence (or non-existence) of the phoneme.

This book could have been developed in two different directions, either of which might have benefited the intended readership. (1) It could have included about 50 more pages of the history of related fields and their development and then explained psycho-linguistics in terms of the issues that concern ELT/TESL/TEFL/TESOL the most: second language acquisition, listening perception, articulation, and reading processes, etc. Or, (2) it could have given a somewhat more complete and technical explanation of psycho-linguistics.

Overall, it was a disappointing book to read. There are far better introductions to psycho-linguistics (such as Garman, CUP). Meanwhile, academics in ELT ought to stop playing around with superficial approaches to 'cross-disciplinary studies'. Instead, they ought to face up to the bleak reality: theirs is a field run by a big business mentality. Intellectually speaking, ELT has never really got past a superficial understanding of structuralism and behaviourism, which might explain the amateurish efforts at producing 'research' that now pollute most journals that language teachers are supposed to take an interest in.

Finally, the lack of an index is inexcusable.

Since it is not available in my country, in termz of price, quality, and delivery it is just excellent