Patsy M Lightbown - How Languages Are Learned 5th Edition

How Languages are Learned

Fifth edition

Published in this series

Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers

Teaching American English Pronunciation

Peter Avery and Susan Ehrlich

Putting CLIL into Practice

Phil Ball, Keith Kelly, and John Clegg

Doing Second Language Research

James Dean Brown and Theodore S. Rodgers

Designing and Analyzing Language Tests

Nathan T. Carr

ESOL: A Critical Guide

Melanie Cooke and James Simpson

Supporting Learners with Dyslexia in the ELT Classroom

Michele Daloiso

Success in English Teaching

Paul Davies and Eric Pearse

English for Academic Purposes

Edward de Chazal

From Experience to Knowledge

Julian Edge and Sue Garton

Teaching Business English

Mark Ellis and Christine Johnson

Intercultural Business Communication

Robert Gibson

Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom

Tricia Hedge

Teaching Second Language Reading

Thom Hudson

Teaching English Overseas: An Introduction

Sandra Lee McKay

Teaching English as an International Language

Sandra Lee McKay

How Languages are Learned (5th Edition)

Patsy M. Lightbown and Nina Spada

Communication in the Language Classroom

Tony Lynch

Teaching Second Language Listening

Tony Lynch

Teacher Wellbeing

Sarah Mercer and Tammy Gregersen

Teaching Young Language Learners (2nd Edition)

Annamaria Pinter

The Oxford ESOL Handbook

Philida Schellekens

Exploring Learner Language

Elaine Tarone and Bonnie Swierzbin

Technology Enhanced Language Learning

Aisha Walker and Goodith White

Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca

Robin Walker

How Vocabulary is Learned

Stuart Webb and Paul Nation

Exploring Psychology in Language Learning and Teaching

Marion Williams, Sarah Mercer, and Stephen Ryan

Doing Task-based Teaching

Jane Willis and Dave Willis

Explaining English Grammar

George Yule

How Languages are Learned

Fifth edition

Patsy M. Lightbown & Nina Spada

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom

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Oxford University Press 2021

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eBook Edition

ISBN: 978 0 19 440630 7 eBook (epub)

First published in 2021

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors and publisher are grateful to those who have given permission to reproduce the following extracts and adaptations of copyright material : p.17 From Language Development and Language Disorders by Lois Bloom and Margaret Lahey, New York, Copyright 1978 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., reprinted by permission via PLS Clear; p.49 Adapted from Table 2.1 Average order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes for English as a second language (children and adults), Krashen 1977, reprinted by permission of Stephen Krashen; p.55 Speeding up acquisition of his and her: Explicit L1/L2 contrasts help, White, J., p.197 in Second Language Acquisition and the Younger Learner: Childs play? (2008), published by John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, https://benjamins.com/catalog/lllt.23, reprinted by permission; p.56 Adapted from Catherine Doughty, Second language instruction does make a difference: Evidence from an Empirical Study of SL Relativization in Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13 (4), 431469, reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press; p.150152 From Corrective Feedback and Learner uptake: Negotiation of Form in Communicative Classrooms by Lyster, R. & Ranta, L. (1997) in Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19 (1), p.3761, reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press; p.147148 From Talking it through: two French immersion learners response to reformulation by Swain, M. & Lapkin, S. (2002), in International Journal of Educational Research, 37 (34), 285304, Copyright 2002, reprinted by permission of Elsevier.

Illustrations by : Rupert van Wyk (working in the style of Sophie Grillet)/Beehive Illustration Agency

To the teachers and students from whom we have learned so much

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish first to thank the readers who have responded so positively to the four previous editions of this book. It is their enthusiastic response that has brought us to this fifth edition. We are grateful to readers who have sent us notes or approached us in seminars or at conferences to suggest new topics or sources and sometimes to point out places where we have made errors, or where we could have made our points more clearly. We cannot reconstruct a complete list of these informal contributions, but we hope those readers will recognize our efforts to respond to their concerns. We take full responsibility for remaining errors and limitations.

With each edition, we have benefited from suggestions and feedback offered by colleagues and students. Our thanks to Ahlem Ammar, Alexander Ary, Philippa Bell, Luz Celaya, Laura Collins, Maria Frhlich, Randall Halter, Zhaohong Han, Marlise Horst, Jim Hu, Phillip Hubbard, Youjin Kim, Roy Lyster, Alison Mackey, Kim McDonough, Shawn Loewen, Paul Meara, Imma Miralpeix, Vicki Murphy, Carmen Muoz, Heike Neumann, Howard Nicholas, Paul Quinn, Katherine Rehner, Mela Sarkar, Raquel Serrano, Younghee Sheen, Wataru Suzuki, and Yasuyo Tomita. Leila Ranta and Jude Rand made essential contributions to the first edition.

At Oxford University Press, we owe a debt to Henry Widdowson for his early encouragement and to Cristina Whitecross, who was our editor for the first three editions. Ann Hunter was a tireless editor for the fourth edition. We are grateful to Sophie Falcon-Lang, Yordanka Kavalova, and Antoinette Meehan, who have worked with us through the development of this new edition. Special thanks go to Julia Bell who oversaw the content editing of this new edition.

PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION

How Languages Are Learned started out as a series of professional development workshops for teachers in Quebec, Canada, where we both worked for many years. Four editions of the book have now travelled far from those origins. When we were working on the first edition in the 1980s and 1990s, we were still in the early days of remarkable growth of research in second language acquisition. For each new edition, the decisions about what to include have grown more difficult because research in the field has grown dramatically. Keeping the book to a reasonable length has often meant choosing between classics in the field and important new studies. As in the fourth edition, we have annotated some Suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter and we encourage readers to follow these publications and the reference list to deepen their understanding of topics that we can only introduce here.