Innovation in Intensive English Programs

This month we published Innovation in University-Based Intensive English Programs edited by Jason Litzenberg. In this post Jason introduces the book.

Intensive English Programs (IEPs) are special types of English Language Programs that serve international students who want to take part in US higher education, although many IEPs also frequently offer short-term English language programming as “study abroad” opportunities. IEPs are a common feature of US higher education, used by institutions for bridging students into English-only classrooms. IEPs exert wide-ranging impact on the wider field of English Language Teaching: Researchers and academics in applied linguistics from around the world attest to having begun their careers in IEPs. Moreover, IEPs are sites of language acquisition research, provide practicum experience to pre-service teachers, and link theory and practice through curricular innovation and experimentation.

Innovation in University-based Intensive English Programs: From Start to Future begins with three chapters that trace the early beginnings of IEPs in the US to present day. It then considers the impact of these programs across topics such as applied linguistics, higher education, pedagogy, professionalism, the local community, social responsibility, corporatization, raciolinguistics, international relations and technology. The book ends with a forward-looking chapter inferring directions for future programs. The volume specifically looks at the concept of innovation, but also never really defines the term. Instead, contributors present their own conceptualizations of innovation through the content of their chapters, highlighting the range of ways that IEP professionals interpret their relationship to innovation in their area of expertise.

Even though the book mostly looks at language programs in the United States, the integrative and wide-ranging subject matter of the chapters is relevant to ELT professionals at all types of English language programs around the world (e.g. adult and community education programs, binational centers, international schools, proprietary language schools, and so forth). That is, regardless of the actual type of English language program where one might work, ELT professionals will find relevancy in these chapters. This book expands upon other publications about IEPs and English Language Programs in that it is less oriented toward program administrators (although certainly of interest to them!), and it doesn’t use IEPs as an anonymous (or often merely convenient) backdrop for research. Indeed, by considering language program operations and their relationship to the wider field, this volume is of interest to language instructors, pre-service teachers, and teacher educators and researchers who wish to contextualize their work. The final chapter of the book encourages practitioners to engage in “conscientious innovation” toward a more socially just and sustainable profession – a reassuring message that is sure to impact the careers of both current and future teachers.

For more information about this book please see our website. 

If you found this interesting, you might also like Antisocial Language Teaching by JPB Gerald.

Why Should Forced Migration be Considered in Research on Language Learning?

This month we published Language Learning and Forced Migration edited by Marte Monsen and Guri Bordal Steien. In this post the editors explain why it’s important to consider forced migration in language learning research.

When you listen to debates about migration in some European countries, you might get the impression that the rest of the world spend their life waiting for an opportunity to pack their bags and penetrate the European borders. As academics living in Norway, we are used to a discourse where adult language learners are portrayed as people who came to Norway voluntarily and need to meet strict Norwegian language requirements to prevent too many others taking the same journey. Researchers on second language acquisition also tend to view second language learning for adults as voluntary, and of course, many people both move across borders and learn new languages voluntarily for work, for studies or even just for the sake of new experiences.

However, many people experience that they are moved across borders with force. In Norway, the immigration policies are strict, so migrants coming to Norway from outside the EU will not be able to settle in Norway unless they are in special need of protection, such as UN resettlement refugees. Adult second language learners in Norway are thus usually forced migrants. In our work, we have met people who have been forced from their homes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, often by means of cruelty beyond our imagination. They have fled on foot to Uganda, where they have lived a rough life in a sort of limbo, as they know their life in Uganda is only temporary. Under these circumstances, many of them have learned new languages through communicating with people “in the streets”, and many of them have large language repertoires. After years in transit, sometimes decades, they have been resettled in Norway, where few or none of their current language resources are valued. Entering many countries in the Global North entails forced attendance of classes to learn the host language, as is also the case for Norway.

The language courses and language tests that the migrants will come up against in Norway and other European countries are based upon the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). A well-known critique of this framework is that it allows policymakers to easily use language proficiency levels as standards and gatekeepers, while the empirical foundation for these standards is weak, and while the descriptions of language proficiency in CEFR initially was developed to measure foreign language learning by students. Well used concepts within SLA that might further guide the language courses, like Selinker’s theories on interlanguage or various models of motivation or investment in language learning, are also based upon knowledge from students or voluntary migrants. This means that a large number of people that attend language classes in the Global North enter a system that lacks knowledge of their language backgrounds, their needs and their lived experience.

Because of the unique situation of refugees and other forced migrants, we believe we need a research agenda that takes into consideration the experiences of people who have been forced to cross borders. That is what we hope to initiate with our book Language Learning and Forced Migration.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Crossing Borders, Writing Texts, Being Evaluated edited by Anne Golden, Lars Anders Kulbrandstad and Lawrence Jun Zhang.

Exploring Usage-Based Approaches to Language Learning

We recently published Usage-Based Dynamics in Second Language Development edited by Wander Lowie, Marije Michel, Audrey Rousse-Malpat, Merel Keijzer and Rasmus Steinkrauss. In this post Wander explains the inspiration behind the book.

To the best of our knowledge, there is no single theory in applied linguistics that denies the role of input for language learning. Without input, as a source of frequent systematicity and a rich variety of language exemplars, children will not acquire their mother tongue (L1) and adults will not learn a second language (L2). It is on these premises of frequency, systematicity, richness and variety that usage-based approaches attempt to explain the exciting path of language learning. In this book, we take these constructs as a starting point to explore the many avenues of usage-based approaches to language acquisition, with a focus on L2 learning. Grounded in complex dynamic systems theory (CDST), the different chapters showcase how second language researchers investigate language learning from many different angles using a variety of methods for lab-based studies, for classroom interventions and to explore language learning in the wild. The volume thus clearly shows the many different research questions that benefit from usage-based approaches to language learning.

The home of the editors, Groningen University in the Netherlands, has been a centre for CDST-inspired L2 research for quite some time, generating cutting-edge publications from such a CDST perspective. This book forms a natural contribution to this line of research while at the same time being a celebration of the legacy of Marjolijn Verspoor, who has been a driving force behind the Dynamic Usage-Based approach in second language acquisition (SLA) research. Contributors to the edited volume have all been fortunate enough to be influenced by Marjolijn in some way: from her source of inspiration as a theorist, via long-standing colleagues and fellow pioneers within CDST – starting in times when generativists ruled the field of linguistics – and mid-career faculty presenting state-of-the-art methodologies, to young researchers that were formed by her as MA students or graduated under her supervision, as well as language teaching colleagues in the department who, inspired by her, implemented usage-based pedagogy in their classrooms.

We are particularly proud that the edited collection covers the wide variety of usage-based work, painting the dynamic picture of this field of SLA research in all its facets and, moreover, by colleagues at different career stages. Authors studied different source and target languages (e.g., Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Russian), explored language learning in instructed settings of adolescents in high-school as well as young adults at university, or even naturalistic contexts beyond the confines of instruction, for example in social media. Using quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods approaches, the research collected in this volume investigates both oral and written language development, both cross-sectionally but also adopting a longitudinal perspective where learners are followed over several years.

The result is a colourful illustration and celebration of the dynamic trajectory of usage-based research into second language development, building on the legacy of eminent scholars, such as Marjolijn Verspoor, while at the same time paving the way for a bright future of CDST-inspired classroom implementations.

For information, please contact Wander Lowie: w.m.lowie@rug.nl

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Profiling Learner Language as a Dynamic System edited by ZhaoHong Han.

Focusing on Phonology in Child Language Acquisition Research

This month we published On Under-reported Monolingual Child Phonology edited by Elena Babatsouli. In this post, the editor writes about how her new book contributes to the field of child language acquisition research.

Early evidence of philosophical thought on how language is acquired dates back to Classical Greece in the 4th and 5th centuries BC. Even nowadays several language acquisition publications — reviews or actual research — pose the logical problem of acquisition: how language is acquired, known as Plato’s problem. More recently, fundamental philosophical insights waver between two opposing perspectives, namely, the rational (e.g. Noam Chomsky) and the empirical stance (e.g. B.F. Skinner).

For language acquisitionists, there is also a distinct difference between the logical problem of acquisition and the developmental problem of acquisition (Hornstein & Lightfoot 1981).

The distinguished child linguist David Ingram differentiates between research on language acquisition, as one substantiated by ‘what people know’, and research on child language, substantiated by ‘what children say’. Thus, a comprehensive model of child language development needs to combine knowledge of how grammar is practiced during language acquisition, with how learnerability evolves in human offsprings. Furthermore, for such a model to have universal applicability, all aspects of the acquisition of grammar, across all natural languages, and across language acquisition contexts, need to be accounted for.

This necessitates ongoing research into individual children’s linguistic development as well as across several children’s collective developmental linguistic data from infancy and toddlerhood to about school age (i.e. protolanguage). Further elucidation comes by comparing children’s speech outputs (phonological systems) in typical development contexts, in atypical development contexts (i.e. in the presence of disorder or impairment), and in cases where intervention and therapy are practiced.

In the midst of everything, child language data (empirical proof) are the driving force behind theoretical suppositions (rationalizing).

The present volume, On Under-reported Monolingual Child Phonology, adds a tile on the edifice that makes up child language acquisition research, with a particular focus on the development of phonology (i.e. the study of human speech sounds). It has been a while since a compilation of this type has appeared in the book literature, in spite of the gradually increasing upsurge of related research undertaken in the field.

Also, there has not been a volume previously published that attempts to fill in general knowledge gaps that concern scientists, interested colleagues, and novices in child phonological development — some evidence-based, some theoretical, some purely informative.

Like the auburn-haired child on its cover, On Under-reported Monolingual Child Phonology stands out as a unique and singular contribution that pays homage to every child, every parent, every parent-linguist, every scientist, and every group effort (contributors, books, conferences) that makes child language research the vibrant collaborative enterprise that it is.

I am thankful for the opportunity to put this book together and hopeful that it will occupy a deserving place in the procession of similar struggles since the ‘official’ commencement of crosslinguistic child phonological research in the early 20th century.

Elena Babatsouli
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
elena.babatsouli@louisiana.edu

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like An Anthology of Bilingual Child Phonology edited by Elena Babatsouli and Martin J. Ball.

Taiwan’s Gendered Language Learning Ideologies

This month we published Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital by Mark Fifer Seilhamer. In this post the author talks about the research that informed the book.

The title of my new book just out this month is Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital: Taiwanese Narratives of Struggle and Strategy, with ‘Gender’ prominently foregrounded as the first element of this title. But while ‘Neoliberalism’ and ‘Distinction through Linguistic Capital’ had been dominant themes since the very beginning of the manuscript’s preparation, the extent to which my focal participants’ (female) gender impacted their experiences is an issue that was addressed only fleetingly in the manuscript I originally submitted to Multilingual Matters back in 2016. This early version featured a fairly straightforward class-focused Bourdieusian analysis of my participants’ narrated experiences, seemingly (in retrospect) oblivious to the fact that gender does indeed play an outsized role in my participants’ stories, as well as in the dynamics of multilingualism in Taiwan more generally.

The centrality of gender to my participants’ experiences as language learners was pointed out by a reviewer, who asked what I made “of the fact that some students are quite successful at making friends with foreigners, getting free language practice, lining up Skype partners, having boyfriends to talk English with and to pay for trips abroad”. This reviewer went on to pose other questions that served to guide my radical overhaul of the manuscript: “Are young women considered ideal candidates for the sorts of international marketing/public relations/sales jobs many of the women get? How are ideologies of language acquisition gendered in Taiwan, and are these women seen as compromised in terms of their relationships and friendships with foreigners?”

Ideologies of language acquisition are indeed highly gendered in Taiwan, with the idea that males are simply no good at learning languages regarded by many as a commonsensical notion. This common belief results, of course, in language study beyond minimum requirements being almost exclusively the preserve of females. At the start of this research, I did not set out to include only female participants. In the junior college program specializing in languages that I was recruiting participants from, male students were, however, very much in the minority and my pool of possible participants consisted almost entirely of female students. Because it is commonly believed that female brains are specifically wired for learning languages, young women are encouraged to study foreign languages and pursue careers in international marketing, public relations, and interpreting – the sorts of occupations that my participants did, in fact, wind up in. My participants, in their interviews, had indeed addressed Taiwan’s gendered language learning ideologies and the notion of gendered language work, as well as positioning by others due to their relationships with foreigners. In my revisions, the focus on gender and the intersectional questioning that this focus necessitated really did change the fundamental character of the book.

In what now seems to be a glaring omission, I neglected to include an ‘Acknowledgements’ page for this book. This can be attributed to the extreme sense of relief I felt when the editors allowed me to go over the stipulated word limit with my final revised manuscript. Looking back now, I’m pretty sure they would have had no problem with my adding an ‘Acknowledgements’ page, but at the time, I was reluctant to request any more words for anything. I will take this opportunity now then to acknowledge the assistance and contributions of numerous individuals: my study’s participants, without whom the research and book would not have been at all possible; my doctoral thesis supervisors, Lionel Wee, Joseph Sung-Yul Park, and Mie Hiramoto; and everyone at Multilingual Matters, who were all incredibly patient with me, granting me extension after extension as I struggled to address reviewer concerns. And I am also immensely grateful to the anonymous reviewer who alerted me to the inadequacies of the earlier version of my manuscript – before gender was prominently brought to the fore.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Language, Education and Neoliberalism edited by Mi-Cha Flubacher and Alfonso Del Percio.

10 Things You Might Not Have Known About Multilingualism

We recently published Twelve Lectures on Multilingualism edited by David Singleton and Larissa Aronin. In this post the editors reveal 10 things you might not have known about multilingualism…

1. 

   Are dogs multilingual?

   Multilingualism is a specifically human feature. Other species generally use only their own communication systems. Interesting exceptions are domesticated animals which learn to understand human instructions like sit, stay and whoa, as well as apes who have been taught the rudiments of sign language!

2. The use of two or more languages by individuals almost certainly goes back to the very beginnings of humans’ experience of language and in today’s world is a feature of the profile of a majority of the world’s population.

3. This latter fact is unsurprising when we consider the number of human languages in the world. Despite the yearly extinction of languages, estimations of this number typically revolve around 6,000 but dramatically increase as soon as we take into account non-standardized language varieties popularly known as “dialects”.

4. 

   “Thank you!” in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish

   Sometimes you do not even need to have learnt a language in order to understand it! “Receptive multilingualism” is a phenomenon which is common among speakers, of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, where mutual understanding is assured by the closeness of the languages in question. Within other language families too the phenomenon of language proximity facilitating understanding is fairly widespread.

5. Very often, everyday communication and language-based reflection depend largely on neither one single language nor a person’s entire language repertoire. Instead, small sets of languages (two, three or four), labelled as “Dominant Language Constellations”, provide the principal resources for language use and mainly underlie patterns of language use.

6. A multilingual may either acquire his/her languages together from infancy or may acquire them sequentially at different ages. A common cliché is that languages learnt beyond childhood will inevitably be condemned to remain at a low level of proficiency, but the reality is that very many adolescent and adult learners of additional languages do so well that they routinely pass for a native speakers of the languages in question.

7. On the question of age and language acquisition it is also necessary to say that such acquisition also does not stop at any point in life. Our capacity to go on learning languages, including learning aspects of our native language, continues until the very end of our lives.

8. Bilingualism and multilingualism (three +) are close, overlapping in many ways, but also seem to be significantly different from each other. There is little doubt that, with more experience in multilingual learning, additional language mechanisms develop that would not otherwise be there. These are important not only in language acquisition and teaching, but also in relation to dealing with multilingual communities.

9. Multilinguals who (because of e.g. stroke or brain surgery) lose their languages have various patterns of recovering them. Recovery patterns in bilingual speakers can be parallel (when all languages improve at similar rates), differential (when one of the languages shows recovery but the others show less recovery or none at all), or selective (when the recovery of some languages comes before the recovery of others). There is also sometimes an incidence of blended recovery – when speakers lose control of their ability to keep their languages apart, and unintentional mixing of elements from their languages ensues. Finally, in antagonistic recovery, the language most available to the patient may change every few days.

10. The question of whether there is – in a general sense – a “multilingual advantage” is a fraught one. It has been pointed out that the impressive linguistic skills possessed by polyglots sometimes coexist with inadequacies in other areas of life. It may be objected that such observations apply to a very small category of multilingual individuals. A better understanding of such cases may, however, contribute to a fuller and perhaps more broadly applicable sense of individual multilingual possibilities.

 

For more information about Twelve Lectures on Multilingualism please see our website.

The Amazing Mind of the Multilingual Language User

We recently published Mind Matters in SLA edited by Clare Wright, Thorsten Piske and Martha Young-Scholten. In this post the editors discuss what is unique about the book.

“I really love the cover of Mind Matters in SLA, but why do you have jugglers and acrobats?” – this was one of the most frequent comments we heard around the Multilingual Matters stands at conferences this autumn. This book is the companion volume to Input Matters in SLA, published by Multilingual Matters in 2009, with a similar cover by the wonderful artist Ellen Harris. The beauty but also the hard work that underpins successful acrobatics seems to us an ideal way of picturing the complex and amazing processes in the mind of the multilingual language user.

We wanted our volume to go to the heart of the debates that still go on around what the nature of language knowledge is, and – more importantly for us – how that knowledge develops and can be used. So we invited authors who are an eclectic mix of established leaders in their field and rising star researchers to create a well-rounded resource, which we hope will inspire readers, particularly those new to language acquisition, to think in new and exciting ways about second language teaching and learning.

The book is unique in some ways providing a bridge between formalism and functionalism, allowing the reader to explore points of convergence between Minimalist accounts and emergentist/processing accounts, and providing access to cutting-edge research on how learners make transitions during linguistic development. The book is also unique in being committed to being accessible to non-experts. We’ve ensured the volume is easily readable by those who will benefit from it most, i.e. students training to be language teachers, students on postgraduate programmes and professionals keen to reflect on their language teaching practice.

Another unusual aspect of the book is its historical range over what may lie behind modern theories and debates. We highlight just how long some of these questions have taxed scholars – we specifically include a chapter on language evolution, and other chapters make reference to the centuries of thinking about language, dating back to antiquity. The first section of the book focuses on issues that relate to our current understanding of language in general, to acquisition and to second language acquisition, including why human language (particularly syntax) is special, from both generative and non-generative perspectives. The second section includes work on issues currently debated in property-theoretic work in SLA on L2 morpho-syntax, phonology and speech perception, the lexicon and attrition. The third section, focusing on transition research, covers psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research impacting L2 development, including models of L2 acquisition in and out of the classroom. As with Input Matters in SLA, we’ve included a glossary to define complex terms, and we have ensured chapters can be related to real-world settings to help the reader understand at least some of the possible reasons behind of the old mystery of “why don’t learners learn what the teacher teaches?” (Allwright 1984).

As with all edited volumes, there can be unexpected delays along the way, and we are grateful to Multilingual Matters for their support during the long process of finally getting this one out – to the delight (and relief) of contributors and editors when they saw it on the conference stand!

References:

Allwright, R. (1984) Why don’t learners learn what teachers teach?  The interaction hypothesis. In D.M Singleton and D.G. Little (eds) Language Learning in Formal and Informal Contexts (pp 3–18). Dublin: IRAAL

For more information about this book please see our website. If you found this interesting, you might also like Working Memory and Second Language Learning by Zhisheng (Edward) Wen.

New Research on Typical and Atypical Child Language Development and Assessment

This month we published Crosslinguistic Encounters in Language Acquisition edited by Elena Babatsouli, David Ingram and Nicole Müller. In this post the editors explain how the book came about and discuss its contribution to the field.

David, Nicole and I got together for the first time in 2015 at the International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech that took place in Chania on the island of Crete. In retrospect, it comes as no surprise that we ended up editing this book on the acquisition and assessment of typical (normal) and atypical (disordered) child speech crosslinguistically, a theme that represents combined aspects of our research interests.

The crosslinguistic encounters in research undertaken by the volume contribute to the general effort in the field of linguistics to gather data-based evidence that ultimately guides the delineation of normative patterns in the acquisition of languages/dialects in all their likely contexts (e.g. monolingual, bilingual, multilingual, normal, disordered) on a worldwide scale. The book itself contributes towards the establishment of common assessment tools and methods that account for variation (e.g. typological, individual differences) during child language development and, as such, it is an advocate of all such endeavors. This approach will ultimately permit reliable and comprehensive documentation of what is normative and non-normative in child language acquisition in the world that will, in turn, guide clinical methods and intervention techniques.

The book’s aim was to bring together current developments characteristic of its theme, with an eye for the ‘under-represented’ – be that a language per se, a specific disorder, an assessment tool designed for a single language or valid for use across languages/dialects, a linguistic construct, a sociolinguistic context, or an innovative approach that extends existing knowledge. Readers will agree that we have met this goal, notwithstanding the length limitations that a publication of this type affords.

While working in this direction, we discovered that there was a downside to our vantage point, namely that the book turned out to be an amalgam of studies well within its intended span, but not necessarily of immediate interest in its entirety to every single language researcher contributing to these subfields. Given that recognition of shortcomings triggers progress, there is hope that the wide scope of the current edited volume may spark new thought and generate novelty across corresponding subfields in the study of child language and its assessment, where both typical and atypical development are concerned.

We are thankful to the editors of the book series at Multilingual Matters for hosting this, and also to all contributing authors, language therapists, as well as the children and families involved.

Elena Babatsouli, David Ingram, Nicole Müller

For more information about this book please see our website. If you found this interesting, you might also like Assessing Multilingual Children edited by Sharon Armon-Lotem, Jan de Jong and Natalia Meir.

New Perspectives on Transfer in Second Language Learning

This month we published New Perspectives on Transfer in Second Language Learning edited by Liming Yu and Terence Odlin. Here, Terence tells us a bit more about language transfer and the issues examined by the book.

Language transfer research looks at the influence of one language upon another. When learners try to acquire a new language, the knowledge they already have (as in the knowledge of their native language) can influence what they produce or understand inside or outside the classroom. Consequently, experienced language teachers often seek to understand better how transfer works and what they may do to deal with the reality of such influence.

Our volume brings together several innovative studies that shed light on transfer or, as it is also known, cross-linguistic influence. The studies brought together in the book consider such influence in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation as well as topics such as comprehension and social setting in relation to transfer.

Researchers as well as teachers will find a wealth of new insights on several topics including ones that have long been discussed. For example, the introductory chapter shows that the term transfer itself has had a long history in linguistics and was not introduced, as some conventional wisdom would have it, in the 1950s. The same chapter also provides new insights about the issue of predictions of transfer, offering a more optimistic outlook on the issue than is often found in other discussions.

The volume also presents several detailed analyses of transfer involving language contact in China, with most of these studies focusing on the influence of Mandarin on the acquisition of English. However, there is also one study involving the converse type of influence, that is, of L1 English on L2 Chinese. ESL or EFL teachers who are curious about, for example, the prepositional choices made by Chinese students will find an empirical analysis of particular cases, while another chapter investigates why ill-formed sentences such as “The Eiffel Tower sees easily from this window“ often seem acceptable to Chinese students.

Along with the empirical studies are ones looking at the broader picture, as in Chapter 2 by Scott Jarvis, which reviews (among other topics) some pioneering work using methods such as eye-tracking technology that suggest new insights about cross-linguistic influence. Considering the broader picture from a different perspective, Chapter 12 by Chuming Wang emphasizes the importance of the contexts in which learning occurs. The diverse perspectives of the volume are considered globally in the final chapter (by Terence Odlin), which discusses questions such as whether some linguistic-processing is language-specific. Although it may seem self-evident that people inevitably “think” in English, in Chinese, in Arabic, or in some other language, the notion of language-specific cognitive processes has proven controversial. What is clear, however, is that language transfer has a special relevance to the controversy and the new volume offers much to show that relevance.

Terence Odlin, Ohio State University
odlin.1@osu.edu

If you would like any further information about this book please see our website or contact Terence at the address above.

Consciousness and Second Language Learning

Consciousness and Second Language Learning by John Truscott is the latest book in our Second Language Acquisition series. In this post, John explains how he became interested in the subject and how the book came together.

The book is, first of all, an expression of what has always been my number one intellectual interest: trying to understand the human mind. I’ve spent a few decades now wandering through the fields of psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and second language acquisition, always returning to that main interest. Almost 15 years ago, this interest found a home when Mike Sharwood Smith and I began our MOGUL project. The focus of the project is on establishing a framework within which second language learning can be understood and explored. But given the relations between this area and various other fields, constructing a framework of this sort necessarily means going far beyond second language learning itself. The project becomes, in effect, an effort to understand the mind.

One important strength of the MOGUL framework is its parsimonious account of consciousness, which straightforwardly incorporates the major themes of cognitive and neural theories and explains central features of consciousness in perhaps the simplest way imaginable. These characteristics give it great potential value for the study of second language learning. My goal in the book, a narrowing of the general goal of understanding the human mind, was to present the account of consciousness and explore this potential value.

In the first chapter I describe two views of consciousness and human nature, criticizing both. The first sees us as conscious creatures, downplaying or dismissing unconscious knowledge and processes, while the other sees an unconscious self as more important and perhaps more real than the conscious self that we know. The second view has sometimes enjoyed a faddish sort of popularity, but the first is much closer to common thinking. Even those who maintain an intellectual belief in View 2, I suggest, have great trouble actually following through with the idea. The tendency to equate “me” with what I consciously experience can be overwhelming.

This tendency shows in beliefs about second language teaching and learning. Research cannot begin to justify or explain the widespread faith shown by teachers, learners, and academics in the importance of explicit (conscious) learning. What might explain it, without justifying it, is the underlying assumption about human nature: that conscious knowledge and conscious processes represent our essence. This assumption is, depending on the exact form it takes, either confused or simply false. Conscious processes are important in many ways, and I’ve tried to elucidate some of them. But it is a mistake to assume that what we consciously know and do has more than a very indirect relation to second language learning.

Thus, in writing the book I was interested in (a) deepening our understanding of the mind and specifically of how consciousness fits into it, (b) exploring the implications for second language learning, and (c) challenging assumptions that implicitly dominate this area. I hope the book will at least inspire a recognition that more serious consideration of these topics is needed.

For more information about the book please see our website or contact the author: John Truscott, Center for Teacher Education, National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan) truscott@mx.nthu.edu.tw.