1.8
| Author | Perdue, C. |
Title | Second Language Acquisition by Adult Immigrants: A Field Manual. |
Language | English |
| Date | 1984 |
| Full reference | Perdue, C. (1984). Second Language Acquisition by Adult Immigrants: A Field Manual. Newbury House Publishers. |
Summary | The field manual for a series of coordinated studies of the spontaneous acquisition of a second language by adult immigrant workers provides a theoretical and practical framework for the entire project and a source of information about it for other researchers. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the project's objectives and organization. Chapter 3 reviews previous work on the spontaneous acquisition of language in the chosen target countries (France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Great Britain) by adult learners. In chapters 4-8 the research topics are discussed in detail: understanding, misunderstanding, and breakdown; the thematic structure of utterances; processes in the developing vocabulary; and reference to people, space, and time. The chapters discuss why the topics are thought to be important, what the specific hypotheses are, how they arise from previous work, and how they are to be approached. Chapter 8 outlines data collection techniques and ways of combining them in this research, with a sample plan of the actual work each team is to accomplish during the project's data collection phase. The final chapter examines the practical, logistical problems and the ethics of the research. |
Key words | Language acquisition, adult immigrant |
Other interesting information | The acquisition of a second language for adult migrants is determined both by learning and communication; both need to be complimentary. There can be no learning without communication and no communication without learning. Learning practices have to include communication opportunities. |
Interest for the project | 3/5 |
| Contributor´s name + email | Stéphanie Barillé - stephanie@unak.is |