The purpose of this workbook is to provide students with practice in analyzing second language data. For the student of second language learning, "hands-on" experience with actual data is essential in understanding the processes involved in learning a second language. Working through exemplars of the kinds of interlanguages that learners do and do not create brings about a clearer understanding of the principles underlying these interlanguages, as well as the universal principles of language learning (those that are independent of particular languages and interlanguages). The goal in this workbook is to present data organized in such a way that by working through pedagogically presented data-sets, students are led to a discovery and understanding of theoretical and/or methodological issues. In addition, they acquire the ability to interpret data and to begin to draw conclusions from them. The authors intend that students should go from the data to a conclusion that includes a 3-part statement: *what else you should want to know about these data; *why this, specifically, and not something else; and *how one can empirically research what you want to find out. This sequence of questions forces students to constantly keep in mind the important question of falsification: What kind of data would it take to falsify the particular conclusions the students come to? As with the earlier edition of this workbook (Sorace, Gass, & Selinker), two audiocassettes provide language samples for use in the exercises. These cassettes and the teacher's manual are offered free of charge on adoption of the workbook for classroom use; a three-part set (workbook/manual/tapes) is also available.
L2 acquisition and the ontology of language universals. In W. Rutherford (Ed.),
Second Language Acquisition and Language Universals (pp. 33 68); Data from E
. Broselow, Nonobvious transfer: on predicting epenthesis errors, in S. Gass & L.
No language teaching program should be designed without a thorough analysis of the students' needs. The studies in this volume explore Needs Analysis in the public, vocational and academic sectors, in contexts ranging from service encounters in coffee shops to foreign language needs assessment in the U.S. military. In each chapter, the authors explicitly discuss the methodoldogy they employed, and in some cases also offer research findings on that methodology. Several studies are task-based, making the collection of special interest to those involved in task-based language teaching. Contributions include work on English and other languages in both second and foreign language settings, as well as a comprehensive overview of methodological issues in Needs Analysis by the editor.
Yet, if this aspect of course design is to go beyond reliance on notoriously
unreliable textbook writer intuitions, such is the task facing the conscientious
materials writer (and publisher). It is the kind of `homework' language teachers
and applied ...
