Second Language Acquisition Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching

Michigan Education Myths

by Steven Brown, Jenifer Larson-Hall

This volume was conceived as a first book in SLA for advanced undergraduate or introductory master’s courses that include education majors, foreign language education majors, and English majors. It’s also an excellent resource for practicing teachers. 

Both the research and pedagogy in this book are based on the newest research in the field of second language acquisition.  It is not the goal of this book to address every SLA theory or teach research methodology.  It does however address the myths and questions that non-specialist teacher candidates have about language learning.

 

Steven Brown is the co-author of the introductory applied linguistics textbook Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation  textbook (and workbook).

 

The myths challenged in this book are:
 

§  Children learn languages quickly and easily while adults are ineffective in comparison.

§  A true bilingual is someone who speaks two languages perfectly.

§  You can acquire a language simply through listening or reading.

§  Practice makes perfect.

§  Language students learn (and retain) what they are taught.

§  Language learners always benefit from correction.

§  Individual differences are a major, perhaps the major, factor in SLA.

§  Language acquisition is the individual acquisition of grammar.

 

Genres: Nonfiction, Language, Teaching, School, Linguistics

208 pages, Paperback

First published March 28, 2012

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fun, and educational. I had set my eyes on it since I saw it, and wanted to read it more for linguistic fun, less for research, but it ended in serving both purposes.
The book tackles 8 classic myths in foreign language learning, and if you are into languages, chances are you know them all, or almost all. Their findings rely on personal experiences and hard data from surveys, and even then, some myths are hard to point down. There's so many factors to take into account that some myths remain elusive. Others are easier to deal with.
All in all I enjoyed it, and it also has some advice for teachers at the end of each chapter to help them deal with the myths and improve teaching in the own classrooms.

[Ari]

had to read this for school. very well written & probably interesting to some people... not me tho I suffered

[Jenifer Larson-Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very nice little book, if I do say so myself. I've been using with undergrad and grad students in Japan in Second Language Acquisition courses, and I think it's the right level for these groups so that they can understand the research. All of the other SLA books I know are more complicated conceptually. This is meant to be somewhere in between a more academic textbook and a popular account. Easier to understand than the academic textbooks, it's no page-turner for the most part, but it gets some information about SLA disseminated.

[Billy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been teaching ESL for the past year, and this has been by far the most helpful resource. I love how they thoroughly explain the research on common beliefs and make it practically applicable to the classroom. I wish there was more stuff out there just like this!

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now I feel I need to read the other three books in this series: Listening Myths, Vocabulary Myths, and Writing Myths.

[David Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three Stars for a grad school book is like 4 stars for other books. I don't recommend other humans reading this, but if you had to read it for grad school, it's interesting enough.

[Nathan Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a neat little book. It's very readable, concise, and well documented. Each chapter deals with a different myth about second language acquisition- children learn better than adults, bilinguals are perfect at 2 languages, language learning is just learning grammar, etc. The end of each chapter has a table summarizing research, along with practical advice for teachers, so you can TL;DR to just the summaries if you want to get to the point.
My favorite chapter was something like "Students Learn What You Teach". It opened my eyes about learning in general. Basically, research shows that we learn second languages as well as we learn anything else. Compare what you remember from high school algebra to how much Spanish you can speak, and they are about the same. It's just that not knowing Spanish has greater visibility. When you learn anything, you start with facts and build up to intuition and a bird's eye view. To be a good physicist, you have to learn to speak physics like you would a second language. And the way you do that is by using it- examining the material, digesting it, reconstructing it, actually making it a part of you in the same you would have to with a language to achieve fluency instead of conscious grammatical jigsaw-puzzling with a second language. I had read about how real, long-term learning needed to be done before, but having it compared with language learning made it make more sense.

[Tudor Ștefănescu · Rating 3 out of 5]

as somebody who moved from country to country - and struggled with SLA for a long time I found that I was under the influence of some of the myths addressed in the book(e.g. I thought that children are better learners than adults and that you could learn a language only by reading and listening...) What I take from this book is that active processing of the language: trying to write/speak correctly and searching (guided or not) the rules to achieve this are really fundamental to build language acquisition (and of course doing this constantly over a long period of time). So, as a learner I found this book useful even if it's more targeted to teachers of foreign languages.