This state-of-the-art volume presents an outstanding collection of 22 studies on current issues facing research in second-language acquisition (SLA). The editors sought contributions for this volume from seasoned veterans of SLA like Lydia White and Susan Gass, from well-known researchers in linguistics and/or first-language acquisition like Haj Ross and Harald Clahsen, and from relative newcomers to the field like India Plough and Jean-Marc Dewaele. The topics covered range from the role of universals at various levels of second-language (L2) knowledge; the way that linguistic knowledge is represented by L2 learners; the changing nature of linguistic theory itself; and the definition of usage phenomena like style shifting and code switching. The introduction to The Current State of Interlanguage gives a concise yet detailed overview of research in the field over the past 10 years, and focuses on the present growing concensus on a number of issues that were at one point highly controversial.
1. The current state of interlanguage: Introduction (by Eubank, Lynn);
2. Prominence in applied linguistics: Bill Rutherford (by Jordens, Peter);
3.
I-interlanguage and typology: The case of topic-prominence (by Yip,
Virginia);
4. Universals, SLA, and language pedagogy: 1984 revisited (by
Gass, Susan M.);
5. Learnability, pre-emption, domain-specificity, and the
instructional value of "Master Mind" (by Birdsong, David);
6. Why we need
grammar: Confessions of a cognitive generalist (by Bialystok, Ellen);
7.
Chasing after linguistic theory: How minimal should we be? (by White, Lydia);
8. The irrelevance of verbal feedback to language learning (by Carroll,
Susanne Elizabeth);
9. Indirect negative evidence, inductive inferencing, and
second language acquisition (by Plough, India C.);
10. The negative effects
of 'positive' evidence on L2 phonology (by Young-Scholten, Martha);
11.
German plurals in adult second language development: Evidence for a
dual-mechanism model of inflection (by Clahsen, Harald);
12. Universal
Grammar in L2 acquisition: Some thoughts on Schachter's Incompleteness
Hypothesis (by Felix, Sascha);
13. Acquiring linking rules and argument
structures in a second language: The unaccusative/unergative distinction (by
Sorace, Antonella);
14. Data, evidence and rules (by Beck, Maria-Luise);
15.
Markedness aspects of case-marking in L1 French/L2 English (by Zobl, Helmut);
16. Language transfer: What do we really mean? (by Martohardjono, Gita);
17.
Age before beauty: Johnson and Newport revisited (by Kellerman, Eric);
18.
Style-shifting in oral interlanguage: Quantification and definition (by
Dewaele, Jean-Marc);
19. Observations of language use in Spanish immersion
classroom interactions (by Blanco-Iglesias, Susana);
20. Some neurolinguistic
evidence regarding variation in interlanguage use: The status of the 'switch
mechanism' (by Lorch, Marjorie Perlman);
21. Beyond 2000: A measure of
productive lexicon in a second language (by Laufer, Batia);
22. A first
crosslinguistic look at paths: The difference between end-legs and medial
ones (by Ross, Haj);
23. Index
