Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268

This text explores the relationship between second language teaching practice and what is known about the process of second language acquisition and summarizes the current state of second language acquisition theory.-- Draws general conclusions about the application of theory to methods and materials and describes the characteristics that effective materials should include.-- Concludes that language acquisition occurs best when language is used for the purpose for which it was designed: communication.

http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf

Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition

1 Front Matter 2 Executive Summary 3 Part I: Introduction to Reading 4 1. Introduction 5 2. The Process of Learning to Read 6 Part II: Who Are We Talking About? 7 3. Who Has Reading Difficulties? 8 4. Predictors of Success and Failure in Reading 9 Part III: Prevention and Intervention 10 5. Preventing Reading Difficulties Before Kindergarten 11 6. Instructional Strategies for Kindergarten and the Primary Grades 12 7. Organizational Strategies for Kindergarten and the Primary Grades 13 8. Helping Children with Reading Difficulties in Grades 1 to 3 14 Part IV: Knowledge into Action 15 9. The Agents of Change 16 10. Recommendations for Practice and Research 17 References 18 Biographical Sketches 19 Index

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Preventing reading difficulties in young children

All Rights Reserved. This publication may be downloaded and copied without charge for all reasonable, non-commercial educational purposes, provided no alterations in the text are made. I have had a great deal of help and feedback from many people in writing this book. Among the many scholars and friends I am indebted to are also would like to express my thanks to those scholars whose work has stimulated my own thinking in the early stages of the research reported on here: John Upshur, Leonard Newmark, and S. Pit Corder all recognized the reality of language "acquisition" in the adult long before I did. I would also like the thank Introduction This book is concerned with what has been called the "Monitor Theory" of adult second language acquisition. Monitor Theory hypothesizes that adults have two independent systems for developing ability in second languages, subconscious language acquisition and conscious language learning, and that these systems are interrelated in a definite way: subconscious acquisition appears to be far more important. The introduction is devoted to a brief statement of the theory and its implications for different aspects of second language acquisitions theory and practice. We define acquisition and learning, and present the Monitor Model for adult second language performance. Following this, brief summaries of research results in various areas of second language acquisition serve as both an overview of Monitor Theory research over the last few years and as introduction to the essays that follow. Language acquisition is very similar to the process children use in acquiring first and second languages. It requires meaningful interaction in the target language-natural communication-in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding. Error correction and explicit teaching of rules are not relevant to language acquisition but caretakers and native speakers can modify their utterances addressed to acquirers to help them understand, and these modifications are thought to help the acquisition process (Snow and Ferguson, 1977). It has been hypothesized that there is a fairly stable order of acquisition of structures in language acquisition, that is, one can see clear 1 similarities across acquirers as to which structures tend to be acquired early and which tend to be acquired late (Brown, 1973; Dulay and Burt, 1975). Acquirers need not have a conscious awareness of the "rules" they possess, and may self-correct only on the basis of …

http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/58723/1/26pdf.pdf

Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning

Richard Schmidt presents on the role of consciousness in second language learning at the 1988 Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) held in at the University of Hawai‘i.

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The role of consciousness in second language learning

Bilingualism in Development is an examination of the language and cognitive development of bilingual children focusing primarily on the preschool years. It begins by defining the territory for what is included in bilingualism and how language proficiency can be conceptualized. Using these constraints, the discussion proceeds to review the research relevant to various aspects of children's development and assesses the role that bilingualism has in each. The areas covered include language acquisition, metalinguistic ability, literacy skill, and problem-solving ability. In each case, the performance of bilingual children is compared to that of similar monolinguals, and differences are interpreted in terms of a theoretical framework for cognitive development and processing. The studies show that bilingualism significantly accelerates children's ability to selectively attend to relevant information and inhibit attention to misleading information or competing responses. This conclusion is used as the basis for examining a set of related issues regarding the education and social circumstances of bilingual children.

http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam031/00045520.pdf

Bilingualism in development : language, literacy, and cognition

Previous work has shown that bilingualism is associated with more effective controlled processing in children; the assumption is that the constant management of 2 competing languages enhances executive functions (E. Bialystok, 2001). The present research attempted to determine whether this bilingual advantage persists for adults and whether bilingualism attenuates the negative effects of aging on cognitive control in older adults. Three studies are reported that compared the performance of monolingual and bilingual middle-aged and older adults on the Simon task. Bilingualism was associated with smaller Simon effect costs for both age groups; bilingual participants also responded more rapidly to conditions that placed greater demands on working memory. In all cases the bilingual advantage was greater for older participants. It appears, therefore, that controlled processing is carried out more effectively by bilinguals and that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses in certain executive processes.

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Bilingualism, Aging, and Cognitive Control: Evidence From the Simon Task.

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/10587326/GIGI%20Trends.pdf?sequence=1

Bilingualism: consequences for mind and brain

In a previous study, a bilingual advantage for preschool children in solving the dimensional change card sort task was attributed to superiority in inhibition of attention (Bialystok, 1999). However, the task includes difficult representational demands to encode and interpret the task stimuli, and bilinguals may also have profited from superior representational abilities. This possibility is examined in three studies. In Study 1, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on versions of the problem containing moderate representational demands but not on a more demanding condition. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that bilingual children were more skilled than monolinguals when the target dimensions were perceptual features of the stimulus and that the two groups were equivalent when the target dimensions were semantic features. The conclusions are that bilinguals have better inhibitory control for ignoring perceptual information than monolinguals do but are not more skilled in representation, confirming the results of the original study. The results also identify the ability to ignore an obsolete display feature as the critical difficulty in solving this task.

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Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: evidence from the dimensional change card sort task

The present paper summarizes research showing that bilingualism affects linguistic and cognitive performance across the lifespan. The effect on linguistic performance is generally seen as a deficit in which bilingual children control a smaller vocabulary than their monolingual peers and bilingual adults perform more poorly on rapid lexical retrieval tasks. The effect on cognitive performance is to enhance executive functioning and to protect against the decline of executive control in aging. These effects interact to produce a complex pattern regarding the effect of bilingualism on memory performance. Memory tasks based primarily on verbal recall are performed more poorly by bilinguals but memory tasks based primarily on executive control are performed better by bilinguals. Speculations regarding the mechanism responsible for these effects are described.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1366728908003477

Ellen Bialystok

Papers

Bilingualism in development : language, literacy, and cognition

Bilingualism, Aging, and Cognitive Control: Evidence From the Simon Task.

Bilingualism: consequences for mind and brain

Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: evidence from the dimensional change card sort task

Bilingualism: The good, the bad, and the indifferent*