ERIC Number: ED255027
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1984-Oct
Pages: 327
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: ISBN-0-88377-281-7
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Second Language Acquisition by Adult Immigrants: A Field Manual.
Perdue, Clive, Ed.
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. A postscript describes the project's progress after eighteen months, and an appendix gives an overall scheme for analyzing interactions. A list of references and author and subject indexes to the text are also included. (MSE)
Descriptors: Adult Learning, Comprehension, Data Collection, Foreign Countries, Immigrants, Language Research, Research Methodology, Second Language Learning, Vocabulary Development
Newbury House Publishers, Inc., Rowley, MA 01969 ($16.95).
Publication Type: Reports - Research; Books; Guides - General
Education Level: N/A
Audience: Researchers
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: France; Netherlands; Sweden; United Kingdom (Great Britain); West Germany
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A