This course offers an introduction at the advanced undergraduate/beginning graduate level to the study of language acquisition, in particular Second Language Acquisition (SLA). The course surveys the major approaches to SLA, their goals, research methodology, and major findings, emphasizing the interdisciplinary link to linguistic modeling and cognition.

Nature of course and grading: This is a lecture course, i.e., students are expected to regularly come to the lecture, actively participate in the discussion, and thoroughly read the announced reading material before class. Grading is based on a final exam in the last week of the semester and active participation in the lecture.

The reading material is announced during the course. The main text books we will follow is: Lourdes Ortega (2009). Understanding second language acquisition. London: Hodder Education. Students should obtain a copy of the book during the first week of the class. Options include the Lehrbuchsammlung, for which copies have been ordered.

Academic conduct and misconduct: Research is driven by discussion and free exchange of ideas, motivations, and perspectives. So you are encouraged to work in groups, discuss, and exchange ideas. At the same time, the foundation of the free exchange of ideas is that everyone is open about where they obtained which information. Concretely, this means you are expected to always make explicit when you’ve worked on something as a team – and keep in mind that being part of a team always means sharing the work. For any text you write, you always have to provide explicit references for any ideas or passages you reuse from somewhere else. Note that this includes text “found” on the web, where you should cite the url of the web site in case no more official publication is available.

References

Bykh, S. & D. Meurers (2012). Native Language Identification Using Recurring N-grams – Investigating Abstraction and Domain Dependence. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING). Mumbay, India, pp. 425–440.

Hancke, J., D. Meurers & S. Vajjala (2012). Readability Classification for German using lexical, syntactic, and morphological features. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING). Mumbay, India, pp. 1063–1080.

Lightbown, P. M. & N. Spada (2006). How languages are learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press, third ed.

Ortega, L. (2009). Understanding Second Language Acquisition. London: Hodder Education.

Vajjala, S. & D. Meurers (2012). On Improving the Accuracy of Readability Classification using Insights from Second Language Acquisition. In J. Tetreault, J. Burstein & C. Leacock (eds.), Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA7) at NAACL-HLT. Montréal, Canada: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 163—-173. URL http://aclweb.org/anthology/W12-2019.pdf.