Bill VanPatten was a professor of Spanish at Michigan State University, where he was also an affiliate faculty in the Department of Cognitive Science. He is currently an independent scholar while he also pursues fiction writing in both English and Spanish. His primary areas of research within second language acquisition are the acquisition of formal properties of language, language processing and parsing, and the interface between processing and acquisition.

Gregory D. Keating is an associate professor of Linguistics at San Diego State University. His research interests include second language acquisition, heritage language bilingualism, sentence processing, and online methods. He is an associate editor of Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

Stefanie Wulff is an associate professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Florida, and between 2019 and 2023, Professor II at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Her research interests are in second language learning, quantitative corpus linguistics, and student writing development. She is the editor-in-chief of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (de Gruyter Mouton).

Contributors

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Nature of Theories

Bill VanPatten, Jessica Williams, Gregory D. Keating and Stefanie Wulff

Chapter 2. Linguistic Theory, Universal Grammar, and Second Language Acquisition

Lydia White

Chapter 3. One Functional Approach to L2 Acquisition: The Concept-Orientated Approach

Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig

Chapter 4. Usage-Based Approaches to L2 Acquisition

Nick C. Ellis and Stefanie Wulff

Chapter 5. Skill Acquisition Theory

Robert DeKeyser

Chapter 6. Input Processing in Adult L2 Acquisition

Bill VanPatten

Chapter 7. The Declarative/Procedural Model: A Neurobiologically Motivated Theory of First and Second Language

Michael T. Ullman

Chapter 8. Processability Theory

Manfred Pienemann and Anke Lenzing

Chapter 9. Input, Interaction, and Output in L2 Acquisition

Susan M. Gass and Alison Mackey

Chapter 10. Sociocultural Theory and L2 Development

James P. Lantolf, Matthew E. Poehner, and Steven L. Thorne

Chapter 11. Complex Dynamic Systems Theory

Diane Larsen-Freeman

Chapter 12. Theories and Language Teaching

Bill VanPatten

Glossary

Index