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

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

/pdf/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-480wr4m3kb.pdf

The WEIRDest People in the World

How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? The problem takes many forms; learning vocabulary from text is an especially dramatic and convenient case for research. A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented and used to successfully simulate such learning and several other psycholinguistic phenomena. By inducing global knowledge indirectly from local co-occurrence data in a large body of representative text, LSA acquired knowledge about the full vocabulary of English at a comparable rate to schoolchildren. LSA uses no prior linguistic or perceptual similarity knowledge; it is based solely on a general mathematical learning method that achieves powerful inductive effects by extracting the right number of dimensions (e.g., 300) to represent objects and contexts. Relations to other theories, phenomena, and problems are sketched.

/pdf/a-solution-to-plato-s-problem-the-latent-semantic-analysis-4jfk7ozfms.pdf

A Solution to Plato's Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and Representation of Knowledge.

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

/pdf/from-neurons-to-neighborhoods-the-science-of-early-childhood-3bfl5g72ow.pdf

From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

Standard alphabetical procedures for organizing lexical information put together words that are spelled alike and scatter words with similar or related meanings haphazardly through the list. Unfortunately, there is no obvious alternative, no other simple way for lexicographers to keep track of what has been done or for readers to find the word they are looking for. But a frequent objection to this solution is that finding things on an alphabetical list can be tedious and time-consuming. Many people who would like to refer to a dictionary decide not to bother with it because finding the information would interrupt their work and break their train of thought.

/pdf/introduction-to-wordnet-an-on-line-lexical-database-1cshcej27g.pdf

Introduction to WordNet: An On-line Lexical Database

If we will observe how children learn languages, we will find that, to make them understand what the names of simple ideas or substances stand for, people ordinarily show them the thing whereof they would have them have the idea; and then repeat to them the name that stands for it, as 'white', 'sweet', 'milk', 'sugar', 'cat', 'dog'.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED335884.pdf

The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings

List of contributors Preface Part I. The Logic of Language Acquisition: 1. Language acquisition: the state of the state of the art Lila R. Gleitman and Eric Wanner Part II. Preconditions for Language Acquisition: 2. The resilience of recursion: a study of a communication system developed without a conventional language model Susan Goldin-Meadow 3. Why short subjects are harder to find than long ones Charles Read and Peter Schreiber 4. On mechanisms of language acquisition: can features of the communicative environment account for development? Marilyn Shatz 5. Universal and particular in the acquisition of language Dan I. Slobin Part III. The Development of Grammar: 6. Functionalist approaches to grammar Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney 7. On what cases categories there are, why they are, and how they develop: an amalgam of a priori considerations, speculation and evidence from children Martin D. S. Braine and Judith A. Hardy 8. The child's construction of grammatical categories Michael Maratsos 9. The role of universals in the acquisition of gerunds Thomas Roeper 10. A principle theory for language acquisition Kenneth Wexler Part IV. Semantic and Lexical Development: 11. Reorganisational processes in lexical and syntactic development Melissa Bowerman 12. Semantic development: the state of the art Susan Carey 13. The young word maker: a case study of innovation in the child's lexicon Eve V. Clark Part V. Alternative Conceptions of Acquisition: 14. Some implications of the nonspecific bases of language T. G. Bever 15. Task specificity in language learning? Evidence from speech perception and American Sign Language Elissa L. Newport References Index.

Language Acquisition: The State of the Art

http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~gleitman/papers/Armstrong,%20Gleitman,%20Gleitman%20-%201983%20-%20What%20some%20concepts%20might%20not%20be.pdf

Lila R. Gleitman

Papers

The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings

Language Acquisition: The State of the Art

What some concepts might not be.

Mother, Id rather do it myself: Some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style

Language and Experience: Evidence from the Blind Child