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Meaning and Structure in Second Language Acquisition: In honor of Roumyana Slabakova
Edited by Jacee Cho, Michael Iverson, Tiffany Judy, Tania Leal and Elena Shimanskaya
[Studies in Bilingualism 55] 2018
► pp. 263–282

Chapter 10
What is easy and what is hard

Lessons from linguistic theory and SLA research

| McGill University

This chapter presents an overview of research, past and present, which has explored the extent to which linguistic theory and generative second language (L2) research offer insights for the language classroom. A number of issues are addressed, including the potential role of negative evidence, questions raised by linguistically misleading input, and linguistic accounts relating to acquisition orders. Consideration is given to proposals grounded in linguistic description (such as Slabakova’s Bottleneck Hypothesis) and how such proposals can help to pinpoint problem areas for L2 learners, as well as ways of making such descriptions accessible to language teachers. It is concluded that uncovering implications for language teaching is a bonus and not a requirement of research on second language acquisition.

Keywords: Bottleneck Hypothesis, Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, Learnability, Negative evidence, Positive evidence, Universal Grammar (UG), Verb raising/verb movement
Article outline
  • Early approaches
  • What we don’t need to teach
  • Learnability considerations
    • Effects of negative evidence in the classroom
    • Inappropriate or misleading classroom input
  • Linked properties
    • Acquisition order
    • Parametric clusters
  • The Bottleneck Hypothesis
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.55.10whi
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