The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition

Course goals

Upon completion of this course, students will:
•            Possess a good understanding of the main approaches to SLA with a focus on the learning processes, brain and language, modality, and the learners.
•            Demonstrate ability to critically read peer-reviewed research papers in the field of SLA and present their critical reflection on these papers.
•            Be able to use either existing data or new data to address a clearly-formulated hypothesis on a question on aspects of SLA
•            Be able to report on the results of their investigation following the conventions of research papers in psycholinguistics and experimental linguistics.
 

Content

This course introduces students to approaches to second language acquisition (SLA) rooted in the field of psychology. It will focus on topics such as the learning processes involved when learning English as a second language, the relation between brain and language, multimodality of language learning, and individual factors potentially linked with variation in L2 achievement. Students will also familiarise themselves with psycholingistic and neurolinguistic methods widely used in SLA research, learn to investigate questions on the afore-mentioned topics, including analysing existing data (e.g. FAIR data), designing experiments to collect new data, and reporting and interpreting results of data analysis.
 

Additional information

Please note: the time slot shown here is not yet final and may still be modified until the 3rd Wednesday in September. 

This course is part of the 'Language Learning and Teaching across the Lifespan' specialisation.

LAS and TCS students who follow this course as part of the core curriculum of their major, need to complete a compulsory preparation course/assignment. See for more information: https://tcs.sites.uu.nl/