This book defines and reviews five central problems in the study of second language acquisition (SLA): (subconscious) transfer, staged development, cross-learner systematicity, incompleteness, and variability. The central thesis of the text is that linguistic knowledge is an autonomous component of SLA, distinct from the socially determined use of…

This graduate level text on second language learning is divided into three sections. The first two sections provide a survey of the historical underpinnings of second language research in contrastive analysis and error analysis. The third section includes discussions of recent developments in the field. The first section contains articles on the…