Reviews for Papers from the 12th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, University Park, April 1-3 1982

The average rating for Papers from the 12th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, University Park, April 1-3 1982 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-06-05 00:00:00 Lee Robinson When it takes me over a year to finish a book, there's always an explanation. This is some dry stuff. I can only recommend it to you if you're a linguistics major who is looking for some sort of a summary of the major movements of research concerning second language acquisition. You'll find everything from Chomsky to Vygotsky to Piaget to Jakobson to Wittgenstein, as well as more recent studies, including those done by the two authors, Bialystok and Hakuta. Allow me to summarize: most conclusions drawn from linguistics research is conflicting and/or invalid, there are very few concrete characteristics or abilities that are found in "successful" language learners, therefore there's not much we can say about how to learn a second language "successfully". I put that word in quotes because they also spend a lot of time highlighting the notion that success is only relative to the aims of the speaker. As a polyglot, English teacher and wannabe linguist, this book didn't help me much in any of those areas. Glad to take this guy off my currently-reading shelf.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-07-31 00:00:00 david tuminello Overall, the message of the story is that people learn languages according to different cognitive styles in different situations. The book is very dense and somewhat hard to read since lots of information is just thrown at you. If you really want to read this, then I suggest you keep a pen and paper or a highlight nearby to take notes. The authors use lots of scientific and linguistic jargon, which makes this book a bit inaccessible to everyday readers. It's not a "pop psych" book. They definitely know what they're talking about since they mention most of the major studies done on second language acquisition. Long story short, the book contains a lot of useful information, but it may be hard for an average, non-scientific and/or non-linguistic, person to read. For example, beforehand, I read some of the research studies that they quote, so I knew what they were talking about most of the time, but I have no linguistic background. When they delve deeper into the nitty-gritty linguistic terms, it takes a lot of processing to keep things straight.