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A short history of SLA: Where have we come from and where are we going?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2020

Rod Ellis
Rod Ellis*
Affiliation:
Curtin University, Perth, Australia
*
E-mail: r.ellis@auckland.ac.nz
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Extract

If we want to understand where we are now, we need to consider where we have come from. This statement constitutes the strongest rationale for the study of history. It is relevant to any field of enquiry and it is certainly true of the field of second language acquisition (SLA). As Larsen-Freeman (2018) wrote in her own historical account of SLA ‘it is important to understand ideas at the time they originated’ (p. 56). I would add that it is also important to understand how the ideas that motivated a field of enquiry at one time evolved into and were sometimes replaced by ideas later on.

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Language Teaching , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 190 - 205
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This paper is based on the presentation given by Professor Ellis at the Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Associations of Applied Linguistics (ALAA/ALANZ), Perth, Australia, 25–27 November 2019.

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