2015 Articles

Introduction: Why Should Second/Foreign Language Teachers Tune In To Instructed SLA?

Sok, Sarah Y.; Qi, Shaoyan

Born in the late 1960s, second language acquisition (SLA) is a field of study that addresses how non-native languages are learned, either in naturalistic or instructed settings. As a “burgeoning subdomain” of SLA (Ortega, 2013, p. 5) that emerged in the 1980s, instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) focuses on the latter, attempting to unveil the effects of instructional intervention, i.e., second language (L2) pedagogy, on the process of L2 learning. As such, a rich body of theoretical and empirical works that bears direct relevance to the L2 classroom constitutes ISLA, distinguishing it from related sub-domains within the more general discipline of second language acquisition.