How Languages Are Learned

I am an MA student at University of Massachusetts Boston. I had to read H. Douglas Brown's Principles of Language Learning and Teaching for my class but I didn't completely understand after reading his book. I then spent some time reading this book How Languages are Learned by Patsy Lightbown, and I understand completely. It cleared up my frustrations. I highly recommended it to anybody who needs a little references before the more advanced book.

This book gives an excellent overview of the way in which humans learn language--both their native language (L1) and subsequent languages (L2, L3, etc). Not only does it give an excellent introduction to each of the areas of language acquisition, it serves as a springboard to further research, with an outstanding and very recent bibliography. Recommended for methods classes, but specifically meant for self-study.

This is a great book for teaching. I read it in college and forgot about it until I realized that I couldn't remember the names of the language patterns my students were following. Fun to learn about and easy to reference.

I really recommend this book as an introduction to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) reasearch. It was written with the language teacher in mind. Many of the other books on the subject are focused on the researcher rather than the teacher, so this book fills a gap in the literature. The explanations of the major theories are carried out without frequent use of jargon, so it's easy for the beginner to get a handle on SLA theory. I even recommend this for students who are studying SLA in graduate school. This will provide an excellent introduction that could be read before reading more difficult texts. After readinging "How Languages Are Learned", you'll understand more in depth discussions about the theories covered. A must for all practicing language teachers.

I used this book in a graduate ESL teacher-training SLA course. It presents all the relevant theory and research in terms students can understand. I adapted some of the authors' analyses to be used as models in student projects. Works well in combination with Vivian Cook's _Second Language Learning and Language Teaching_. I will definitely use it again.