This is the second volume of the SiBil series to present results from the European Science Foundation's project 'Second language acquisition by adult immigrants'. It deals specifically with the acquisition of temporality in five European languages: Dutch, English, French, German and Swedish, providing a detailed account of how adult learners who have little or no exposure to classroom teaching, express temporality at any given stage of the acquisition process, how they proceed from one stage to the next, and what factors determine both their progress and their final levels of proficiency. The guiding hypotheses, methodology, and theoretical framework for analysing temporality from a cross-linguistic perspective are given in Chapters 1 and 2. The detailed longitudinal analyses of Chapters 3-7 form the backbone of the book. Chapter 8 contains the cross-linguistic generalizations, the factors which account for them, and the wider theoretical implications of the study.

As one of the first books in child second language acquisition (SLA), this book focuses on the core area of tense-aspect morphology, reporting on three L1-Italian children learning L2 English vs. three L1-English children learning L2 Italian. An innovative longitudinal/bidirectional research design, where two languages represent both source and target, show effects of language transfer in learners that, because of their age, still have potential to become native-speakers of the target. An unusual feature of this book is that relevant studies of acquisition of L2 Italian, some heretofore only in Italian, are reviewed, incorporated into the study and made available to a more general audience. Though the main focus is on child SLA, crucial comparisons to both first language acquisition vs. adult SLA are presented. This approach will thus be of interest more generally to readers in first and second language acquisition and child development.

This volume explores the acquisition of tense and aspect by adult second language learners of nine target languages. The author focuses on the association of form and meaning in leaders' emerging system of temporal expression. The book provides a survey and synthesis of studies from five perspectives: the meaning-oriented approach, acquisitional sentences, the aspect hypothesis, the discourse hypothesis, and the effect of instruction. In addition, original longitudinal and cross-sectional studies on the acquisition of English by the author illustrate each of the perspectives and explore the importance of research design and analysis in acquisition research.

The present volume provides a cross-linguistic perspective on the development of tense-aspect in L2 acquisition. Data-based studies included in this volume deal with the analysis of a wide range of target languages: Chinese, English, Italian, French, Japanese, and Spanish. Theoretical frameworks used to evaluate the nature of the empirical evidence range from generative grammar to functional-typological linguistics. Several studies focus on the development of past tense markers, but other issues such as the acquisition of a future marker are also addressed. An introductory chapter outlines some theoretical and methodological issues that serves as relevant preliminary reading for most of the chapters included in this volume. Additionally, a preliminary chapter offers a substantive review of first language acquisition of tense-aspect morphology. The analysis of the various languages included in this volume significantly advances our understanding of this phenomenon, and will serve as an important basis for future research.

This volume addresses theoretical and research domains related to questions of how forms-meaning connections are initiated, processed, and stored, and what internal and external factors may affect these mappings.

This edited volume offers critical reflections on an essential component of research method in the field of second language acquisition – data. Scholars working on diverse areas (e.g., pragmatics, corrective feedback, phonology) and approaches (e.g., corpus linguistics, concept-oriented analyses, variationism) have come together to identify challenges researchers face when collecting, coding, and analyzing data and to provide guidance for making advancements regarding these aspects of research method. This volume also showcases three types of critical reflection. One involves building a relevant corpus of published investigations and using that database to identify methodological issues in existing research. Another consists of recoding and reanalyzing published work, before reflecting on the impact that these decisions have on observations made about interlanguage. The third begins with a particular area of or approach to second language acquisition and then offers a critical examination on the challenges that characterize the selected area or approach. Researchers and graduate students alike will benefit from an open discussion on methodological issues that are in need of improvement.