While most research on language acquisition continues to consider the individual primarily in closed-system terms, Ecology of Language Acquisition emphasizes the emergence of linguistic development through children's and learners' interactions with their environment - spatial, social, cultural, educational, and so on - bringing to light commonalities between primary language development, child and adult second-language learning, and language acquisition by robots. Such a situated, context-responsive perspective on acquisition is able to interrelate insights from a variety of paradigms and disciplines while avoiding unjustifiable appeals to normativity. The theoretical and empirical studies presented here challenge a number of dominant ideas in language acquisition theory and mark an important new research orientation. This work should be of interest to language acquisition researchers and professionals in a wide range of specialisms
CONTENT
1 Towards an ecology of language acquisition -- 2 Critical realism, ecological psychology, and imagined communities: Foundations for a naturalist theory of language acquisition -- 3 A tale of two computer classrooms: The ecology of project-based language learning -- 4 From joint attention to language acquisition: How infants learn to control othersโ{128}{147} behavior -- 5 Beyond cognitive determination: Interactionism in the acquisition of spatial semantics -- 6 Language socialization in childrenโ{128}{153}s religious education: The discursive and affective construction of identity -- 7 An integrational linguistic view of coming into language: Reflexivity and metonymy -- 8 The ecology of an SLA community in a computer-mediated environment -- 9 Robot babies: What can they teach us about language acquisition? -- 10 Borrowing words: Appropriations in child second language discourse -- 11 Language acquisition behind the scenes: Collusion and play in educational settings
