La ricerca sull’acquisizione di una seconda lingua : implicazioni e applicazioni per l’insegnamento

Since its beginnings in the early Seventies, Second Language Acquisition has gradually developed as an autonomous field of enquiry within applied linguistics. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of second language acquisition research highlighting its main areas of investigation and discussing its multidisciplinary theoretical and empirical perspectives. Among the issues tackled, some attention will be given to the debate generated by a call for a more socially and contextually situated view of SLA research due to the increasing diversity and plurality of learning contexts. The last part of the article will consider the impact of SLA on other fields of enquiry and on real-world problems, including the relevance of its findings to instructional contexts.