No pan of this publication may be reproduced. stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted m any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise. without the prior peimi>sion of the publisher Pearson Education. 10 Bank Street. White Plains, MY 10606 Staff credits: The people who made up the Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, Fifth Edition team, representing editorial, production, design, ;ind manufacturing, are Danielle Belfiore. TraCev Munz Cataldo. Dave Dickev, Laura Lr Dr&in. and Melissa lewa Text design; Wendy Woir Text composition Laserwords Private Limited Text font. Garamond Library of Congress Cataioging-in Publication Data Brown, H Douglas, 1941-Principles of language learning and teaching / Douglas Drown.-5th ed p cm Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 0 13-199I28-0 (student book alk paper) 1. Language and languages-Study and teaching. 2 Language acquisition I Title P5J.B775 2006 416 0071--dc22 4 CHAPTER 1 Language, Learning, and Tedcliingthrough the chapters of this book. And you can hone the global questions into finer, subtler questions, which in itself is an important task, for often being able to ask the right questions is more valuable than possessing storehouses of knowledge.At the same time, you should not labor under the impression that you can satisfactorily find final answers to all the questions, By some evaluations, the field of SLA is still in its infancy, with all the methodological and theoretical problems that come with a developing discipline (see Gregg, 2003, for example). Therefore, many of these questions will receive somewhat tentative answers, or at best, answers that must begin with the phrase, "it depends." Answers must almost always be framed in a context that can vary from one learner to another, from one moment to another, The wonderful intricacy of complex facets of human behavior will be very much with us for some time. Roger Brown's (1966, p. 526) wry remark of over four decades ago still applies:Psychologists find it exciting when a complex mental phenomenon-something Intelligent and slippery-seems about to be captured by a mechanical model. We yearn to see the model succeed, But when, at the last minute, the phenomenon proves too much for the model and darts off on some uncapturable tangent, there is something in us that rejoices at the defeat.We can rejoice in our defeats because we know that it is the very elusiveness of the phenomenon of SLA that makes the quest for answers so exciting. Our field of Inquiry is no simple, unidimensional reality. It is "slippery" in every way,The chapters of this book are designed to give you a picture of both the slip-periness of SLA and the systematic storehouse of reliable knowledge that is now available to us. As you consider the issues, chapter by chapter, you are led on a quest for your own personal, integrated understanding of how people learn-and sometimes fail to learn-a second language. That quest is eclectic no single theory or hypothesis wilt provide a magic fo...
