Tarone, Elaine

Abstract

The most succinct summary of the applied linguistics and teaching career of Elaine Tarone (1945– ) is the title of one of her early books: Focus on the Language Learner . Her research and teaching career has focused on second language (L2) learners as social beings in a variety of contexts and has emphasized the effects of those contexts on both the learners' use of language and the manners in which they learn it. She is one of the leading theorists of variationist second language acquisition (SLA), which has as its fundamental premise that the form of second language learners' utterances can vary dramatically depending on the learners' perceptions of social contextual variables such as the interlocutor, task, or topic. In a variationist perspective of SLA, variability in a learner's interlanguage (IL) (e.g., I study grammars vs. I study grammar ) is not viewed as “noise” in the researcher's data or necessarily as errors for a teacher to correct; instead, variability is considered to be a potential source of new language forms appearing in the learner's IL and an indicator of transition in the language development process.