Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition

teachers to theory and hopefully to gain their confidence again. The time has come to look to theory again, realizing that the most current theory may still not be the final word on second language acquisition. I am not asking practitioners or materials developers to follow all of the implications of theory blindly. My hope is only that our results will be considered as another source of ideas and input to methods and materials, in partnership with conclusions reached by practitioners themselves from their own experience as language teachers and language acquirers.

Consider, for example, the table of contents of Language Learning, vol. 9, 1959, which included:
     "Grammatical theory and practice in an English grammar class"
     "Reaching the French verb"
     "Noun-classes and the practical teacher"
     "Morpheme alternants in Spanish verb forms"
     "'Thechnemes' and the rhythm of class activity"
Volume 12, 1962, contained:
     "Annotated bibliography of generative grammar"

The 1979 volume of the TESOL Quarterly, for example, contains articles such as:
     "Using radio commercials as supplementary materials in ESL listening classes"
     "Communicative writing"
     "Joke-telling as a tool in ESL"
reflecting the current emphasis on communication in the classroom.

(Notes 1 and 2 certainly do not represent a wide sample of activity in the filed, but they are representative. In recent years, the journal Language Learning has focussed on theoretical and applied research, rather than pedagogy. For this reason, I used the TESOL Quarterly, which began publication in 1967, for current titles.)