Acquisitions

This book was a major disappointment. The publisher (Oxford University Press) promises that it redresses a supposed imbalance between sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic ones in Language Teaching and Language Learning. Now one has to suppose that means this volume emphasizes psycholinguistics (since the word 'cognitive' is used in the title). That's interesting because (1) often sociolinguistic volumes say they redress an imbalance the other way and (2) there is very little about psycholinguistics or cognition in language learning in this rather long book (what there is comes from Second Language Acquisition research and is not cross-disciplinary in nature) .

If you teach a foreign language and want a book that reviews the the SLA research around the all-important concept of the 'task', this is a worthwhile read--though don't expect much that is directly applicable to teaching. (Unsurprisingly, a lot of the research cited comes from Skehan himself, so if you've read his papers, you don't need the book.)

Outside of that, it's a waste of time. It also fluctuates stylistically from very well written to turgid and nearly unreadable.

It seems the other reviewer (only one at this point - Charles Januzzi) defines psycholinguistics differently than I do. As Skehan writes himself, psycholinguistics is "the study of the psychological processes underlying language learning and use" (Skehan, 1998, p.1). Based on this definition, Skehan's entire book IS about psycholinguistics. As a student of second language acquisition and an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher myself, I have found this book a great resource. The first half of the book discusses psycholinguistics as it relates to instruction and testing. The second half of the book then discusses task-based learning (TBL) and how you can employ it in the classroom to support the psycholinguistic aspects of second language acquisition (SLA). Since TBL is a relatively new and promising area of research in the field of SLA, its investigation would not be complete if you overlooked Skehan's thoughts and contributions to TBL development.

In the end, I would probably give this book a 4-star rating since some of Skehan's ideas on how to implement task-based learning are not supported by current SLA research. However, since the other reviewer unfairly rated this book (in my opinion), I'm trying to "even the score" so to speak. Just because Mr. Januzzi's expectations for this book differed from the actual content, it does not mean the content itself is not worthwhile and informative.