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Title: Not for persons without previous knowledge of this subject
Review: I am a professor of Spanish Linguistics. I used this book one semester in an undergraduate applied linguistics course and received very negative feedback from the students. In spite of the fact that the back cover claims that the book is for those with no previous knowledge of L2 acquisition research, it was definitely not accessible to my students. It lacks a clearly organized approach in explaining the history of the discipline, existing L2 acquisition theory, what motivates researchers to conduct the studies that they do, and the terminology of the discipline. I have since found that a better choice for real begginers in this area is "Principles of Language Learning and TEaching" by H.D. Brown (1994). Its scope includes more than L2 acquisition theory, as the title suggests, but it provides the basic understanding necessary to then begin to talk about current research.
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