Bjorn Hammarberg (ed.): PROCESSES IN THIRD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION.
David Singleton · Applied Linguistics · 2010
This book, which is edited and mostly written by Björn Hammarberg, by any standards an important figure in L3 acquisition studies, mostly has its origins in material already in print. This will no doubt come as a disappointment to those hoping for a completely new array of research and insights from Hammarberg. However, the updating and bringing together of the previously published pieces, some of which had their first airing in collections that were not necessarily very widely disseminated (a set of conference proceedings and two festschrifts), and one of which was previously available only in French, constitutes a genuine service to our field. All of the chapters derive from the project ‘Processes in Third Language Acquisition’ which was based on conversational data collected in the early 1990s from the young British linguist Sarah Williams, who goes under her initials SW throughout the book. It is perhaps fitting to note Sarah's untimely death in 1996, and the fact that the book functions as a sort of quiet-spoken memorial to her.