Introducing usage in SLA
Kevin McManus · 2024
This chapter provides an introduction to the volume by focusing on current questions about usage, learning, and their connections in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). The motivation for this volume is that many usage-based approaches to SLA exist in the field, and so this book sets out to critically review the conceptual and methodological foundations of several usage-based approaches to SLA. In doing so, the volume seeks to clarify common ground among different accounts and explore some of the ways that differences exist and what the impacts of these differences are for the field. This goal is achieved by asking several contributors to critically review three questions: What is usage? What is the L2 learning task? What are the connections between usage and learning? In addition to discussing these questions from several usage-based approaches (e.g., cognitive linguistics, conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, instructed SLA), this chapter introduces each of the chapters in the volume.