Who are Nina Spada and Patsy Lightbown?

This week you will read the first empirical study in this course (after having read 3 chapters from our textbook): Spada & Lightbown (1999), published in the Modern Language Journal. It's a study of effectiveness of instruction conducted in Canadian ESL intensive classes, with children who were Francophone speakers learning English in Quebec (a French-speaking province in Canada). They were in grade 6, so their age was 11 or 12.

If you want to find out more about the two authors, the web has some information about them, including some photos. Nina Spada is currently at the University of Toronto, and you can find a photo and description of her interests here, the same photo and an extensive list of publications here, and an abridged CV here. Patsy Lightbown is now professor emeritus (which means she retired, but remains active in the field) at her institution of many years, Concordia University in Montreal. You can read the note on her retirement in 2001 and see a photo if you click here and scroll down the page.

These two SLA scholars are co-authors of one of the most successful SLA textbooks in the history of the field: "How languages are learned." It is an excellent undergraduate-level, readable introduction, and it would be a good idea to consult it for your research papers if your topic has to do with L2 learning in classroom contexts.