Bill VanPatten is a former

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

of Spanish and

Second Language Acquisition Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning—otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process of learning a language other than one's native language (L1). SLA research examines how learners ...

Michigan State University Michigan State University (Michigan State or MSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State o ...

. He specializes in

second language acquisition Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning—otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process of learning a language other than one's native language (L1). SLA research examines how learners ...

, which he investigates on both theoretical and practical levels, using techniques from

psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...

applied linguistics Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field which identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, psychology, Communication stu ...

, and

cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, whi ...

Research

VanPatten was the creator of the educational television show ''

Destinos ''Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish'', also known as simply ''Destinos'', is a television program created by Bill VanPatten, who at the time was Professor of Spanish and Second Language Acquisition at the University of Illinois at Urbana C ...

'', designed for use with Spanish courses. He worked with the theory of input processing in second language acquisition, which aims to explain how L2 learners process input. This term was first used by Professor Bill VanPatten. Growing up in a multilingual home, he strongly believes in the significant benefits of being able to speak, read, and write multiple languages. VanPatten considered that most people view language as something static, assuming that practicing rules will eventually make them stick in one's mind. However, VanPatten believes that learning a language involves first processing language through hearing and reading to gather enough data to build up the linguistic system over time. To exemplify this theory, VanPatten explains that giving people a couple of chunks of language and having them do something with them allows them to process language, thus demonstrating how language develops in the brain.

Bibliography

* ''Dust Storm: Stories from Lubbock'' * ''From Input To Output: A Teacher's Guide to Second Language Acquisition'' * ''Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen'' (with James F. Lee) * ''Theories in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction'' (with Jessica Williams) * ''Key Terms in Second Language Acquisition'' (with Alessandro G. Benati) * ''Studies in Second Language Acquisition'' (with

Susan Gass Susan Gass (born 1943) is an American Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize-winner linguist. She is currently a professor emerita, retired from the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on ...

) * ''Research in Second Language Processing and Parsing" (with Jill Jegerski)VanPatten Full CV July 2011
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References

External links

* ttp://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.aatsp.org/resource/resmgr/hispania_open_access/hispania_98.1_vanpatten.pdf Hispania White Paper: Where are the experts? (Hispania 98.1 (2015): 2–13) Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Applied linguists Bilingualism and second-language acquisition researchers Michigan State University faculty {{US-linguist-stub