Bill VanPatten is a former

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

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 by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific dis ...

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

. 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 by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific dis ...

, 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 rese ...

, and

cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of 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, which ...

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 Champa ...

'', which is designed for use with Spanish courses. He worked with the theory of input processing in second language acquisition, which aims to offer an explanation on how L2 learners process input. This term was first used by professor Bill VanPatten. Since he grew up in a multilingual home environment he strongly believes in the huge benefits being able to speak, read and write. VanPatten considered that most people have looked at language as something static, therefore there is a rule to learn it by practicing and then when it is relevant enough it sticks in your head. However, VanPatten considers that in learning language, first you have to process language by hearing and reading in order to get enough data to build up the linguistic system over time. To exemplify this theory, VanPatten mentions that you just have to give people a couple of chunks of language and make them do something with them so that they can 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) http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.aatsp.org/resource/resmgr/2011_election/vanpatten_full_cv_july_2011.pdf

References

External links

Giving adult language learners wings to fly (and acquire): Van Patten responds to Robert O'Neill's criticisms of SLA theory

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-academic-bio-stub