D Atkinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 8923 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Atkinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Atkinson |
| SIGNATURE | ATKINSON D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Temple University, Japan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7460-542X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 189 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Sociocognitive Approaches to Second Language Acquisition
Historically, it has been assumed that second language acquisition (SLA) is a mental process, which takes place largely in isolated cognitive space (e.g., Long, 1997).
Biber, Douglas
Douglas Biber is a linguist who has spearheaded the computerized analysis of large, systematically constructed text corpora, yielding new and more sophisticated ways of understanding language and its use. His multidimensional approach to analyzing discourse, which examines co‐occurrence patterns of large numbers of linguistic features across a broad range of spoken and written texts, has been highly influential in applied linguistics, sociolingui…
Crisis talk
An important way of guarding against the dangers inherent in the absolutist world view in any sphere of human endeavor, including science, is to let all the flowers bloom, not just a chosen few. You never know which ones will catch the eye to become tomorrow's realities (Lantolf, 1996, p. 739). Thirty years later, and now joined by Matt Poehner and Jacob Rieker (Lantolf et al., 2025; hereafter Lantolf et al.), Lantolf seems to have reversed cours…
Learning as inter‐ action
When people inter‐ act, they act conjointly, not as independent beings. This article explores the role of interactive we‐processes in second language acquisition and teaching (SLA/T). First, we define we‐processes, review literature, and summarize our theoretical framework—a sociocognitive approach to SLA/T. Second, we present an exploratory study of we‐processes in an Australian ESL classroom, microanalyzing a 55‐second videotaped interaction us…
Forging common ground in second language acquisition and teaching
In this final article in this guest‐edited issue on synergies in second language acquisition and teaching (SLA/T), we attempt to bring together the main content of this issue in an overall, combined synergy statement, concluding this project as a whole. Let us remind readers of the project: A shared effort by 17 scholars taking 11 different perspectives on SLA/T is not the norm in our field. Our aim has been to promote the intermingling and cross…
Introduction to the guest‐edited issue
Intellectuals in every field are familiar with frequent complaints about the isolation of various disciplines into insular silos of self-reflexive chatter, more-or-less immune from the cross-pollination of ideas.This has been particularly true of the field of psychology.(. ..)Increasingly, though, psychological researchers and practitioners are coming to chafe under this restrictive intellectual regime, and one hears increasing calls for approach…
Relationality, interconnectedness, and identity
This complex article has six subsections. Following a brief introduction, one team of three co‐authors and three single authors present compact statements of their distinctive individual research perspectives on second language acquisition and teaching (SLA/T): Atkinson, Mejía‐Laguna, and Ribeiro offer a sociocognitive perspective; Cappellini introduces an eclectic perspective in which online communication is analyzed multimodally; Kayi‐Aydar dev…
A Commentary on “Proactive Language Learning Theory”
Congratulations to Mostafa Papi and Phil Hiver for providing a thought-provoking contribution to the second language acquisition (SLA) literature. I appreciate this opportunity to engage with their ideas and to think dialectically and dialogically with them about second/additional/multilingual language learning. One thing virtually all SLA researchers seem to agree on is the highly complex and multifaceted nature of what we study. If so, then the…
Beyond learning opportunities
This paper introduces the sociological concept of focused encounters (FEs) as a tool for researching interaction in second language acquisition and teaching. FEs are face-to-face interactions affording joint attention, intersubjectivity, interaffectivity, and interactional alignment, considered key contributors to learning in some SLA/T approaches. First, we introduce the FE concept. Second, we situate FEs within a sociocognitive approach to SLA/…
Jslw@30
Natural Pedagogy in Second Language Learning and Teaching
This article introduces the concept of natural pedagogy (NP) as a tool for envisioning and enacting second language learning and teaching. Currently popular in the social and cognitive sciences, NP theory holds that much adaptive human behavior is too complex and nontransparent to learn via observation, imitation, and trial‐and‐error alone: Something extra is needed. NP employs humans’ remarkable “hyperprosocial” capacities/tools for interaction …
Homo Pedagogicus
Second language (SL) teacher educators tirelessly teach others how to teach. But how often do we actually def ine teaching? Without explicit definitional activity on this fundamental concept in second language teaching (SLT), it remains implicit and intuitive – the opposite of clear, productive understanding. I therefore explore the question, ‘What is teaching?’ in this paper. First, I establish the claim that the SLT literature rarely defines te…
Language learning in mindbodyworld
Based on recent research in cognitive science, interaction, and second language acquisition (SLA), I describe a sociocognitive approach to SLA. This approach adopts a non-cognitivist view of cognition: Instead of an isolated computational process in which input is extracted from the environment and used to build elaborate internal knowledge representations, cognition is seen as adaptive intelligence, enabling our close and sensitive alignment to …
Culture from the Bottom Up
The culture concept has been severely criticized for its top-down nature in TESOL , leading arguably to its falling out of favor in the field. But what of the fact that people do live culturally (Ingold, 1994)? This article describes a case study of culture from the bottom up-culture as understood and enacted by its individual users. Findings suggest that culture is an emergent phenomenon for the research participant, who actively interprets, res…
Research Articles in English for Specific Purposes
The research article (RA) is the single most analyzed genre in English for specific purposes (ESP). This is understandable—it has been the main outlet for new knowledge in natural science and medicine for the past 150 years, and, in the 20th century, engineering and social science.
Corpus Analysis of Scientific and Medical Writing Across Time
Diachronic corpus linguistic studies have fundamentally deepened our knowledge of scientific and medical writing by revealing “language‐in‐the‐making”: how the literate technologies of scientific and medical research have developed, and what they have been developed for.
Cognitivism, adaptive intelligence, and second language acquisition
There is no doubt that the “cognitive revolution,” in tandem with a focus on second language teaching, gave birth to the organized study of second language acquisition (SLA). In this sense, SLA studies has always been a cognitive science, although calls have recently been made to reemphasize and strengthen the connection. This paper: 1) reviews the cognitivist vision of mind/brain which has historically dominated both cognitive science and SLA st…
Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition
Introduction Dwight Atkinson Chapter 1: The Sociocultural Approach to Second Language Acquisition: Sociocultural Theory, Second Language Acquisition, and Artificial L2 Development James P. Lantolf Chapter 2: A Complexity Theory Approach to Second Language Development/ Acquisition Diane Larsen-Freeman Chapter 3: An Identity Approach to Second Language Acquisition Bonny Norton & Carolyn McKinney Chapter 4: Language Socialization Approaches to Secon…
Colloquium – Alternative approaches to second language acquisition
Presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, Denver, Colorado, USA; 23 March 2009
The Teaching Practicum in Thailand
Alignment and Interaction in a Sociocognitive Approach to Second Language Acquisition
This article argues for the crucial role of alignment in second language acquisition, as conceptualized from a broadly sociocognitive perspective. By alignment , we mean the complex processes through which human beings effect coordinated interaction, both with other human beings and (usually human‐engineered) environments, situations, tools, and affordances. The article begins by summarizing what we mean by a sociocognitive approach to second lan…
Research as Social Work
The social-work literature has already made links between social work and research, and has argued in favour of practitioner–research. This paper turns the argument around and looks at how research can come to look and feel like social work. This happens particularly, but not exclusively, in participatory research in the learning-disability field, especially in auto/biographical or life-story research, where long-term research relationships are m…
Contrasting rhetorics/contrasting cultures
L2 writing in the post-process era
Toward a sociocognitive approach to second Llanguage acquisition
This article develops the notion of a sociocognitive perspective on second language acquisition (SLA), proposed as an alternative to the cognitivism pervading the field. By sociocognitive, I mean a view of language and language acquisition as simultaneously occurring and interactively constructed both "in the head" and "in the world." First, I develop a view of language and its acquisition as social phenomena-as existing and taking place for the …
A Critical Approach to Critical Thinking in Tesol
This article presents four more-or-less independent reasons why TESOL educators should be cautious about adopting critical thinking pedagogies in their classrooms: (a) Critical thinking may be more on the order of a non-overt social practice than a well-defined and teachable pedagogical set of behaviors; (b) critical thinking can be and has been criticized for its exclusive and reductive character; (c) teaching thinking to nonnative speakers may …
Toward a sociocognitive approach to second Llanguage acquisition
This article develops the notion of a sociocognitive perspective on second language acquisition (SLA), proposed as an alternative to the cognitivism pervading the field. By sociocognitive, I mean a view of language and language acquisition as simultaneously occurring and interactively constructed both "in the head" and "in the world." First, I develop a view of language and its acquisition as social phenomena-as existing and taking place for the …
Tesol and Culture
Culture is a central yet underexamined concept in TESOL. In comparison to other fields such as anthropology and cultural studies, there has been little serious discussion and critique of the concept in TESOL over the last two decades. This article offers a reassessment of the notion of culture in TESOL, taking recent work in critical anthropology and cultural studies, and to a lesser degree TESOL itself, as a starting point. It proposes a revised…
Individualism, academic writing, and ESL writers
Contrasting rhetorics/contrasting cultures
L2 writing in the post-process era
Language learning in mindbodyworld
Based on recent research in cognitive science, interaction, and second language acquisition (SLA), I describe a sociocognitive approach to SLA. This approach adopts a non-cognitivist view of cognition: Instead of an isolated computational process in which input is extracted from the environment and used to build elaborate internal knowledge representations, cognition is seen as adaptive intelligence, enabling our close and sensitive alignment to …
Culture from the Bottom Up
The culture concept has been severely criticized for its top-down nature in TESOL , leading arguably to its falling out of favor in the field. But what of the fact that people do live culturally (Ingold, 1994)? This article describes a case study of culture from the bottom up-culture as understood and enacted by its individual users. Findings suggest that culture is an emergent phenomenon for the research participant, who actively interprets, res…
ThePhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1675-1975
This study traces the evolution of scientific research writing in English from 1675 to 1975. Two separate methods of discourse analysis - rhetorical analysis focusing on broad genre characteristics, and sociolinguistic register analysis - are applied to a large corpus of articles from thePhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. The two sets of results are then interpreted vis-à-vis the Royal Society's social history to yield an …
Cultures of Writing
Nonnative-speaking (NNS) undergraduates at U.S. universities frequently proceed from ESL or English for academic purposes writing classes directly into freshman composition. Although this sequence of events may be an effective means of getting students into the academic writing mainstream, there have been some suggestions to the contrary. Taking an ethnographic approach, this study describes the contrasting cultural norms of academic writing and …
Differing Reading-Writing Relationships in L1 and L2 Literacy Development
0 The complex nature of L2 literacy has recently become an area of special concern to applied linguists and second language acquisition researchers. Carson, Carrell, Silberstein, Kroll, and Kuehn (1990), for example, studying reading and writing relationships for ESL students from two different L1 backgrounds, found that although measures of reading and writing proficiency were significantly related for their Japanese subjects in Japanese, a simi…
Natural Pedagogy in Second Language Learning and Teaching
This article introduces the concept of natural pedagogy (NP) as a tool for envisioning and enacting second language learning and teaching. Currently popular in the social and cognitive sciences, NP theory holds that much adaptive human behavior is too complex and nontransparent to learn via observation, imitation, and trial‐and‐error alone: Something extra is needed. NP employs humans’ remarkable “hyperprosocial” capacities/tools for interaction …
Research as Social Work
The social-work literature has already made links between social work and research, and has argued in favour of practitioner–research. This paper turns the argument around and looks at how research can come to look and feel like social work. This happens particularly, but not exclusively, in participatory research in the learning-disability field, especially in auto/biographical or life-story research, where long-term research relationships are m…
Homo Pedagogicus
Second language (SL) teacher educators tirelessly teach others how to teach. But how often do we actually def ine teaching? Without explicit definitional activity on this fundamental concept in second language teaching (SLT), it remains implicit and intuitive – the opposite of clear, productive understanding. I therefore explore the question, ‘What is teaching?’ in this paper. First, I establish the claim that the SLT literature rarely defines te…
Apprenticing Nonnative Speakers to New Discourse Communities. The Author Responds
Dwight Atkinson, Comments on Dwight Atkinson's "A Critical Approach to Critical Thinking in TESOL": A Case for Critical Thinking in the English Language Classroom. The Author Responds, TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 133-137
Improving cause-of-death statistics
The Evolution of Medical Research Writing from 1735 to 1985
A crucial event in the historical evolution of scientific English was the birth of the scientific journal. This event, and its early rhetorical consequences, have been well described in recent research. In contrast, few details are known concerning subsequent developments in scientific writing from the eighteenth century onward. In this paper, the changing language and rhetoric of medical research reporting over the last 250years are characterize…
Improving cause-of-death statistics
Differing Reading-Writing Relationships in L1 and L2 Literacy Development
0 The complex nature of L2 literacy has recently become an area of special concern to applied linguists and second language acquisition researchers. Carson, Carrell, Silberstein, Kroll, and Kuehn (1990), for example, studying reading and writing relationships for ESL students from two different L1 backgrounds, found that although measures of reading and writing proficiency were significantly related for their Japanese subjects in Japanese, a simi…
Cultures of Writing
Nonnative-speaking (NNS) undergraduates at U.S. universities frequently proceed from ESL or English for academic purposes writing classes directly into freshman composition. Although this sequence of events may be an effective means of getting students into the academic writing mainstream, there have been some suggestions to the contrary. Taking an ethnographic approach, this study describes the contrasting cultural norms of academic writing and …
History of Englishes
ThePhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1675-1975
This study traces the evolution of scientific research writing in English from 1675 to 1975. Two separate methods of discourse analysis - rhetorical analysis focusing on broad genre characteristics, and sociolinguistic register analysis - are applied to a large corpus of articles from thePhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. The two sets of results are then interpreted vis-à-vis the Royal Society's social history to yield an …
A Critical Approach to Critical Thinking in Tesol
This article presents four more-or-less independent reasons why TESOL educators should be cautious about adopting critical thinking pedagogies in their classrooms: (a) Critical thinking may be more on the order of a non-overt social practice than a well-defined and teachable pedagogical set of behaviors; (b) critical thinking can be and has been criticized for its exclusive and reductive character; (c) teaching thinking to nonnative speakers may …
Apprenticing Nonnative Speakers to New Discourse Communities. The Author Responds
Dwight Atkinson, Comments on Dwight Atkinson's "A Critical Approach to Critical Thinking in TESOL": A Case for Critical Thinking in the English Language Classroom. The Author Responds, TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 133-137
"Comments on Ryuko Kubota's "Japanese Culture Constructed by Discourses
Dwight Atkinson, Comments on Ryuko Kubota's "Japanese Culture Constructed by Discourses: Implications for Applied Linguistics Research and ELT": Postmodern Applied Linguistics: Problems and Contradictions. Another Reader Reacts, TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 745-749
Tesol and Culture
Culture is a central yet underexamined concept in TESOL. In comparison to other fields such as anthropology and cultural studies, there has been little serious discussion and critique of the concept in TESOL over the last two decades. This article offers a reassessment of the notion of culture in TESOL, taking recent work in critical anthropology and cultural studies, and to a lesser degree TESOL itself, as a starting point. It proposes a revised…
Individualism, academic writing, and ESL writers
Toward a sociocognitive approach to second Llanguage acquisition
This article develops the notion of a sociocognitive perspective on second language acquisition (SLA), proposed as an alternative to the cognitivism pervading the field. By sociocognitive, I mean a view of language and language acquisition as simultaneously occurring and interactively constructed both "in the head" and "in the world." First, I develop a view of language and its acquisition as social phenomena-as existing and taking place for the …
L2 writing in the post-process era
Contrasting rhetorics/contrasting cultures
Research as Social Work
The social-work literature has already made links between social work and research, and has argued in favour of practitioner–research. This paper turns the argument around and looks at how research can come to look and feel like social work. This happens particularly, but not exclusively, in participatory research in the learning-disability field, especially in auto/biographical or life-story research, where long-term research relationships are m…
Alignment and Interaction in a Sociocognitive Approach to Second Language Acquisition
This article argues for the crucial role of alignment in second language acquisition, as conceptualized from a broadly sociocognitive perspective. By alignment , we mean the complex processes through which human beings effect coordinated interaction, both with other human beings and (usually human‐engineered) environments, situations, tools, and affordances. The article begins by summarizing what we mean by a sociocognitive approach to second lan…
The Teaching Practicum in Thailand
Colloquium – Alternative approaches to second language acquisition
Presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, Denver, Colorado, USA; 23 March 2009
Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition
Introduction Dwight Atkinson Chapter 1: The Sociocultural Approach to Second Language Acquisition: Sociocultural Theory, Second Language Acquisition, and Artificial L2 Development James P. Lantolf Chapter 2: A Complexity Theory Approach to Second Language Development/ Acquisition Diane Larsen-Freeman Chapter 3: An Identity Approach to Second Language Acquisition Bonny Norton & Carolyn McKinney Chapter 4: Language Socialization Approaches to Secon…
Research Articles in English for Specific Purposes
The research article (RA) is the single most analyzed genre in English for specific purposes (ESP). This is understandable—it has been the main outlet for new knowledge in natural science and medicine for the past 150 years, and, in the 20th century, engineering and social science.
Corpus Analysis of Scientific and Medical Writing Across Time
Diachronic corpus linguistic studies have fundamentally deepened our knowledge of scientific and medical writing by revealing “language‐in‐the‐making”: how the literate technologies of scientific and medical research have developed, and what they have been developed for.
Cognitivism, adaptive intelligence, and second language acquisition
There is no doubt that the “cognitive revolution,” in tandem with a focus on second language teaching, gave birth to the organized study of second language acquisition (SLA). In this sense, SLA studies has always been a cognitive science, although calls have recently been made to reemphasize and strengthen the connection. This paper: 1) reviews the cognitivist vision of mind/brain which has historically dominated both cognitive science and SLA st…
Culture from the Bottom Up
The culture concept has been severely criticized for its top-down nature in TESOL , leading arguably to its falling out of favor in the field. But what of the fact that people do live culturally (Ingold, 1994)? This article describes a case study of culture from the bottom up-culture as understood and enacted by its individual users. Findings suggest that culture is an emergent phenomenon for the research participant, who actively interprets, res…
Language learning in mindbodyworld
Based on recent research in cognitive science, interaction, and second language acquisition (SLA), I describe a sociocognitive approach to SLA. This approach adopts a non-cognitivist view of cognition: Instead of an isolated computational process in which input is extracted from the environment and used to build elaborate internal knowledge representations, cognition is seen as adaptive intelligence, enabling our close and sensitive alignment to …
Homo Pedagogicus
Second language (SL) teacher educators tirelessly teach others how to teach. But how often do we actually def ine teaching? Without explicit definitional activity on this fundamental concept in second language teaching (SLT), it remains implicit and intuitive – the opposite of clear, productive understanding. I therefore explore the question, ‘What is teaching?’ in this paper. First, I establish the claim that the SLT literature rarely defines te…
Linguistics (23 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (12 works) · Second Language Learning and Teaching (11 works) · Mathematics education (10 works) · Second-language acquisition (10 works)