Abstract:

During my work as an English teacher in Beijing, students asked me (the first author) tricky questions about learning English as a second language (L2). Some of these tricky questions included “Should I learn the phonetics or vocabulary first?”, and “How many hours should I spend on learning English if I want to communicate fluently with native speakers?”. A father even asked me if his 7-year-old daughter would get confused if she studied two languages simultaneously. Some of them I could manage to answer, but oftentimes I was struggling to give plausible explanations which I would be doubtful about either. Even if I tried my best to reassure these students based on my own experience, truths about language learning eluded me. I could not help but think if Sadeghi’s book was out back then and I happened to read it, I might have given more satisfactory answers to these knotty questions concerning second language acquisition (SLA).

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