Is Language Teachable? Psycholinguistic Experiments and Hypotheses

Abstract

In this article I demonstrate that the teachability of language is constrained by what the learner is ready to acquire. I set out a series of psychological constraints on teachability and relate these to the ‘multidimensional model of SLA’, taking a speech processing approch towards the explanation of language acquisition. This article supplies the empirical evidence for these constraints—namely experiments and longitudinal studies—which were available at the time of submission (1985). I take the position that while this research has important implications for ‘formal interventions’ in the acquisition process, the nature of such interventions do by no means follow from the research on teachability reported on in this article.

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