Language in educationan interview with Leo Van Lier

Resumen

Leo van Lier is Professor of Educational Linguistics at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California and is Director of its Center for Language in Education and Work (CLEW). He took his doctorate at Lancaster University and is the author of The Classroom and the Second Language Learner, one of the first books to deal thoroughly with research in the second/foreign language classroom. Leo van Lier is a strong advocate of incorporating ethnography and qualitative discourse analysis into educational research in the classroom. Among his current research interests is the question of the development in the pupil of language awareness, i. e. the capacity to think about language, its structure and its usage in order to make the process of learning a language more effective and more efficient. This interest has already borne fruit in the form of his two most recent books, Introducing Language Awareness (in press) and Interaction in the Language Curriculum: Awareness, Autonomy and Authenticity (in press).