Bill VanPatten
BVPVanPatten
Bill VanPatten is an American SLA scholar, teacher educator, and novelist whose professional life has moved between university research, public explanation, and creative writing. He taught Spanish and second language studies for many years, most prominently at Michigan State University, and became one of the clearest public voices in instructed SLA.
VanPatten's academic identity is tied above all to Input Processing and Processing Instruction, but on the page he often comes across less like a cloistered specialist than like a very well-informed explainer who is slightly impatient with bad theory and bad pedagogy. He has also written fiction, which gives his public profile a texture that many applied linguists never quite acquire.
Career
- Professor of Spanish and second language studies, especially associated with Michigan State University
- Widely known as a lecturer and writer who translates psycholinguistic SLA into teacher-facing language
- Active beyond academia as a novelist and public intellectual in language education
- Central figure in research on processing-based views of acquisition
Published Work
- Input Processing and Grammar Instruction (1996, with Teresa Cadierno)
- From Input to Output: A Teacher's Guide to Second Language Acquisition (2003, with Jessica Williams)
- While We Are on the Topic (2017)
- Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition (2020, with Gregory Keating and Stefanie Wulff)