Craig Chaudron
Craig Chaudron (1946–2006) spent his career at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, where he joined the ESL (later Second Language Studies) department in 1983 and became full professor in 1994. Born in St. Louis, educated at Wabash (BA, philosophy and French), he took an MEd in educational theory and a PhD in educational linguistics at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education before a stint at UCLA. The CV is a reminder that the people who later built SLA as a research field often arrived through philosophy, education, or language teaching rather than linguistics proper.
Second Language Classrooms: Research on Teaching and Learning (1988, Cambridge) is the work the field still cites. It synthesised twenty years of descriptive and quasi-experimental classroom research, set the bar for what counted as evidence about teaching, and became the starting point for later handbooks and anthologies. Chaudron's subsequent work on applied psycholinguistics and research methods extended that insistence on methodological seriousness into the design and interpretation of SLA studies generally.
Career
- BA, Wabash College (1968); MEd and PhD, OISE/University of Toronto (1976, 1982)
- Visiting Assistant Professor, UCLA
- Joined ESL/SLS, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, 1983; full professor 1994
- Department Chair 1990–1994; Graduate Chair 1998–2006
- North American editor, Applied Linguistics (Oxford), 1989–1995
- Died 21 August 2006
Published Work
- Second Language Classrooms: Research on Teaching and Learning (1988, Cambridge) — the landmark synthesis
- Papers on error correction, recasts, teacher talk, and classroom discourse analysis
- Methodological work on coding schemes and reliability in classroom research