John Schumann

John H. Schumann is an American applied linguist and Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at UCLA. His career moved from a classic SLA starting point — the acquisition data of a single learner — to neurobiology, affect, and the biological substrates of language learning.

Schumann is best known for the Acculturation Model, which argued that an adult learner's acquisition of a second language is constrained by the social and psychological distance between the learner and the target-language community. The model emerged from his longitudinal study of Alberto, a Costa Rican immigrant in Boston, whose English showed features reminiscent of pidginization rather than steady development. Later in his career, Schumann turned to the neurobiology of learning and motivation, work that anticipated much of the current interest in embodied and affective SLA.

Career

• PhD from Harvard University
• Long career at UCLA, eventually Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics
• Past president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL)

Published Work

• The Pidginization Process: A Model for Second Language Acquisition (1978)
• "Social distance as a factor in second language acquisition" (1976)
• The Neurobiology of Affect in Language (1997)
• The Interactional Instinct (with colleagues, 2009)

Influence

• Through the Acculturation Model, made social and psychological distance central categories in early SLA theorizing
• Brought neurobiology and affect into mainstream applied linguistics well before either became fashionable
• His Alberto case study remains a teaching staple for introducing longitudinal SLA research