Peter Skehan
Skehan
Peter Skehan is a British applied linguist and Professor Emeritus at King's College London whose career has been central to cognitive approaches in SLA and TBLT. He is especially associated with attention, performance limits, task complexity, and the uncomfortable fact that learners cannot do everything well at once.
Skehan's work has the appeal of disciplined realism. Where some theories of learning sound serenely optimistic, Skehan tends to remind the field that minds are busy, attention is limited, and trade-offs are real.
Career
- Long academic career in cognitive SLA and instructed language learning
- Associated especially with King's College London
- One of the central theorists in debates on task complexity and performance
- Deeply influential in bringing cognitive constraints into pedagogical discussion
Published Work
- A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning (1998)
- Individual Differences in Second Language Learning (1989)
- Tasks in Second Language Learning (2011, edited)
- Processing Perspectives on Task Performance (2009)
Influence
- Major influence on how TBLT thinks about complexity, accuracy, and fluency
- Helped stop task design from sounding magically frictionless
- Still indispensable in any serious discussion of performance trade-offs