Robert DeKeyser

Robert DeKeyser is Professor Emeritus of Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland, and the clearest voice in SLA for treating language learning as a species of general skill acquisition. He trained in Belgium (BA Leuven) and the United States (MA, PhD Stanford), spent seventeen years at Pittsburgh, and moved to Maryland in 2005, where he anchored the second-language acquisition PhD programme until his retirement.

Skill Acquisition Theory is his signature contribution. The argument borrows from Anderson's cognitive architecture: learners move from declarative knowledge (knowing that) through proceduralisation (knowing how) to automatisation (doing it fast and without attention). The pedagogic consequence is that practice matters, and that the kind of practice must match the stage — a claim that cuts cleanly against both Krashen's acquisition-not-learning position and the stronger forms of implicit-only pedagogy. His edited Practice in a Second Language (2007) is the reference point for the argument.

Career

• BA, University of Leuven; MA and PhD, Stanford
• University of Pittsburgh, 1988–2005
• University of Maryland, 2005–2020; now Professor Emeritus
• Editor of Language Learning, 2005–2010
• Co-editor, Studies in Bilingualism (Benjamins), 2010–2013

Published Work

• Practice in a Second Language: Perspectives from Applied Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology (ed., 2007, Cambridge)
• Chapters defining Skill Acquisition Theory in successive editions of Theories in Second Language Acquisition (VanPatten & Williams)
• Influential papers on implicit and explicit learning, age effects, and automatisation

Influence

• Made skill acquisition a genuine alternative to both UG-based and usage-based accounts
• Put practice back on the research agenda after decades of suspicion inherited from Krashen
• A frequent collaborator and interlocutor with the Maryland Language Science Center's broader work on L2 processing