Professor Emerita, School of Education
About
Diane Larsen-Freeman was the director of the ELI from 2002-2008. She has been a professor of education at U-M since January 2002. Since 2003, she is also a professor of linguistics. Prior to her arrival in Ann Arbor, Diane was a professor of applied linguistics at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. She is, however, no stranger to the University, having earned her master's degree and doctorate in linguistics here in the mid-seventies.
For the past 30 years, Diane has conducted research in second language acquisition and reviewed and synthesized research literature, the latter activity leading to the publication of a leading introduction to the field, An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Research (Longman Publishing, 1991, with Michael Long).
Diane has also written books on English grammar from a discourse perspective, most recently the second edition of The Grammar Book: An ESL/EFL Teacher's Course (Heinle/Thomson, 1999, with Marianne Celce-Murcia) and has directed the popular grammar series Grammar Dimensions: Form, Meaning, and Use (Heinle/Thomson, 2000), which is in its fourth edition. In addition, her language teaching methodology book Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching (Oxford University Press, 2000) is now in its second edition.
In 2003 Diane published Teaching Language: From Grammar to Grammaring, in which she looks at language from the perspective of dynamical systems. In the book she explores the complexity, dynamism, and nonlinearity of language and its acquisition (Heinle/Thomson, 2003). Her current book with Lynne Cameron, Complex Dynamic Systems and Applied Linguistics (Oxford University Press, 2008) amplifies this perspective for the applied linguistics areas of first and second language acquisition, discourse and the language classroom. The final chapter is on researching applied linguistics from a complexity theory perspective.
