Professor Richard J. Towell

Professor of French Applied Linguisitcs
and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Media and Social Sciences

E-Mail: R.J.Towell@salford.ac.uk

Professor Richard Towell is Professor of French Applied Linguistics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Media and Sociat Sciences. He is a past President of the Association of French Language studies, a past Chair of the university Council for Modern Languages and has just relinquished his role as an editor of the Journal of French Language Studies. A former Head of the School of Languages, he is currently a member of the Advisory Group on Research of CILT and Chair of the Advisory Board of the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. He has been invited to give plenary lectures at the annual conferences of the European Association for Second Language Acquisition (EUROSLA) and the Association for French Language studies (AFLS). In the last few years, he has given invited lectures at the universities of Auckland (NZ), Durham, Exeter and Nijmegen.

Research interests:

Second language acquisition and French Language.

Principal and recent publications include:

(with R. Hawkins) , Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (Clevedon and Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1994), pp. 280.

(with R. Hawkins) French Grammar and Usage (revised edition) Arnold. 2001.

'Second Language Acquisition: Holes in the Parts and parts of a Whole', Studia Linguistica Vol 54 (2000) pp. 109 - 122.

'Relative degrees of fluency: A comparative case study of advanced learners of French' IRAL Vol 40 (2002) pp117 -150

(with J-M Dewaele) (forthcoming) 'The Role of Psycholinguistic Factors in the development of fluency' in Advanced learners of French.

PhD Supervision:

He is currently supervising three Ph.D students working respectively on a study of the role of the native language in the language teaching, a study of the teaching of language and culture via multimedia, and a generativist study of the acquisition of Spanish as a foreign language.

School of Languages
University of Salford
Maxwell Building 8th and 9th   Floor
The Crescent
Salford, M5 4WT
United Kingdom.
Tel. 0161 295 5990
Fax. 0161 295 5335
E-Mail