This course is designed as an introductory course into the study of language acquisition (FLA and SLA), and will be of interest to you as prospective language teachers via broadening your understanding of how your students learn a second language. Throughout the course we will be examining not only the findings of particular research areas of SLA but also the theories of them which have often provided the research questions. For language teachers, who usually organize and manage the learning process for their students, any knowledge of how language learning takes place is of vital importance — in order to make decisions which affect learning processes, one must have a conscious knowledge of language learning as a base. An awareness of the various SLA theories will help teachers and future teachers form their own beliefs about how students learn, and thus of how they should be taught. In some ways the course poses many more questions than it provides answers for. This reflects the current state of research and findings mainly in the field of SLA, which still provides conflicting views and theories of language learning: SLA research does provide information on how language learners learn, but by no means provides all the answers.