Diane Larsen-Freeman

Diane Larsen-Freeman (born 1946) is an American linguist. She is now a Professor Emerita in Education and in Linguistics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She works in Applied linguistics. She studies in second language acquisition, English as a second or foreign language, language teaching methods, teacher education, and English grammar. Her work on the complex/dynamic systems approach to second language development is very important and well-known.
Career.
Larsen-Freeman began her career as a Peace Corps volunteer. She taught English in Sabah, Malaysia from 1967 to 1969. She says this experience started her interest in language acquisition. She went on to graduate studies at the University of Michigan, earning her PhD in linguistics in 1975.
Larsen-Freeman worked at the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles and then the SIT Graduate Institute. In 2002, she returned to the University of Michigan to direct the English Language Institute. She was also Professor in the School of Education and the Department of Linguistics. She retired from the University of Michigan in 2012. She has emerita positions at the English Language Institute and in Education and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, and at the SIT Graduate Institute. She is still active in her field, and teaches courses on the structure of English and second language development as a visiting senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
Larsen-Freeman mostly researches second language acquisition. She also studies English grammar. She thinks grammar is not only a set of structural patterns, but also important for making meaning and for changing language to meet a communicative context. She thinks that complexity theory is a new and useful way to understand language, its acquisition, and its use. She sees all three as complex changing processes that do not move neatly in a straight line. She applied this idea to teaching grammar, or “grammaring” as she calls it. The dynamic approach to second language development includes the idea that students each have their own path to learning, and that teaching is fundamentally a process of managing learning.
Larsen-Freeman was also the editor of the journal "Language Learning" for five years.
In 1997, she wrote a leading article applying complex/dynamic systems theory to study second language acquisition. A book of papers in her honor, "Complexity Theory and Language Development", was published in 2017.
Related pages.
List of women linguists