Diane Larsen-Freeman

Diane Larsen-Freeman (born 1946) is an American linguist.

She is currently a Professor Emerita in Education and in Linguistics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

An applied linguist, known for her work in second language acquisition, English as a second or foreign language, language teaching methods, teacher education, and English grammar, she is renowned for her work on the complex/dynamic systems approach to second language development.

Larsen-Freeman began her career as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in Sabah, Malaysia from 1967 to 1969, an experience she credits for igniting her fascination with language acquisition.

She went on to graduate studies at the University of Michigan, earning her PhD in linguistics in 1975.

Larsen-Freeman first served on the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles and then the SIT Graduate Institute.

In 1997, she wrote a seminal article in which she suggested the application of complex/dynamic systems theory to study second language acquisition.

In 2002, she returned to the University of Michigan to direct the English Language Institute (ELI), now Michigan Language Assessment and was also appointed Professor in the School of Education and at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts in the Department of Linguistics.

She was forced to step down from the ELI in 2008 by Dean Terrence J. McDonald and retired from the University of Michigan in 2012, where she holds emerita positions as well as at the SIT Graduate Institute.

She remains 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 concentrates her research on the process of second language acquisition.

She also researches English grammar, which she regards not only as a set of structural patterns, but also as an important resource for making meaning and for adapting language to the communicative context.

She has found that complexity theory provides new insights into language, its acquisition, and its use.

She sees all three as complex, non-linear, dynamic processes.

Such a perspective has contributed to her dynamic perspective of language, which she has applied to teaching grammar, or “grammaring” as she calls it.

The dynamic approach to second language development also acknowledges the individual paths that students chart to second language success, and views teaching as fundamentally a process of managing learning.

Larsen-Freeman was also the editor of the journal Language Learning for five years.

A book of papers in her honor, Complexity Theory and Language Development, was published in 2017.

Larsen-Freeman criticised Larry Selinker's Interlanguage in a chapter entitled Another Step to be Taken published in Han and Tarone's Interlanguage - Forty Years Later by claiming that there is no endpoint of the interlanguage continuum.

She suggested the reconsideration of the Interlanguage.