Vivian Cook (academic)

Vivian James Cook (born 13 June 1940) is Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. He is renowned for his work on second language acquisition and second language teaching, and for writing successful textbooks and popular books about linguistics. He has worked on a number of topics such as bilingualism, EFL (English as a Foreign Language), first language acquisition, second language teaching, linguistics, and the English writing system. He has published more than 20 books and 100 papers. He was founder and first President of the European Second Language Association (EuroSLA), and co-founder of the Oxford University Press journal Writing Systems Research.

He started his career as a Lecturer in EFL and Director of Language Service in London, and during this time he published many innovative EFL textbooks (Active Intonation, 1968;Realistic English, with B. Abbs and M. Underwood, 1968–70;English Topics, 1975,Using Intonation, 1979,English for Life, 1980–1983). In 1978 he became a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex, and in 2004 he got his professorship at Newcastle University.

In the 1970s and 1980s Professor Cook introduced various research methods in second language acquisition research (elicited imitation, short-term memory measures, response times and micro artificial languages). He favoured an experimental approach to second language research and conducted various experiments. He wrote a very successful textbook about Noam Chomsky's theories (Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction), and related Universal Grammar to second language acquisition and teaching. He also published papers on second language teaching, and developed Computer-Assisted Language Learning programs for learning English as a Foreign Language, including adventure games and syntactic parsing programs.