2008 Symposium Highlights

2008 SLA Graduate Student Symposium
“Evolving Perspectives in SLA”

Friday, April 11, 2008 & Saturday, April 12, 2008
Lowell Hall, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa
Invited Speakers:

Sally Sieloff Magnan (Professor of French, UW-Madison; Director of the Language Institute; Co-director of the SLA Program)

Socially Based SLA Perspectives on the National Foreign Language Educational Standards

The National Standards for Foreign Language Learning is having a substantial effect foreign language instruction. However, socially based perspectives of SLA, focusing on language use, lead us to question how we interpret the Standards, especially the relationship between communication and cultures. This talk considers the Communication, Cultures, and Community standards from a theoretical perspective of communicative competence.

Roumyana Slabakova (Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Iowa)

What is easy and what is hard in acquiring a second language?

This talk will survey recent successes and failures in the generative approach to SLA. We will start from the contemporary understanding of what an internalized grammar looks like if a learner can comprehend and produce sentences and discourse in the second language. Poverty of the stimulus learning situations will be presented where L2 knowledge goes clearly beyond the available input. The Bottleneck Hypothesis, a theory about “more difficult” and “easier” modules of SLA will be presented. It will be argued that inflectional morphology, but not syntax or semantics, is the tight spot of the acquisition process. Pedagogical implications will be discussed.

Panel Discussion on Focus issue of the Modern Language Journal:
Second Language Acquisition Reconceptualized? The Impact of Firth and Wagner (1997).

Panel Moderator:

Barbara A. Lafford (Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, Department of Languages & Literatures, ASU Main Campus, Tempe)

Barbara A. Lafford (Ph.D. Cornell, 1982) is a Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the School of International Letters and Cultures (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) at Arizona State University (ASU). In addition to her professorial duties, Lafford currently serves as Professor in Charge of the Faculty of Languages and Cultures in the School of Letters and Sciences at ASU's Downtown Phoenix Campus. Professor Lafford has published in the areas of Spanish sociolinguistics, second language acquisition (SLA), Spanish applied linguistics and computer assisted language learning (CALL). Among her recent contributions to the field of SLA are two co-edited significant volumes dealing with Spanish second language research and teaching (Lafford, B. & Salaberry, R. Spanish second language acquisition: State of the Science, Georgetown University, 2003; Salaberry, R. & Lafford, B. The art of teaching Spanish: Spanish second language acquisition from theory to practice, 2006) and a retrospective of Spanish Applied Linguistics in the 20th C (Lafford, 2000). Prof. Lafford has also served as Associate Editor for the Applied Linguistics section of Hispania, Chair of the Board for CALICO (the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium), and she currently holds the post of Editor for the Monograph/Focus issue Series of the Modern Language Journal.

Invited Panelists:

Penn State University

James P. Lantolf (Greer Professor in Language Acquisition & Applied Linguistics, Department of Applied Linguistics & the Center for Language)

Professor Lantolf’s research focus is on sociocultural theory and second language acquisition. In particular he is interested in language acquisition in the instructed setting, where he is exploring the effects of Concept-Based Instruction and Dynamic Assessment on L2 development. To this end, he is about to publish a co-edited volume (with Matt Poehner) entitled Sociocultural Theory and the Teaching of Second Languages (Equinox Press). He is beginning work on a new single-authored book tentatively titled Sociocultural Theory and the Pedagogical Imperative: The Dialectics of Second Language Instruction. His research also investigates the relationship between speech and gesture in L2 learning. He will soon publish a co-authored (Soojung Choi) article in Studies on Second Language Acquisition on the gesture-speech interface in advanced L2 speakers of English and Korean.

University of Iowa

Jason Rothman (Assistant Professor of Hispanic linguistics and language acquisition, Department of Spanish and Portuguese)

Professor Rothman’s research areas are linguistic (generative) approaches to adult SLA, additive multilingualism (L3/Ln acquisition) and heritage language acquisition. Most of his research has investigated the acquisition of syntax and related semantic and pragmatic restrictions in Spanish and Portuguese, including the acquisition of null-subjects and anaphora resolution, grammatical aspect, properties of control related to inflected and uninflected infinitives, as well as ellipsis phenomena.

Bruce Spencer (Assistant Professor of German, Department of German)

Professor Spencer's primary research interests are in Sociolinguistics, specifically variationist approaches to language variation and change, the historical sociolinguistics of German, geolinguistics, and language ideology. His interests in the field of SLA are focused on classroom pedagogy, teacher training, grammar pedagogy, and content-based instruction. He is the coordinator of the Elementary German Program at the University of Iowa, and his current research projects include a study of syntactic variation in Low German and an investigation of how learners of German employ textbook grammar explanations to complete grammar focused tasks.

Joshua Thoms (graduate student)

Joshua, with a BA in Spanish and Secondary Education minor from St. John’s University and an MA in Spanish Literature from The University of Iowa, is currently finishing his dissertation entitled “Teacher-Initiated Talk and Student Oral Discourse in a Second Language Literature Classroom: A Sociocultural Analysis.” He is interested in several areas of SLA including Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical views on L2 acquisition as well as ecological linguistic perspectives of language learning (van Lier, 2000, 2004). Other research areas include the use of technology and its applications to L2 learning along with micro-level analyses of discourse in Spanish classroom contexts.

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Atsushi Hasegawa (graduate student)

Atsushi is currently working on his dissertation, in which he describes pair-work interactions occurring in Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classrooms. Atsushi has also worked on learning motivation, learner autonomy, computer-mediated communication (CMC), and learner socialization. While his overall theoretical orientation is leaning toward sociocultural perspectives, he does not fully align himself with any specific learning theory at this point.

Junko Mori (Associate Professor of Japanese language and linguistics, Department of East Asian Languages and Literature)  Professor Mori’s research interests center on the application of the methodological framework of conversation analysis (CA) to the study of talk-in-interaction involving first and second language speakers of Japanese. More specifically, her publications have explored 1) the relationship between grammar and interaction; 2) the coordination of vocal and non-vocal resources for the accomplishment of social actions; 3) the discursive construction of cultural identities; 4) learners’ orientations toward different types of learning demonstrated through their conduct during classroom pair work activities; and 5) the reexamination of textbook model dialogs and task designs vis-à-vis CA findings concerning naturally occurring mundane conversations. She is also serving as one of the project directors for the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER), a National Language Resource Center housed at the Pennsylvania State University. The CALPER Japanese Project has developed online instructional resources based on video-clips of naturally occurring interactions.

Catherine Stafford (Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese);

Catherine Stafford completed a Ph.D. in Spanish Applied Linguistics at Georgetown University and joined UW—Madison’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese as an assistant professor in 2005. Professor Stafford’s research interests encompass cognitive aspects of adult language learning and in her research she has examined from an information processing perspective the influence of individual differences on non-primary language learning in adulthood. In an ongoing research project she is investigating computer-assisted third language learning by bilingual adults. Of particular interest to Professor Stafford are the interactive relationships among individual differences in previous language experience, cognitive capacity and age and their influence on learning under more and less explicit conditions.

Richard Young (Professor of English linguistics, Department of English)

Professor Young received his Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught in Italy, Britain, Germany, Hong Kong, and China. He is trained as a linguist and his abiding passion is to understand the relationship between the use of language and the social contexts that language reflects and creates. He has always seen that relationship as dynamic and reflexive, and his research has focused on change—how newcomers to a community learn to participate in the practices of the community. Two of his current research projects illustrate that interest. His book in press in the Routledge Applied Linguistics Series is an advanced resource book on Language and Interaction, in which he presents to a nonspecialist readership the concepts of talk-in-context, discursive practice, social identity in language use, and language development through social interaction. He is nearing completion of a second book, Discursive Practice in Language Learning and Teaching, the next volume in the Language Learning Monograph Series. In this monograph, Young puts forward a theory of the socio-cultural characteristics of recurring episodes of face-to-face interaction, episodes that have social and cultural significance to a community of speakers. He describes Discursive Practice Theory in detail and uses it as a way to illuminate the processes by which newcomers acquire competence in unfamiliar practices. The book concludes with a discussion of how participants’ abilities in a specific discursive practice may be learned, taught, and assessed.

Co-sponsored by

The College of Letters and Science Anonymous Fund.

The Wisconsin Experience Grant.

UW-Madison Doctoral Program in SLA: www.sla.wisc.edu
UW-Madison Language Institute: www.languageinstitute.wisc.edu
University of Iowa FLARE: http://international.uiowa.edu/centers/flare/