Roughly 30 years ago researchers in the second language acquisition (SLA) field started to take a focused interest in the study of inner speech (IS) and private speech (PS) processes in second language (L2) learning and use. The purpose of this review is to assess the status of current research and the progress made during the last ten years on…

Multilingualism is now seen as the norm rather than the exception in an age of migration and supranational entities, and where minority language rights and the consequent educational policies have become more common. The field of applied linguistics reflects that transition: second language acquisition (sla) research is slowly being replaced by…

As applied linguists know very well, how we use language both constructs and reflects our understanding. It is therefore important that we use terms that do justice to our concerns. In this presentation, I suggest that a more apt designation than "multilingual" or "second language acquisition" (SLA) is "multilingual"…

The invited colloquium on New Directions in Language Assessment held at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) annual meeting in Portland, Oregon on March 22, 2014 brought together an international panel of scholars to together explore the possibilities and challenges of translanguaging and bi/multilingual approaches in…

This paper focuses on the advantages that bilinguals have over monolinguals when acquiring an additional language. Bilinguals are more experienced language learners and have potentially developed learning strategies to a larger extent than monolinguals. They also have a larger linguistic and intercultural repertoire at their disposal. In this…

Language attrition research has developed in several clearly delimited phases spanning, roughly, each of the three decades between 1982 and 2012 (see Kopke & Schmid 2004 for a more detailed overview and analysis). The first phase was an era of stocktaking, with a number of symposia, collected volumes and special issues of journals. All of…

This presentation builds on the concept of orientations to languages other than English in the US first suggested by Ruiz (1984). Using examples from recent ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and policy-related investigations undertaken principally in North America, the discussion explores possible connections between individual and group language…

This colloquium discussed a multilingual approach to language learning, language teaching and language assessment in school settings. This approach implies looking at language acquisition and use from a holistic perspective, taking into account not only the target language but all the languages known by the learner; such a perspective brings…

Faculty and graduate students in the Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison engage in a broad spectrum of research. From Professor Sally Magnan's research on study abroad and Professor Monika Chavez's work in foreign language policy through Professor Richard Young's examination of…