Conference Overview
A conference of invited presentations is to be held in Ann Arbor on November 7-9 2008 to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of Language Learning and to explore a paradigm shift currently taking place across the language sciences, the growing realization of Language as a Complex Adaptive System.
Language Learning was first published from the University of Michigan in 1948. Its subtitle then was "A Quarterly Journal of Applied Linguistics"; indeed the beginnings of "Applied Linguistics" have been attributed to this usage. In the 60 years since, the subtitle has evolved to become "A Journal of Research in Language Studies" reflecting our mission:
Language Learning is a scientific journal dedicated to the understanding of language learning broadly defined. It publishes research articles that systematically apply methods of inquiry from disciplines including psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, educational inquiry, neuroscience, ethnography, sociolinguistics, sociology, and semiotics. It is concerned with fundamental theoretical issues in language learning such as child, second, and foreign language acquisition, language education, bilingualism, literacy, language representation in mind and brain, culture, cognition, pragmatics, and intergroup relations.
The conference in 2008 will mark our 60th anniversary and our remarkable success towards these ends. Members of the board, past editors, our colleagues at Wiley-Blackwell, and friends and confederates in this enterprise are gathering to celebrate.
The topic of the conference is Language as a Complex Adaptive System. Recent research across a variety of disciplines in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that patterns of use determine how language is acquired, is structured, and changes over time. However, there is mounting evidence that processes of language acquisition, use, and change are not independent from one another but are facets of the same complex adaptive system. This theme builds upon foundations laid by colleagues from different branches of linguistics, psychology, and complex systems (including Clay Beckner, Richard Blythe, Joan Bybee, Morten H. Christiansen, William Croft, Nick C. Ellis, John Holland, Jinyun Ke, Diane Larsen-Freeman, and Tom Schoenemann) at a meeting at the Santa Fe Institute in 2007. "The Five Graces Group" (named after their rather special accommodations there) are offering a position paper on Language as a Complex Adaptive System as the introductory piece for the conference followed by ten individual papers that discuss substantive areas of language from this perspective. The authors of these ten papers are active in their recognition of complexity in their respective areas, ranging from language usage, structure and change, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, anthropology, language evolution, first language acquisition, second language acquisition, psycholinguistics and language processing, language education, individual differences, and language testing. Discussion of these papers will be led by members of the board of Language Learning in order to contextualize these influences within Applied Linguistics and the Language Sciences more generally.
Written papers based on these presentations will form a special issue of the journal Language Learning (2009, Volume 59, Supplement 1). The proceedings will also be recorded and later made available through Wiley-Blackwell and the University of Michigan as a webcast.