THINKING, DOING, LEARNING: USAGE BASED PERSPECTIVES ON SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Teresa Cadierno
Wander Lowie
Simona Pekarek Doehler
Steve Thorne

Invited Colloquium:
Converging evidence in Thinking, Doing, Learning from one dataset
Gale Stam

After the successful first conference in Denmark in 2013 (http://www.selc.dk/conference/), the University of Groningen will host the second one. The conference will take place from Wednesday June 3 to Friday June 5 at the University of Groningen in Groningen, The Netherlands
The field of second language (L2) learning research has come to sustain a multitude of perspectives on language and learning but also on broader issues such as the crossing points between sociality, the nature of human interaction, and individual cognition. Along with this great theoretical, methodological and empirical variety comes an expansion of what is traditionally thought of as the core of language and the nature of learning.
This conference brings together perspectives that find mutual kinship in a view of language as an embodied, semiotic, symbolic tool used for communicative and interactional purposes and an understanding of language use as the preeminent condition for language learning – perspectives that we conjoin under the umbrella term of usage based perspectives.
Such perspectives yield a wide variety of questions to be answered – from societal issues of what it means to interact in an L2 to how speakers carry out social, sense-making moment-to-moment activities, and from the environments of language use and learning to the nature of the sediments of these usage events that are left as “acquired linguistic constructions” in the individual language learner.
The conference will promote and advance this multitude of theoretical and methodological perspectives in second language learning research. We therefore invite conference contributions that draw on theories and methods from across the spectrum of usage based language learning research, including data-driven and theory driven empirical investigations of the relation between cognition, context, interaction and language learning.

We invite the submission of abstracts (for paper, poster or panel presentations) addressing issues in second language learning research, including but not limited to:

Usage-based linguistics in language learning
Embodiment and language learning
Construction-based language learning, including the role of formulaic sequences and frequency issues
Dynamic Systems / Chaos-Complexity-based language learning
Linguistic relativity and language learning
Thinking-for-speaking and SLA
Socio-cognitive language learning
Socio-cultural language learning
Ecological language learning
Language socialization
Conversation Analysis in language learning
Language learning as social activity

Talks: 20 minutes, plus 10 minutes for questions.
Posters: whole conference
Panels: 2 hours and 15 minutes (about 3-5 presentations on common theme)

Please submit by visiting the conference website at http://www.rug.nl/let/tdl. The following information will be requested:

Full name, affiliation and e-mail of corresponding author/panel organizer
Choice of talk, poster, panel general proposal, or panel presentation
Names of authors/ organizers
Title
Abstract 300 words
References
Summary 25 words
Choice of general stream: Thinking (L1-L2 concepts), Doing (interaction), Learning (development or teaching)

All abstracts will be subject to double-blind peer review by an international Scientific Committee. The deadline for abstract submission is December 1st 2014. Notification of acceptance will be given by January 20th 2015.

For further information, visit the conference website at http://www.rug.nl/let/tdl or contact us (Marjolijn Verspoor and Rasmus Steinkrauss) by using the following e-mail: tdlgroningen2015@gmail.com.

On behalf of the organizers,
Marjolijn Verspoor
Rasmus Steinkrauss