Themes in SLA Research

This issue of AILA Review contains the proceedings of a special symposium of the AILA Scientific Commission of Second Language Acquisition at the 2005 AILA Congress in Madison, WI, USA. Seven international experts in the field of SLA – Bardovi-Harlig, Dörnyei, N. Ellis, R. Ellis, Gass, Kasper, Mackey – have been asked to provide a state of the art overview of their specialization tracks. The result is a concise summary of six distinct strands of second language acquisition studies that follow both linguistics-based and psychology-based approaches. Readers will not only find up-to-date reviews of important SLA areas but the issue also offers authoritative insights into the thinking of some of the major scholars in the field of applied linguistics.