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 language-in-interaction, Professor Jane Zuengler's investigation of language socialization, Professor Diana Frantzen's research in second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition and linguistic analysis of literature, to Professor Catherine Stafford's investigation of processes involved in Spanish-English bilinguals’ acquisition of a third language (L3), our research interests encompass much of the SLA field.

Our current students have interests spanning language play in a French class (Jacques Arceneaux), the role of social class in foreign language learning (Alice Astarita), intercultural competence, alterity, and study abroad programs (Daniel Audaz), the discourse of foreign literature in a graduate-level curriculum (Barbara Bird), identity development of intern teachers in France (Anne Dargent), second-generation Mexicans’ language ideologies toward Spanish (María del Carmen De Ávila), the impact of Lao literacy on English language learning (Christine Elliott), Berlin-based Turkish students’ identity construction (Isil Erduyan), cognate and false cognate use in L2 Spanish (Jennifer Morgan), and language socialization of foreign healthcare workers in Japan (Chiharu Shima).

Study abroad and pedagogy

Research in study abroad is a strong focus in our program. Professor Magnan, with Alice Astarita and associate director of the Language Institute, Dr. Dianna Murphy, is investigating the global engagement of students who do and those who do not study abroad. While Magnan & Back (Reference Magnan, Back and Wilkinson2006) explored how to develop pragmatic features in French during study abroad, Magnan & Back (Reference Magnan and Back2007) examined social interaction and linguistic gain during study abroad.

Another line of research relates centrally to foreign language pedagogy. Professor Monika Chavez's work explores how teacher talk influences in-class student interactions. Her recently completed study of how teacher L1 use in the classroom influences student L1 use in peer work is based on the same data set as Chavez (Reference Chavez2006). She is currently investigating what beginning learners of German really hear in the classroom, and how their perceptions compare to teachers’ intent. Funded by the US Department of Education, Magnan and Murphy, with SLA student Sandra Terra, are studying the alignment of the goals of post-secondary students with the National Standards for Foreign Language. With SLA student Suyeon Kim, Magnan and Murphy have presented on the pilot of this study at AILA 2008 in Essen, Germany and at AAAL 2010 in Denver. Magnan has also undertaken research on less commonly taught languages (Murphy, Magnan, Back & Garrett-Rucks Reference Murphy, Magnan, Back and Garrett-Rucks2009), and her research interests include learner intercultural development.

Our faculty also maintain an active research agenda in the adjacent area of world language education and issues related to globalization. In 2009, Professor François Tochon received a Title VI award from the US Department of Education to create, research, and evaluate instructional materials that take a semiotic approach to language teaching, learning, and L2 acquisition. Through grants from the Spencer and Tubitak Foundations, he has been working on ways to internationalize education through e-portfolios, world languages, and an intercultural approach. His recent publication (Tochon Reference Tochon2009) received the AERA Review of Research Award.

Language learning through instructed and non-instructed participation

In the area of acquiring academic linguistic practices, Professor Jane Zuengler undertook ‘The project on academic language socialization’ over several years, which enabled her and a number of graduate students to videotape and observe linguistically heterogeneous students in mainstream high school subject matter classes. A recent edited collection (Cole & Zuengler Reference Cole and Zuengler2008) based on this project contains a set of individual papers presenting analyses from different theoretical perspectives of a particular activity undertaken by students in a freshman biology class. More recently, Zuengler has expanded the scope of academic language socialization by examining how issues of identity and hybridity impact immigrant youth communication (Zuengler in press).

The crucial relationship between the use of language and the social contexts that language reflects and creates is also central to Professor Richard Young's research, which focuses on change, and in particular, on how newcomers learn to participate in the practices of a new community. Young & Miller (Reference Young and Miller2004), for instance, examined the discourse roles adopted by an ESL instructor and her student during writing conferences. The important role that interaction plays in his research is also borne out in Young's two recent books Language and interaction (Routledge, 2008) and Discursive practice in language learning and teaching (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Through a synthesis of important theoretical and empirical insights from sociolinguistics, sociocultural theory, systemic functional grammar, and conversation analysis, Young (Reference Young2009) took a discursive practice approach to language-in-interaction, while also addressing how participants’ abilities in a specific discursive practice may be learned, taught, and assessed.

Several graduate students and faculty are investigating the role of beliefs and attitudes in language learning. Professor Chavez (Reference Chavez2009) presented a folk linguistic study of beliefs that American learners of German hold about the German language and provided an analysis of German/English contrasts, while Chavez (Reference Chavez2007) explored German learners' attitudes toward the need for accuracy. Chavez is also studying the attitudes of non-learners of German in order to better understand student language selection. Congruent with this research is Drewelow (in press) which surveys the stereotypes about the French language and people held by American learners of French, and Worth (Reference Worth and Siskin2007), which records a change in learners' attitudes in the Italian-as-foreign-language classroom.

Faculty have been investigating vocabulary acquisition and bilingualism. For example, Professor Diana Frantzen has researched various aspects of L2 vocabulary learning and in her most recent publication in this area (2010) examined patterns of incremental vocabulary learning in advanced L2 Spanish learners. Professor Catherine Stafford has been investigating Spanish-English bilinguals’ initial learning of a third language (L3). In Stafford (in pressReference Stafford), she investigated whether bilingual adults with different degrees of language experience (gained in early childhood, later childhood, and in post-adolescence) exhibit different degrees of ‘cognitive control’ as they complete attention-demanding verbal tasks in their two languages. Stafford, Sanz & Bowden (in press) investigated Spanish-English bilinguals’ initial learning of a third language (L3), Latin.

Our SLA faculty and graduate students have also conducted research on the largely under-examined role of affect in SLA research. While Garrett & Young (Reference Garrett and Young2009) analysed a learner's affective responses to a communicative-based Portuguese course, Worth (Reference Worth and Magnan2008) explored foreign language resistance as enacted by university-level learners of Italian who participated in an online discussion. Learner resistance also forms the focus of Miller & Zuengler's study (in press). Zuengler's critical poststructuralist-oriented research, which endeavors to understand how minority language adolescents and children negotiate meanings and are discursively positioned, also explores what ideologies are conveyed or contested while they communicate in English and other languages. Further work in this area is being carried out by De Costa, whose dissertation addresses the impact of ideologies on the English language development of immigrant students in a Singapore school (De Costa Reference De Costa2010a; De Costa Reference De Costa2010b).

Given the inherently interdisciplinary field of SLA, combining literature with discourse analysis and with linguistic analysis is a natural direction for SLA research. Another of Professor Frantzen's current areas of research combines applied linguistics and literature by employing a linguistic analysis of literature. The purpose of her research in this area is to enhance L2 readers’ understanding of literature by focusing their attention on grammatical and other linguistic features that carry important meaning for plot and character development. A secondary purpose is to lead learners to a more sophisticated understanding of the grammatical structures in question. Frantzen's textbook (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009) features this approach.

Faculty and students in our program have explored how language learning also takes place outside traditional classroom settings. For her Spencer-funded project, Professor Margaret Hawkins examined the responsiveness of schools in non-gateway districts to new immigrant and refugee students (S. J. Lee & Hawkins Reference Lee and Hawkins2008). Underpinning her work on community-based sites of learning is a commitment to developing critical language teacher education (Hawkins & Norton Reference Hawkins, Norton, Richards and Burns2009) and social justice language teacher education (Hawkins Reference Hawkins2011). Hawkins’ interest in community-based learning is also shared by Zuengler, whose current research focus is on after-school sites of learning for immigrant and refugee children. In fact, several current students and graduates from our program have undertaken research with transnational populations. In his work with refugee learners, De Costa (Reference De Costa2010c) traces the language learning trajectory of a Hmong adult refugee learner. Back (in press) draws on a larger multi-site ethnography of a community of eleven multilingual Ecuadorian musicians and addresses how two members of this transnational community learn Quichua, while Cho (Reference Cho2010) examines the academic biliteracy challenges encountered by Korean scholars in the United States.

Conversation analysis and pragmatics

The study of social interaction and pragmatics in L1 and L2 contexts has been addressed in the research of Professors Junko Mori and Naomi Geyer. Using conversation analysis (CA) as her methodological framework, Mori (Reference Mori2010) investigates the reconceptualization of L2 language use and grammar using an interactional linguistic approach. Her work on methodological and theoretical issues to approach the notion of cognition from social interactional perspectives includes a co-authored article with her advisee, Atsushi Hasegawa (Mori & Hasegawa Reference Mori and Hasegawa2009) in the special issue of International Review of Applied Linguistics, which she co-edited with Numa Markee. Under her direction and that of Magnan, recent graduate Hasegawa used CA to examine learners' engagement in tasks in a beginning Japanese classroom. Mori's CA research has expanded to examine multilingual speakers’ identities. Mori also has a broad interest in various applied linguistic issues concerning Japanese and other East Asian languages (Mori & Ohta Reference Mori and Ohta2008). Other students who have used CA in their dissertation research are SLA graduates Jina Lee and Suyeon Kim. Lee and Kim, under the direction of Professor Young, have conducted research on learners' cognitive mediation through private speech and gesture. Applying CA as an analytic tool, Lee (Reference Lee2008) demonstrated how adult Korean-English bilingual university students use gestures and private speech to mediate their thoughts, while Kim (Reference Kim2009) showed how L2 gesture functions as a resource for communication and cognitive mediation.

Turning to pragmatics, Professor Geyer's research in this area involves politeness and face theories, interlanguage pragmatics and teaching and learning L2 Japanese. Her recent research on linguistic politeness and face work in Japanese recognized a paradigm shift in current politeness research, advancing the view of politeness as a discursive phenomenon, and examined how the interactant's face (positive self-image) is displayed and negotiated in discourse. Her most recent work (Geyer Reference Geyer2010) examines teasing – which appears to be both face-threatening and face-enhancing – in Japanese institutional multiparty discourse.

Activities

In 2008 our students initiated and co-hosted what has become an annual SLA Graduate Student Symposium in cooperation with SLA students at the University of Iowa. Planned and run by graduate students, the symposium affords them a collegial atmosphere to present their research. The third such symposium in 2010, entitled ‘Who Are We? SLA in a Global Society’ was held in Madison in April 2010, with Professor Bonny Norton (University of British Columbia) as the keynote speaker. Each year the symposium attracts student presenters and student and faculty attendees from around the country and the world, allowing us to cultivate ties with the world-wide SLA community.