KEYNOTE SPEAKER

12:30 pm - 1:30 pm (AZ TIME/MST/GMT -07:00)

WATCH THE KEYNOTE ADDRESS (RECORDED PRESENTATION).

Keynote Speaker: Professor Lourdes Ortega

Reimagining the Future of SLA: Are We Ready for a Social Justice Turn?

We are living amidst a global pandemic that has upended our personal, public, and research lives. The world is also suffering from a dire tide of authoritarian populism that works against solidarity and respect for human diversity, including the diversity of multilinguals. How might the work of second language acquisition researchers need to change in response to these times of deep crisis? I look at the field through theoretical lenses drawn from usage-based, multilingual, and social justice perspectives, arguing that we must bridge cognitive-linguistic and social-critical dimensions of language learning. I examine accumulated research that suggests the need to explain linguistic development in light of the relative privilege versus marginalization that adults experience, because additional language learning necessarily engages individuals who bring to the task their lifeworlds and agency, their intersecting and liminal social identities, and their often contradictory affiliations to systemic structures of power and oppression. The field has already been transformed by a social turn and to some extent by a bi/multilingual turn. I invite others to reimagine the future of SLA as letting itself be transformed by a social justice turn, and striving for knowledge that supports equitable multilingualism for all.