Language Acquisition Research Symposia in Utrecht

Background

At a time when there were very few regular European-based international meetings for researchers into theoretical and experimental second language acquisition (SLA) a number of initiatives were undertaken to try and provide some. At that time (the 1970s and early 1980s), Europeans researchers were effectively forced to cross the Atlantic in order to to keep abreast of the latest developments in this very new field of research. In Europe, language learning was generally regard as linked to teaching and hence within the domain of (general) applied linguistics and language teaching. One of these initiatives was the LARS series in Utrecht. The ambition was not only to gather together, every year, a small group of SLA researchers in the Utrecht’s Old Town to discuss the latest ideas and empirical studies but also to forge links with psycholinguists and theoretical linguists as well to raise awareness that there was a sister field of theoretical and experimental research in town and promote thereby better interdisciplinary contacts which were pretty sparse at that time. The symposium organisers were James Pankhurst and Mike Sharwood Smith, co-founders of the Interlanguage Studies Bulletin which in 1985 was to morph into its current form as the journal, Second Language Research. The atmosphere of these meeting was always friendly and informal and there was a regular exchange of ideas with many participants returning year after year, not just second language researchers but former participants from the wider interdisciplinary community. Following a tradition built up over the years, the annual gathering of the group in Jan Primus, a ‘café’ known to many academic visitors to Utrecht, quickly became associated with the LARS meeting by its participants. The spirit of LARS is perhaps captured in this picture of one of the regular organising committee members:

 

Plenary speakers in italics (only the few large-scale LARS had plenaries )

[1983-1995]

Mike Barlow (Rice,USA)

Ellen Bialystok [York, Canada]

David Birdsong Gainsville, USA]

Melissa Bowerman [MPI, Netherlands]

Ellen Broselow [SUNY, USA]

Vivian Cook [Essex, UK]

Nick Ellis [Bangor, UK]

Lynn Eubank [Denton, USA]

Sascha Felix [Passau, Germany]

Dan Finer [SUNY, USA]

Suzanne Flynn [MIT, USA]

Susan Gass [Lansing, USA]

Kevin Gregg [St Andrews, Kobe, Japan]

Liliane Haegeman [Geneva, Switzerland]

Birgit Harley (OISE, Canada)

Jan Hulstijn [VU, Amsterdam, Netherlands]

Ray Jackendoff (Brandeis, USA)

Allan James [UVA Amsterdam, Netherlands]

Peter Jordens [VU, Amsterdam, Netherlands]

Annette Karmiloff- Smith (London, UK)

Mary-Louise Kean [Irvine, USA]

Eric Kellerman [KUN, Netherlands]

Juana Liceras [Ottawa, Canada]

Brian McWhinney [Carnegie Mellon]

Frederick Newmeyer [Washington]

Colette Noyau [Paris, France]

Wayne O’Neil [MIT, USA]

Steven Pinker [MIT, USA]

William Rutherford [USC, USA]

Jaqueline Schachter [USC, USA]

Bonnie Schwartz [Durham, UK]

Antonella Sorace [Edinburgh, UK]

Eva Stefanides [Budapest, Hungary]

Daniel Véronique [Aix-en-Provence, France]

Lydia White [Montréal, Canada]

Deirdre Wilson [London, UK]

Tadeusz Zabrocki [UAM Poznań, Poland]

Helmut Zobl [Ottawa, Canada]

AFTERWORD

The flowering of European SLA.

Along with LARS, I should also mention other regular European-based SLA meetings that sprang up, notably Vivian Cook’s COLESLAW workshops in Colchester (University of Essex) and a sister series that began its life in Amsterdam, for phonological SLA, called New Sounds, the brain child of Allan James and Jonathan Leather. This last-mentioned series of meetings  has gone from strength to strength now even taking place outside the Netherlands.  

Colchester was also the birth of place of the European Second Language Association (EUROSLA).  This was the next significant step in the history of SLA. With the growth of EUROSLA and its much larger annual meetings, the scholarly need for LARS meetings in Europe was no longer so great. We were no longer alone.

Mike Sharwood Smith