OVERVIEW
AN INFORMAL NOTE
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
AN ILLUSTRATIVE SELECTION OF TITLES
A NOTE ON COPYRIGHT
Birth and inspiration
The Interlanguage Studies Bulletin – ISBu (ISSN: 01659960) was founded in 1976 . It is the forerunner of the Second Language Research journal. ISBu (also known as ‘the ISB’) came out every year except 1981, originally in two issues (free of charge) and later as two or three issue a year. The covers of each volume had a different colour. The editors of ISBu were James Pankhurst and Michael Sharwood Smith then working at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. The last issue was in 1984. As the expanding ‘L’s in its logo suggests (see image on left), its focus was on how languages develop in the mind of the learner, more specifically the non- native language learner. The name was directly inspired by Larry Selinker’s work reported a few years earlier which promoted the idea of a developmental sequence or ‘continua’ of non-native mental grammars each one worthy of investigation in its own right and independently of any pedagogical concerns. His pioneering work along with that of Pit Corder and William Nemser represent the start of the research area called second language acquisition (SLA) which is to be sharply distinguished from issues relating to language teaching methodology. In 1976, research activity in this still very new non-applied approach to second/foreign language learning was concentrated in a few places in North America, notably in Southern California and Ontario.
Broader or narrower scope?
The original idea of ISBu was very modest. It was intended to stimulate interest and research in this new research area in the Netherlands. The first editorial makes clear that the primary scope of the journal was as stated above but since the rationale was originally to contribute ultimately to the development of effective scientifically-based teaching techniques some leeway way given to contributions that included a pedagogical angle. Given the paucity of SLA research at that time, the contents of ISBu could not possibly have been restricted to SLA topics alone and so the editorial policy was accordingly flexible to allow the journal to develop. As the journal developed, by the 1980s the contents of ISBu became steadily more angled towards theoretical research in SLA an other relevant areas of research. This facilitated its evetual transformation, in 1985, into the strictly non-applied peer-reviewed journal, Second Language Research.
A life of its own
Despite the modest intentions of the editors, as it turned out ISBu attracted much greater interest not only elsewhere in Europe but further afield, greater than they had predicted. Soon it was distributed, at a price intended to cover only the local printing costs, to 30 countries worldwide. As the list of contributors (below) shows, it featured authors who were either already had an international reputation in the area of focus (SLA) or in theoretical linguistics, child language acquisition and psychology or would later have become well-known. The contents of ISBu issues also benefited from its close association with a related series of international symposia entitled LARS (Language Acquisition Research Symposia) that started around about the same time, also in Utrecht. These annual meetings brought together theoretical linguistic, SLA and child language acquisition researchers . This webpage contains the following further sections:
* This is also an appendix to M. Sharwood Smith’s CV.
M. Sharwood Smith
(Names in boldface represent those researchers in and outside SLA whose long-term interests are have mainly or partly been in theoretical research and who are arguably, for one reason or another, more widely recognisable. Note that this does miss out the names of the editors and listed names of otherwise very distinguished scholars in and outside the field of education. No disrespect intended!)
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From ISBu 4.1. (1979)
From ISBu 4.2. (1979)
From ISBu 6.1. (1982)
From ISBu 7.1. (1983)
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A NOTE ON COPYRIGHT
Unbeknown to the editors of ISBu, Sage JSTOR photocopied and made available online contributions to all volumes of ISBu. It should be stressed that no copyright was claimed by the editors for any ISBu articles and it was assumed this rested by default with the authors of contributions. ISBu was printed and bound by the internal printing services of the University of Utrecht for the then English department (Engelse Taal- en Letterkunde) of the University of Utrecht. This would seem to indicate copyright is difficult to work out but in any case, it seems that articles are free to download from JSTOR via university libraries and similar institutions. Link to JSTOR contents of ISBU here