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History of the UW-Madison Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition

History
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been a leader in foreign language education for a very long time. By the mid-1990s, faculty specializing in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and/or foreign language education held tenured or tenure-track appointments in the Department of African Languages and Literature, the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, the Department of English, the Department of French and Italian, the Department of German, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Doctoral minor in SLA
Faculty from these departments came together in 1995 to establish a doctoral minor program in SLA for graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  With the support of affiliated departments (including Curriculum and Instruction, English, foreign languages, as well as Educational Psychology, Sociology, Linguistics, Psychology and other programs and departments), a minor program was established in 1996 with tracks in pedagogy and research. Students seeking the Ph.D. in any program on campus could elect to complete their minor in Second Language Acquisition and many did so, especially graduate students in English, French and Italian, German, Slavic, and Spanish.

Doctoral major in SLA
The SLA committee began work in 1997 towards the establishment of the interdisciplinary doctoral program.  The program was approved after a rigorous review process by the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Letters and Science and Graduate School Academic Planning Councils and was ultimately approved by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin in 2002. Several internationally known experts in the area of second language acquisition reviewed the proposal to create this new program at UW-Madison. The first entering class of graduate students in the Ph.D. program was admitted for the fall 2002 semester, and the doctoral program in SLA is now flourishing as students take classes, prepare for preliminary examinations and write dissertations.

Upcoming SLA Events

Teaching by the Book: Spaces for Creativity and Personalization
Hannelore Jarausch, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

4:00 pm, Thursday, November 5, 2009
254 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Avenue

Language instructors may feel constrained by the pedagogical approach of their program, the syllabus, and most of all, the textbook.  It is challenging to find a balance between  personal teaching style and the materials that instructors work with. learn more>

An invited talk for the 2009-10 Language Institute lecture series, The Pain of Language: Language and Migration.

2010 SLA Graduate Student Symposium: "Who Are We?" SLA in a Global Society
Invited Speaker: Bonny Norton, University of British Columbia

Friday, April 16 - Sturday, April 17, 2010
Memorial Union, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Learn more>

Co-sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison SLA Graduate Student Organization and the University of Iowa Foreign Language and Acquisition Research and Education students.

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