Professor Emeritus
About
Larry Selinker helped found the field of Second Language Acquisition, suggesting early on (Selinker, 1972), the robust concepts of “interlanguage” and “fossilization”, and conducting one of the first empirical studies in language transfer research. At Michigan, he was Director of the English Language Institute, taught Second Language Acquisition courses and created a freshman course, “The Good and Bad Language Learner”, a course which consistently drew large enrollments, becoming Linguistics 101 and leading to undergraduate majors. He has since been seeking a more unified account, attempting to integrate - within the accelerating world of computational life - the concepts of interlanguage, interdialect, interculture and interliteracy.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Interlanguage Hypothesis, there was a special symposium sponsored by Teachers College, Columbia University (October, 2012): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qDpZTzzDrs&feature=share ; http://www.tc.edu/tccrisls/.
Currently, through exploring the processes of “around sourcing”, he is helping to organize an online startup, RESEARCH PRODUCTION ASSOCIATES (http://www.researchproductionassociates.com/).
Reference: Selinker, L. 1972. Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics. 10: 209-231.
Field(s) of Study
- Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics
