Colloquium Papers from the Second Language Research Forum 1998
October 15-18, 1998 at the University of Hawai`i
Colloquium organizer: Lynn Eubank (University of North Texas) eubank@unt.edu
Please cite as...
© 1998 Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center
The papers are in Acrobat PDF format. (If you do not already have an Acrobat PDF reader on your computer, you may download one for free from the Adobe website here.)
Papers (in order of presentation at the colloquium):
Original Invitation to the Colloquium:
At a special colloquium at SLRF/Los Angeles in 1989,
participants examined the so-called access question: Is Universal
Grammar accessible to the (adult) L2 learner? Given that nearly
ten years have passed since that colloquium, and given that we
have, in that time, learned a good deal more about the nature of
the human language faculty, it seems like a good time to
reexamine the assumptions that went into the original UG-access
research of the 1980s. In particular, then, questions that
participants at the present colloquium might consider include (at
least) the following: Is the original access question a
reasonable one to ask at the present time? Does the current state
of linguistic theory, our current understanding of the human
language potential, warrant the original question? If not, how
should the question be reformulated? How would such a
reformulation affect our understanding of previous research, as
well as any future attempts at falsification of a reformulated
question?
After the colloquium, several members of the audience asked whether
we had taped or videotaped the session. In fact, the idea had never dawned
on any of us. In the days after the conference, we then discussed the feasibility
of making the papers available as unpublished manuscripts on the web. Of
course, because the manuscripts do not include the Q&A discussions
that followed each and every presentation, making the papers web-accessible
will not substitute entirely. Nevertheless, we hope that the papers will
at least stimulate further discussion of the issues. Indeed, if you have
questions of your own, you are certainly welcome to e-mail any of us.
*Based on a paper by Schwartz and Sprouse also available at:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/celebration/.
Kevin Gregg (St. Andrews University, Momoyama Gakuin) gregg@andrew.ac.jp
Lydia White (McGill University) lwhite@leacock.lan.mcgill.ca
Jürgen Meisel (Universität Hamburg) jmm@rrz.uni-hamburg.de
Bonnie Schwartz (University of Durham) B.D.Schwartz@durham.ac.uk
Robert Bley -Vroman (University of Hawai`i) vroman@hawaii.edu
Susanne Carroll (Universität Potsdam) carroll@rz.uni-potsdam.de