Mission Statement
The UC Davis SLA Institute seeks to enrich our knowledge of how languages are learned and increase our students' cross-cultural awareness in an increasingly internationalized world. Our activities support research in both foreign language acquisition and English as a second language. The Institute brings together students and researchers in African-American & African Studies, East-Asian, Education, French, German, Linguistics, Native-American Studies, Psychology, and Spanish (current areas of strength on the UC Davis campus). In addition, we promote innovations in language teaching and the development of comprehensive resources for language learning, including the effective use of technology for classroom and self-access language study. The Designated Emphasis and the newly approved Graduate Academic Certificate serve Ph.D. students from all language programs on campus. The Institute constitutes a forum on campus to allow UC Davis and other invited scholars to address the cutting-edge issues in second language acquisition research. We specifically seek to broaden our knowledge base regarding bilingualism and multilingualism, two topics of considerable interest to California's educational system.
The SLA Institute would like to acknowledge the generous support from the Chancellor's New Initiatives Reserve (NIR) fund for the academic years 1997-2000.