Full Title: 1st International ELLRA Conference: "Early Language Learning Research: Current Challenges and Future Opportunities"
Short Title: ELLRA Conference

Date: 25-Apr-2024 - 27-Apr-2024
Location: Krakow, Poland
Contact Person: Agata Wolanin
Meeting Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics; Sociolinguistics

Call Deadline: 01-Oct-2023

Meeting Description:

The Early Language Learning Research Association (ELLRA) has been created in response to the ubiquitous phenomena in today’s globalized world of the widespread introduction of other languages ever earlier into mainstream education and/or the growth of multilingual and multicultural groups of learners in schools today due to increased migration processes. Consequently, languages that are present in education reflect aspirations to learn languages of high status or a dominant/official language in the society as well as the mosaic of the learners’ first languages. Knowing many languages is seen as a window to the world, and therefore learning them continuously from early childhood can contribute to the child’s growth of individual multilingualism.

Still relatively little is known of how much language young and very young children (aged 2- 12) can learn in the formal setting in respect of varied exposure, what is the impact of various teaching techniques and tools, what individual factors play a role in language acquisition at such an early age. The goal of the conference and ELLRA’s mission is to at least partly fill this gap.

We hope that the conference will gather scholars from various disciplines (such as linguistics, psychology, education, sociolinguistics, etc.) and learning contexts across the globe researching early language learning in formal contexts, be it foreign, second, minority, additional or heritage languages.

Thomai Alexiou, University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Nils Jäkel, University of Oulu, Finland
Ana Llinares, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Marianne Nikolov, Univeristy of Pecs, Hungary
Agnieszka Otwinowska, University of Warsaw, Poland

Call for Papers:

Potential topics for conference presentations can refer to learning and teaching of any language(s) in pre-primary and or primary education and include, but are not limited to:

o Research paradigms and methods in early language learning
o Learning and teaching foreign languages in linguistically diverse classrooms
o Integrating children’s languages and / or translanguaging in early language learning
o Psycholinguistic development of a child in multiple languages and across different learning contexts
o Factors affecting early language learning outcomes (age, motivation, emotions, executive functions, continuity issues transition etc.)
o Literacy development in multiple languages
o Assessment and evaluation
o Researching innovations in early language learning
o Home – school partnerships
o Intercultural education and critical pedagogies in early language learning
o Pragmatics and early language learning
o Teacher education and teacher competencies for early language learning
o CLIL and multilingual education in early language learning contexts

Proposals
The language of the conference is English. Contributions are welcome for:

Oral presentations (20 min. presentation + 10 min. discussion).
Proposals should include:
- Full name(s) of presenter(s) and affiliation(s)
- Title of presentation (max 10 words)
- A 200-word abstract with a maximum of three references.
- Bio data(s) of 100 words

Please use the following online document to send in your proposal: https://tinyurl.com/ELLRAConferenceProposal

Deadline for proposal submission: 1 October 2023
Notification of acceptance: 15 November 2023

Further information will be on the forthcoming conference website but if you have any queries, please contact Agata Wolanin [email protected] For information about ELLRA please visit https://ellra.org/