Success in Multilingual Learning: Continued, Probabilistic, and Beyond Language

How successful are adults in their learning of new languages? Traditionally, the field of second language acquisition has answered this question rather pessimistically, comparing multilingual success directly to monolingual success. Professor Ortega leverages research insights from developmental bilingualism and the study of critical applied linguistics and language ideologies and proposes that multilinguals’ success must be thought of as a probabilistic continuum along both early and late bilingualism that goes beyond strictly linguistic notions of competence.

Lourdes Ortega is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her main area of research is in second language acquisition, particularly sociocognitive and educational dimensions in adult classroom settings. Before moving to the USA in 1993, she was a teacher of Spanish as a foreign language at the Cervantes Institute in Athens and she has also taught English as a second language in Hawaii and Georgia. Lourdes was co-recipient of the Pimsleur and the TESOL Research awards (2001) and has been a doctoral Mellon fellow (1999), a postdoctoral Spencer/National Academy of Education fellow (2003), and a senior research fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (2010). She was Journal Editor of Language Learning (2010-2015) and is a member of the Board of Directors of the University of Michigan’s Language Learning Research Club (2016-2020). She has published widely in journals such as Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Journal of Second Language Writing, Language Learning, Modern Language Journal, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and System. Her books include Understanding Second Language Acquisition (2009, translated into Mandarin in 2016), and co-edited collections on Technology-mediated TBLT (with Marta González-Lloret, John Benjamins, 2014) and The Usage-based Study of Language Learning and Multilingualism (with Ande Tyler and colleagues, Georgetown University Press, 2016). She is currently busy co-editing (with Annick De Houwer) The Handbook of Bilingualism for Cambridge University Press.