Posted inLinguistique en Belgique

Broadening The Scope of L2 Complexity Research

14-15 November 2019, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

We are happy to announce that registration is now open for our upcoming colloquium entitled: “Broadening The Scope of L2 Complexity Research”, which will take place at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels) from November 14-15, 2019 (see description below and attached programme). 

The colloquium is open for anyone who is interested in attending but spots are limited, so we kindly ask you to to register by November 1st using the following link:

https://tinyurl.com/L2comcoll

The past 20 years have seen an upsurge of research on linguistic complexity in second language acquisition (SLA) research (often in conjunction with accuracy and fluency; Housen & Kuiken, 2009; Bulté & Housen, 2012). In recent years, this body of research has also been met with criticism (e.g. Pallotti, 2015). Some of these criticisms have included: the fact that the construct of L2 complexity is ill-defined, the lack of construct validity of the L2 complexity measures that have been used, and the fact that L2 complexity research has been too narrow in scope, focusing almost exclusively on complexity phenomena at the lexical and syntactic level, while ignoring other levels of languages such as morphological and phonological complexity or complexity phenomena at the interfaces between the traditional levels of linguistic analysis (e.g. the lexicon-grammar interface; e.g. Paquot, 2019). This two-day workshop is a response to recent calls in the literature (Housen, De Clercq, Kuiken & Vedder, 2018) to expand the construct of, and research on L2 complexity beyond the syntactic and lexical levels. As such, this workshop directly ties in with our own PhD projects, which also aim to expand research on L2 complexity by focusing on complexity in the phraseological domain of learner language and other complexity phenomena at the lexis-grammar interface (cf. Paquot 2018, 2019).

Kind regards, 
Nate Vandeweerd
Rachel Rubin
Alex Housen
Magali Paquot