LESLLA

Low Educated Second Language and Literacy Acquisition (LESLLA) for Adults is an international forum of researchers who share an interest in research on the development of second language skills by adult immigrants with little or no schooling prior to arriving in the country of entry.

The goal of LESLLA is to share empirical research and information to help inform and guide further research on second language acquisition for the low-educated adult population. This research in turn will provide guidance to education policy development in all those countries in which immigrants settle and most need educational support.

LESLLA intends to bring together linguists, psycho-linguists, psychologists and educational scientists to establish a multi-country and multi-target-language research group to study effective methods of language acquisition and literacy. No other group exists that meets regularly to consider interdisciplinary research on adult immigrants learning to speak and write a language other than their native language.

LESLLA was established at the first workshop held at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands on 25-27 August 2005. A second workshop was held in Richmond, Virginia, in the United States on 2-3 November 2006. The third LESLLA workshop was held in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, on 13-15 September 2007, and the most recent in Antwerp, Belgium, on 23-25 October 2008.

For more information, please visit the LESLLA web site at www.leslla.org. There you will find resources for working with this population, relevant links,and workshop descriptions, as well as information about purchasing the workshops’ proceedings, which have been published annually.

Click here to view the proceedings of the 2006 international LESSLA forum.