Tarone named director of CARLA at U of M
Elaine Tarone has been selected as the full-time director of the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA), after an extensive international search. Elaine is the current director of CARLA and professor in the English as a Second Language (ESL) program. She will begin her full-time position on August 1.
Elaine received her master’s degree and a doctorate in speech science (Interdisciplinary Program in Applied Linguistics) from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a diploma in applied linguistics from Edinburgh University in Scotland. She joined the University in 1979 as an assistant professor in the linguistics department and became a professor in 1990. She now serves as a faculty member in the ESL program. She was founding director of CARLA in 1992-93 and has been director since 1996.
In 2000, she received the Award for Outstanding Contributions to Post Baccalaureate, Graduate, and Professional Education and in 2007, she received the TESOL Distinguished Research Award. She is the author or co-author of eight books and dozens of papers in scholarly journals.
She served as president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 1991-92, after organizing AAAL’s first independent international conference. She is an internationally recognized speaker on the topics of social and cognitive aspects of second language learning.
CARLA is one of 15 national Language Resource Centers (LRC), whose role is to improve the nation’s capacity to teach and learn foreign languages effectively. Beginning in 1993 with United States Department of Education Title VI Language Resource Center program funding, CARLA has sponsored a number of research and action initiatives designed to advance the quality of second language teaching, learning, and assessment. Current CARLA initiatives focus on immersion education and research, less commonly taught languages, second language assessment, web-based grammar strategy instruction for Spanish, and using technology in second language teaching.
In addition to its research initiatives, CARLA supports the professional development of second language teachers through an annual summer institute and a wide array of international conferences and regional seminars. CARLA also offers a number of resources to language teachers across the globe.