Elaine Tarone is a retired professor of applied linguistics and is a distinguished teaching professor emerita at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

. She is currently a member of the editorial board of

The Modern Language Journal ''The Modern Language Journal'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations. It covers research and discussion about the learning and teaching of for ...

Teaching and research

Tarone's published research on second-language acquisition began in 1972, and, , includes 10 books and more than 135 papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes. From 1996 until her retirement from the University of Minnesota in 2016, she was director of the university's Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA). A major research interest has been the

sociolinguistic Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language changes between distinct social groups, as well as how it varies unde ...

factors affecting

second-language acquisition Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning—otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process of learning a language other than one's native language (L1). SLA research examines how learners ...

, and she is particularly known for her work on

interlanguage An interlanguage is an idiolect developed by a learner of a second language (L2) which preserves some features of their first language (L1) and can overgeneralize some L2 writing and speaking rules. These two characteristics give an interlangu ...

, interlanguage variation and the impact of emergent alphabetic print literacy on oral second-language acquisition. In 1972, she published the first paper on interlanguage phonology, and in 1978, the first research on communication strategies in second-language acquisition. She has also published research on the grammatical-rhetorical structure of academic writing. Her 1989 book with George Yule, ''Focus on the Language Learner'', aims to provide a clear overview of second-language acquisition research issues of importance to language teachers. Her co-authored 2009 book ''Exploring Learner Language'' helps language teachers develop skills and use tools to analyze learner language samples provided in transcribed videos of adult second-language learners. Her most recent research publications focus on second-language learners' spontaneous language play in oral discourse, and especially the interlanguage variation revealed in oral narratives when learners enact imagined voices of protagonists who are both more- and less-proficient than they are.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tarone, Elaine Living people Applied linguists Linguists from the United States American women linguists Bilingualism and second-language acquisition researchers Year of birth missing (living people) 20th-century American non-fiction writers 20th-century American women writers University of Minnesota faculty American women academics 21st-century American women Presidents of the American Association for Applied Linguistics