The Institute of English at the University of Silesia is pleased to announce the 30th International Conference on Foreign and Second Language Acquisition (ICFSLA). Traditionally, this conference focuses on research in second language acquisition and foreign language learning, concentrating each year on different aspects of the research field. The leading theme of the 2018 conference is:

“We know who we are, but not who we may be”: Identity in second language acquisition and foreign language learning

With traditionally very strong emphasis on cognitive aspects of language acquisition and learning, and more recently the significance of socio-affective factors and environmental issues, modern day research in SLA has inevitably become a multidisciplinary domain. It is a field of applied science which targets bi- and multilingual communities as well as individuals and their need to accommodate in diverse language contexts. The latter raises issues of identity extensively studied by psychology, philosophy and neuroscience and understood as one’s relationship to the world, others and ourselves over time and space. In the context of SLA, individual identity is seen as constructed and negotiated in language acquisition and learning situations (Pavlenko 2002: 286), but also in various contexts in which we speak different languages interacting with different people for different purposes and in different roles, when the experience of another language opens new doors for us to see different worlds. In our taking up of this theme we would like to debate how individual languages: L1, L2, Ln build our identities, how they enrich or challenge who we are by birth and how they affect the way we function as language users/learners and teachers. We welcome presentations and discussions on the different ways language identity can be conceptualised in SLA and also in the teaching of foreign languages. Topics on language identity can relate to external and internal factors determining our language identity in relation to other people (other learners, teachers, speakers of a given language) and different situations and contexts, but they may also focus on individual features such as anxiety, self-efficacy, emotionality or the self.