AAAL 2023 Conference Report
The American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2023 conference was held in Portland, Oregon, this year. To kick things off, we had the two pre-conference workshops, (Un)Doing Applied Linguistics through Southern Epistemologies: Affordances and Challenges and Researching L2 Pragmatics Across Contexts, that were well attended. From Saturday (March 18th ) through Tuesday (March 22nd), our 1907 registered attendees – a record number for an in-person AAAL conference – were treated to: 6 plenaries, 10 invited colloquia, 36 special sessions, as well as 708 paper, 171 roundtable, and 129 poster presentations. The vibrant program lineup also comprised 27 two-hour colloquia and 27 one-hour colloquia. All presentations were spread across 25 strands with two new strands – Language and the Law and Language, Gender, and Sexuality – being added this year. Overall, responses to the conference were enthusiastic, with many attendees expressing their appreciation to the MSU conference planning team either in person or through social media, which exploded with positive sentiments. Many attendees were excited to reconnect with colleagues and friends after a four-year conference hiatus due to the COVID pandemic. And our applied linguistics community is looking forward to AAAL 2024 that will take place in Houston, Texas.
Submitted by:
Peter I. De Costa
AAAL 2023 Conference Chair
President Elect, AAAL
