Richard Young

I'm a Professor in English Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I teach courses in Sociolinguistics, English Syntax, Language Acquisition, and Research Methods. I've also served as a director of the Program in English as a Second Language.

I was born and grew up in London and, after I graduated from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, I taught in Italy and Hong Kong before settling in the United States in 1983. My Ph.D. is from the University of Pennsylvania and my dissertation was the first extension of quantitative variation theory to interlanguage. Since then, my abiding research passion has been to understand the relationship between the use of language and the social contexts that language reflects and creates. I've always seen that relationship as dynamic and reflexive, and my research has focused on change--how newcomers learn to participate in the practices of a new community. My fascination with the relationship between language and context has led me to do work that crosses conventional boundaries between academic fields. My work on discourse variation in oral proficiency interviews combined discourse analysis and language assessment and resulted in some of the earliest empirical discourse analyses of interactions designed to assess spoken English proficiency. In my most recent work I've been using insights from linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis to understand the architecture of face-to-face interaction and to develop the theory of discursive practice.

My research has resulted in four books: Variation in Interlanguage Morphology, Talking and Testing (co-edited with Agnes He), Language and Interaction, and Discursive Practice in Language Learning and Teaching. I've published over 50 articles in journals and anthologies and I serve on the editorial boards of three major journals.

I've held visiting professorships at Penn State, International Islamic University Malaysia, and at two universities in Germany. During 2005-6, I served as President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and I chaired the World Congress of Applied Linguistics in Madison. Up until 2004, I served as a consultant to Educational Testing Service during the major redesign of the TOEFL test.