II. Journal Overview

II. A. Background

SSLA is a refereed journal that basically publishes research and articles in the field of second language acquisition. It was first published in 1977. Since the field of SLA has become in pressing need to establish a specialized journal that gives the priority to papers on second language acquisition research, SSLA was a dream that came true. The need for such a specialized periodical appeared when papers on SLA kept getting rejected by journals whose central focus was theoretical linguistics for irrelevance.

The publisher and distributor of SSLA is the Indiana University Linguistic Club (IULC) which cosponsors SSLA with the Committee for Research and Development in Language Instruction at Indiana University. The distribution and publication management became later the responsibility of Cambridge University Press as this review is going to explain. According to an introductory statement that appeared in the first issue of SSLA, the journal is published twice a year, in November and May. SSLA is devoted to “the study of the process of acquisition of a second language and the relationship between the development of linguistic competence and communicative competence in a second language.” Priority is given to contributors who present papers addressing topics of a general theoretical and methodological interest and to research reports. An independent review board carries out the evaluation responsibilities of papers submitted like the case in any refereed periodical.