UIC BilForum 2024 Organizing Committee Heading link

Head Organizers: Jess Ward and Rosela Romero

Scientific Chair: Alexis Berles

Organizing Committee: John Escalante Martínez, Jason Cruz, Colton Seaman, Ana Rodríguez Gallego, Jefferson Imbaquingo Ramón, Nahia Frías, Isabella Depue, María Páramo, and Nate Cook

Faculty Advisors: Dr. Kara Morgan-Short and Dr. Jennifer Cabrelli

Previous BilForums Heading link

The UIC BilForum has its origins in a student-organized event called “An afternoon of code-switching” that took place in April 2008. This was part of a linguistics talk series known as UIC TiL, hosted at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. The talks where given by students in Kay González-Vilbazo’s seminar on code-switching, based on empirical research they conducted for the class. In addition, there was also a special guest speaker, Jeff MacSwan.

The following fall, many of those same students, with the generous help of various faculty members, began organizing the first UIC Bilingualism Forum, to take place in the spring of 2009. After the first successful conference, it was decided to make the conference a biennial tradition, and the next conference was held in the spring of 2011. The organizers later decided to move the conference to the fall, bringing us to the third UIC Bilingualism Forum during the fall of 2012. In addition, the short name “BilForum” was introduced for easy reference. The seventh installment took place in the fall of 2022.

UIC Bilingualism Forum 2022

The seventh UIC Bilingualism Forum took place on October 27-28, 2022 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The two keynote speakers of the conference were:

  • Dr. Jason Rothman (UiT The Arctic University of Norway; Universidad de Nebrija):
    Unravelling categorical treatments of “-lingualism”: Focusing on consequences and methodological insights when more than one “language” is implicated
  • Dr. Jacqueline Toribio (University of Texas at Austin):
    My (r)evolution as a linguist

The sixth UIC Bilingualism Forum took place on October 11-12, 2018 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The two keynote speakers of the conference were:

  • Dr. Cristina Sanz (Georgetown University):
    Mind and Context Interactions In the Lab, and in the Wild
  • Dr. Viorica Marian (Cornell University):
    Bilingualism changes linguistic, cognitive, and neural function.

The fifth UIC Bilingualism Forum took place on October 20-21, 2016 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The two keynote speakers of the conference were:

  • Dr. Bill VanPatten (Michigan State University):
    What has Happened to SLA?
  • Dr. Carmel O’Shannessy (University of Michigan):
    Multilingualism and the emergence of Light Warlpiri, an Australian mixed language

The forth UIC Bilingualism Forum took place on October 2-3, 2014 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The two keynote speakers of the conference were:

  • Dr. Dianne Lilo-Martin (University of Connecticut):
    Bimodal Language Acquisition and Theories of Bilingualism
  • Dr. Antonella Sorace (University of Edinburgh):
    How bilinguals construct reference: linguistic and attentional processes

The third UIC Bilingualism Forum took place on October 4-5, 2012 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The two keynote speakers of the conference were:

  • Dr. Pieter Muysken (Radboud University Nijmegen):
    In Search of Stability
  • Dr. Maria Polinski (Harvard University):
    Which aspects of language structure are difficult for heritage speakers and why?

The second UIC Bilingualism Forum took place April 14-15, 2011 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There were two keynote speakers for this conference:

  • Marcel den Dikken (City University of New York):
    The Distributed Morphology of Code‐Switching
  • Michael Ullman (Georgetown University):
    Brain, Memory, and Second Language

The first UIC Bilingualism Forum took place April 30 – May 1, 2009. There were three keynote speakers for this conference:

  • Almeida Jacqueline Toribio (Pennsylvania State University, at the time):
    On the socio-phonetics of code-switching
  • Gabriel Rei-Doval (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee):
    Bilingualism and Language Shift in Contemporary Urban Galicia
  • Catherine A. Stafford (University of Wisconsin-Madison):
    Sifting and winnowing: The effects of attention regulation and explicitness of instruction on L3 learning by early and late bilinguals

Conference Sponsors Heading link

We would like to acknowledge the following conference sponsors for making the UIC Bilingualism Forum 2024 possible:

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