Elaine E. Tarone is the Emeritus Director of the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) and Emeritus Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota. Her books and articles focus on the impact of social context on learner language and second language acquisition. She has also published research on oral second-language processing by low-literacy learners, interlanguage variation, interaction in immersion classrooms, language play, genre analysis, and language teacher education. Past editor of Applied Linguistics and past president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), she holds AAAL’s 2012 Distinguished Scholar and Service Award, and the 2016 TESOL “50 at 50” Award “for significant contributions to the TESOL profession within the last 50 years.”