Professor Roger Hawkins took his first degree in French and Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, and then undertook graduate work in theoretical linguistics at the University of Cambridge where he received his PhD. He was formerly a research fellow in French at the University of Leeds, and taught French language and French linguistics at the University of Sheffield. He has taught in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex since 1989. Currently, he is one of the editors of Second Language Research.
Professor Roger Hawkins?main research interests are in second language acquisition research, specifically the development of a theory of knowledge of syntax in second language speakers: how it emerges, how it develops over time, and where it stops evolving. He has published books and articles both on second language acquisition and on French. Recent books are: Second Language Syntax: a Generative Introduction (Blackwell, 2001), French Grammar and Usage (with Richard Towell) (Arnold, 1996) and Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (also with Richard Towell) (Multilingual Matters, 1994).

Professor Nick C. Ellis took his first degree in Psychology & Physiology from the University of Oxford in 1974, and his PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University College of North Wales in 1978. He works as a professor of psychology at the English Language Institute of the University of Michigan. His research interests include language acquisition, cognition, reading in different languages, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and applied psycholinguistics. Two books on these topics are: Implicit and Explicit Learning of Languages (Academic Press, 1994), and Handbook of Spelling: Theory, Process and Intervention (John Wiley, 1994, with Gordon Brown). He served as editor of?em>Language Learning from 1998?002 and is currently the general editor.
Currently Professor Nick C. Ellis?research focuses on second language acquisition, particularly (1) explicit and implicit language learning and their interface, (2) usage-based acquisition and the probabilistic tuning of the system, (3) vocabulary and phraseology, (4) language and brain, (5) the advanced language learner, (6) applications of psychological theory in language testing and instruction, (7) learned attention and language transfer, (8) emergentist accounts of language acquisition.

Professor James P. Lantolf took his first degree in Education and Spanish from the University of Scranton in 1969, and received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Pennsylvania State University in 1974. He is now Greer Professor of Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics in the Department of Applied Linguistics of The Pennsylvania State University. He directs the Center for Language Acquisition in the College of the Liberal Arts and has served as Co-Director of The Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER, Pennsylvania State) since 2002, when CALPER was established.

Professor GAO Yihong obtained her MA degree in linguistics from Durham University (UK) in 1983, EdM in TESOL from Boston University (USA) in 1988, and PhD in linguistics from Peking University in 1992. She is now Professor of Linguistics in the English Department of Peking University and teaches sociolinguistics, language and culture, and several other courses. Her major research interest lies in the social psychology and socio-cultural context of foreign language learning and teaching. Her publications include Culture and Foreign Language Teaching (1997, collaborated with HU Wenzhong), Foreign Language Leaning: “1+1>2” (2001), Understanding and Transcending Linguistic and Cultural Differences (2000), and The Social Psychology of English Learning by Chinese College Students Motivation and Learners' Self-Identities (2004, first author and leader of team work), and over 60 journal articles.

Dr. H UANG Yue Yuan has an MA in TESOL and a doctorate degree in L inguistics , both from State University of New York at Stony Brook , USA. She is now an A ssociate P rofessor in the Language Centre, Hong Kong Baptist University. Her r esearch interests in second language acquisition include acquisition of English by Chinese speakers, acquisition of Putonghua (Mandarin) by Cantonese speakers and acquisition of Chinese by non-Chinese speakers.

Professor WEN Qiufang graduated from Department of English Language and Literature of Nanjing Teachers University in 1976, obtained MA in linguistics （ First Class ） from Bombay University (India) in 1985, and PhD in Applied Linguistics from Hong Kong University in 1993. She was a visiting scholar at Harvard University from 1999 to 2000. She is now director of the National Research Center for Foreign Language Education ， Beijing Foreign Studies University, and also President of China English Language Education Association. Her research interests include second language acquisition, large-scale spoken English testing, learner corpus and computer-assisted systems for scoring subjective items in a large-scale test. Her publications include English Language learning strategies (1996), Testing and teaching spoken English (1999), Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (2005, with WANG Lifei and LIANG Maocheng), and journal articles such as Measuring the validity of the construct “essay content” by using structure equation modeling (2007).