Acknowledgements

We owe heartfelt gratitude to the contributors of this book, for trusting our vision of a new brand of L2 instruction, and for sharing their work in this collection. We would also like to thank our generous external reviewers, who helped improve the final quality of the volume with their deep expertise: Diana Boxer (University of Florida), Richard Donato (University of Pittsburgh), Hana Gustafsson (University of Oslo), Barbara Hinger (Universität Innsbruck), Jan Hulstijn (University of Amsterdam), Casey Keck (Boise State University), Narges Mahpeykar (Georgetown University), Amy Ohta (University of Washington), Karen Roehr-Brackin (University of Essex), Cristina Sanz (Georgetown University), Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), and Mari Tsujita (Dokkyo University). Our desire to instigate a new kind of effectiveness-of-L2-instruction domain that would be inspired in usage-based thinking began to take shape at the 2014 GURT Conference (the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics), which the four of us organized around the theme of Usage-based Approaches to Language, Language Learning, and Multilingualism. We are grateful to the rest of the GURT 2014 organizing team, and we thank our authors for joining us at that very successful conference and later accepting our invitation to participate in the book. We fondly honor the memory of our colleague the late James Alatis, who created the concept of GURT in 1949 and kept it going uninterruptedly year after year. Last but not least, we owe a debt of gratitude to Seline Benjamins and Kees Vaes, at John Benjamins, and particularly to the LL&LT Book Series editors Nina Spada (University of Toronto) and Nelleke van Deusen-Scholl (Yale University) for the care they put into this project. Knowing that we had their scholarly support and professional care made working on this book rewarding.