Essex academic receives Distinguished Scholar Award

An Essex Academic has been honoured with a Distinguished Scholar Award from the European Second Language Association (EuroSLA).

Professor Florence Myles from our Department of Language and Linguistics is to receive one of just two awards from the association, which is a leading learned society for second language research internationally.

In a statement, EuroSLA said they were honouring Professor Myles for “her outstanding influence across the field of second language research, including theoretical SLA, corpus studies and young learners, and for her generosity in motivating the work of others as supervisor, research centre director, journals editor and in public engagement.”

On hearing she was to receive the accolade, Professor Myles said:” I am deeply honoured and humbled.

“EuroSLA has always been close to my heart; they are a very supportive association regrouping all second language acquisition researchers globally, and I gave my first ever international paper at their conference in Finland in 1992!

“I have been closely involved with the Association ever since.”

This year is the 30th anniversary of EuroSLA and to mark that it is giving two awards; one to Professor Myles and the other to Professor Ros Mitchell from the University of Southampton.

They celebrate the exemplary and long-standing collaboration between Professors Myles and Mitchell, a partnership that embodies the core values of EuroSLA.

The awards are due to be presented at a ceremony in Barcelona in July.

Professor Myles served as President of EuroSLA from 2011 to 2015. She is the Founding Director of the Centre for Research in Language Development throughout the Lifespan (LaDeLi) based at Essex, and is Chair of the Research in Primary Languages network (RiPL).

Follow Professor Myles on Twitter at @flomyles5