AAAL Announces 2026 Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award Winner

AAAL Announces 2026 Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award Winner: Lourdes Ortega

The purpose of the DSSA is to recognize and honor a distinguished scholar for their scholarship and service to the profession in general and to the American Association for Applied Linguistics in particular. In making this award, AAAL recognizes that contributions to equity, diversity, inclusion, and access are integral to distinguished scholarship and service.

Lourdes Ortega (Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition, University of Hawai‘i) is a Professor at Georgetown University, USA, where she carries out research on multilingualism and education and mentors doctoral students. She is best known for an award-winning meta-analysis of second language instruction published in 2000, a best-seller textbook Understanding Second Language Acquisition (Routledge 2009, translated into Mandarin in 2016), and since 2010 for championing a social justice turn in the field of second language acquisition. Her multilingual repertoire includes English, Spanish, Greek, and German, and she currently is involved in research supporting K-12 teachers of Arabic and Urdu, two under-researched languages in the United States. Lourdes was President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 2023-2024 and is General Editor of Language Learning.

Congratulations, Lourdes!