Elaine Tarone


Elaine Tarone is a retired professor of linguistics and is a distinguished teaching professor emerita at the University of Minnesota. She is currently a member of the editorial board of The Modern Language Journal.

Early life

Tarone was born in Modesto, California and graduated from Thomas Downey High School in 1962. She spent her freshman year at Modesto Junior College and in 1966 earned a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. After a summer volunteering in a street academy in Harlem, New York, she earned a secondary teaching credential at UC Berkeley. She taught English and Spanish for a year at Encinal High School in Alameda, California, and in 1969 earned a diploma in applied linguistics at the Department of Applied Linguistics at Edinburgh University. Transferring to the University of Washington, Seattle, she earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in speech science, writing a dissertation on her research on intonation in African-American vernacular English.

Teaching and research

Tarone's published research on second-language acquisition began in 1972, and,, includes 10 books and more than 135 papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes. From 1996 until her retirement from the University of Minnesota in 2016, she was director of the university's Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition. A major research interest has been the sociolinguistic factors affecting second-language acquisition, and she is particularly known for her work on interlanguage, interlanguage variation