Having been to the founding meeting in Colchester and almost all the EUROSLA conferences since Salzburg, including an earlier one in the Netherlands, you might expect me be suffering from advanced EUROSLA- fatigue. Not a bit of it. Each one brings its own pleasures. EUROSLA 23, in Amsterdam, was no exception. In fact, the more you attend these conferences the more you appreciate the mix of seeing old, familiar faces, giving each conference the feeling of a family get-together, and encountering exciting new faces, ensuring a healthy future for the field. Hyper-friendliness at a conference can be a sign of academic apathy where no one is prepared to confront anyone about anything. Not so EUROSLA conferences with their fine balance between relaxed sociability and intellectual vigour.

                      A relatively recent addition is the Language Learning Round Table that acts as a tasty hors d'oeuvres to the main meal. This time, Amsterdam gave us a highly entertaining debate on the contribution of two approaches to SLA to the explanation of acquisition orders that deserved our attention, Dynamic Systems theory and Emergentism. Although it does not claim to contribute that much to orders of acquisition, you might still have been forgiven for thinking that 'UG is dead' although some lively protests in the audience scotched that rumour!

                      The main conference fulfilled the expectations provoked by the round table. It proved to be both a further demonstration of the accumulated wisdom of EUROSLA organisers over the years, a wisdom enshrined in the document that is handed down from organiser to organiser, as well as a demonstration of the great skill and commitment of the Amsterdam team. One reflection I had, when I thought of earlier times, is how much more diverse the field has become, both in terms of approaches being discussed and the language combinations involved. Whereas there used to be a predominance of papers on L2 English, we were now provided with discussions about, for example, Germans learning Swedish, Russian speakers losing their Russian in Israel, young bilinguals acquiring Turkish and German, how Norwegian anaphors are acquired, the acquisition of Czech morphology and a study looking at motion construction in L2 Danish. This has to mean, if proof were necessary, that the field has truly come of age, something that EUROSLA conferences reflect in a way that more specialised symposia do not.

                      I was also pleased to see that EUROSLA still remains a truly SLA conference and has avoided the ever present danger of becoming 'just another applied linguistics meeting'. I should perhaps add here that in my understanding of the term, 'applied' means focusing on applying scientific research to some socially recognised and valued  activity, in other words 'trying to help' - a commendable goal in itself- rather than 'seeking to understand', which is surely what SLA is about. Another reflection I had was that EUROSLA can really claim to be the largest SLA association in the world, all other past attempts to form something more than a local association or to move beyond just a conference series having failed. Perhaps it should extend its geographical coverage and be renamed ISLA. Well, I'm not serious but it's a thought I've had from time to time. A far better way in which to close this contribution to The Clarion would be to say 'Well done, Amsterdam!'.

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