Welcome to the 4th Symposium on Language and Sustainability in Asia (SELSA 2017), which is being held Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, September 3-5, 2017 at the Kokusai Hotel in Hiroshima, Japan. All registered participants will be provided with a welcome reception, daily coffee breaks, access to the proceedings and a free, English guided tour of Hiroshima Peace Park – a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Sustainability is a term of recent origin with widespread contemporary saliency. In its popular use, sustainability tends to focus mostly on issues of natural environment; however, as globalization advances and boundaries between countries fade away, the need to communicate in a second or multiple languages has altered the linguistic landscape. As a result, second language acquisition and foreign language teaching have progressed to the forefront of linguistics, providing a critical framework in understanding how language is acquired or learned and its pedagogical implications. Language today not only links nations but also empowers individuals toward greater upward mobility, all of which makes it an indispensable tool in modern society.

Approaches towards education and language teaching have evolved over the past decades from their early days of the grammar/translation method and audio-lingual method to Krashen’s monitor theory to the communicative and content-based approaches that dominate today. Plus with the development of modern technology, CALL or computer-assisted language learning has gained wider acceptance in the classroom though research on it still remains relatively limited. Despite these advances, it is still necessary to examine how individual language skills are learned as well as the roles teachers play.