Introduction

The International AESLA Conference reaches its thirtieth edition in a period marked by important changes in society. The movement of people, the internationalization of both the academic and the professional worlds, new technologies that transform communication and the dissemination of information, as well as increasingly multicultural and multilingual societies all pose important challenges for researchers in the field of applied linguistics.

In accordance with these changes, AESLA's upcoming International Conference will center on "Applied Linguistics in the Age of Globalization". The conference will be held at the University of Lleida from April 19th to 22nd, 2012, and special attention will be paid to the study of communication in multicultural and multilingual environments as well as to overcoming linguistic barriers.

Questions related to this topic and its impact on the area of Applied Linguistics will be addressed in the different AESLA thematic sessions. Sessions will be presented from an interdisciplinary perspective and will represent a wide range of the diverse work presently carried out in several areas such as intercultural communication, language teaching and language acquisition in multicultural environments, recent advances in lexicography applied to second language acquisition, sociolinguistic analysis of minoritized languages, and multilingualism in corpus linguistics and, generally speaking, in the field of language engineering.