Presentations at the World Congress will bring together applied linguists from diverse communities and from varied intellectual traditions to explore the future. The theme of the conference is “The Future is Now” – a future where language is a means to express ideas that were unthinkable, to cross boundaries that seemed to be unbridgeable, and to share our local realities with people who live continents away.

For the first time the World Congress of Applied Linguistics will be held in the United States. The American Association for Applied Linguistics invites colleagues, students, and friends from all over the world to participate in AILA 2005 in Madison, Wisconsin – a city in the American heartland that has been called “the best place to live in America.” Madison is built around four lakes and the conference sites are located on two of them. Monona Terrace is the conference center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright on Lake Monona, and The Pyle Center on Lake Mendota is the state-of-the-art distance education and conference center of the University of Wisconsin.