3.6.1.24 University of California, Davis

Focus / Concentrations: Theoretical, Second Language Acquisition

Department / College: Department of Linguistics

UC Davis may be one of the best-kept secrets of any school I researched. For example, it doesn’t even appear in the NRC’s list of linguistic programs published in 1995. Yet, by many accounts it is a top 50 school by national and world rankings, and a top-20 public school in the United States. Maybe the lack of linguistic ranking indicates a poor linguistics school or a poverty of the stimulus argument. It is hard to tell. Often schools have to pay a fee to be ranked. For example, the American Association of Applied Linguistics (aaal.org) only lists the schools that are members AAAL. Whatever the case, UC Davis lists its foci as structural/theoretical linguistics and second language acquisition and development. Coming from an applied linguistics background and seeking a more theoretical approach to linguistic issues, UC Davis seems like a perfect fit for me.