Benjamins.

The study of L1 attrition is currently entering its third decade. However, after twenty years of diligent investigation resulting in numerous theoretical and empirical papers the questions on this topic still greatly outweigh the answers. Findings from individual studies seem to indicate that it cannot even be said with any certainty whether an L1 in which a certain level of proficiency has been reached can ever undergo significant attrition, let alone how or why it might. There are many reasons for this failure to arrive at a more integrated and explanatory framework. Some are theoretical, some methodological, and some are linked to communication or lack thereof between individual researchers. These were the problems that our conference, this volume, and subsequent work have been trying to address. A further problem is, of course, the extraordinary complexity and multi-facetedness of the phenomenon of language attrition. It is our belief, however, that this last issue cannot even begin to be tackled unless the first three have been solved. This chapter will attempt to identify and clarify these issues, in order to establish the starting ground from which the individual papers will proceed. The first section will give a chronological overview of how the field of language attrition has developed over the past two decades, try to identify the concerns and forces that have shaped it, and point out developments and changes. The second section introduces those extralinguistic factors that have been shown to play important roles in attrition. The third section presents an overview of theoretical frameworks within which language attrition studies have been conducted, while the fourth section focuses on questions of research design. The final section is an outline of the structure and contents of this volume