Merrill Swain is Professor Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. She has researched and published extensively in the fields of second language learning, teaching and testing. Her recent interests include immersion education, languaging and the inseparability of cognition and emotion. She was President of AAAL and Vice President of AILA. She received the Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award of AAAL (2004) and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Vaasa in Finland in 2011.