In the last two decades interest in the Chinese language has skyrocketed. It was not an unexpected development but still linguists and foreign language experts have not been fully prepared for it. Consequently, although there has been a quick and significant growth in research in Chinese linguistics and in Chinese language teaching methodology, the two fields have hardly been connected and there has been almost nothing in between. The real question was how to bring together the two sides, how to apply research results achieved in Chinese linguistics to Chinese language teaching and how to create a strong applied linguistics research field that supports Chinese language learning and teaching. Now we can see that this gap-filling process has been developing fast. More and more papers, books and other publications have become available to present field-generated linguistic research on how to improve our understanding of the acquisition process and the effectiveness of classroom activities, how to tackle the most challenging features of Chinese language such as characters, prosody, aspect, syntax, formulaic language just to mention a few. CASLAR is an organization that has been supporting this discovery and field-forming process since its foundation. This volume is a representative sample of the work CASLAR scholars have been doing to give strong linguistic basis for teaching Chinese as a Second and Foreign Language.