The purpose of this study is to determine if heritage speakers can effectively instruct pronunciation to their non-native speaker peers to support faculty. The researcher of this study assessed non-native speaker participants' pronunciation of Spanish using pronunciation instruction and instructor background as variables (N=111: 91 underwent…

Ahead of the recent wave of social justice movements (e.g., [All] Black Lives Matter (#BLM), #MeToo, #StopJewishHate, #StopAsianHate), in 2019 the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) declared a stance on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in language education. It affirmed that it "values diversity…

This longitudinal study tracked ten L1 English-speaking learners' acquisition of Spanish voiceless stops /ptk/ by measuring their voice onset time (VOT) over an academic year in two distinct contexts of learning. Living in a Spanish-speaking dorm, participants in the experimental group experienced a "domestic partial-immersion," in which…

With the popularity of Spanish for Specific Purposes courses growing at U.S. universities, research that can underpin effective teaching practices and material development is greatly needed. This project focuses on task-based language teaching in the context of Medical Spanish courses, drawing from studies carried out for Business Spanish and…

Recent calls for the "annulment of Spain exceptionalism" (Herlihy-Mera 7) in Spanish programs across developmental levels in the United States, and a greater emphasis on local Spanish language communities and practices compelled the author to reassess her scholarly background as a "Peninsularist" and her approach to teaching…

Studies into the role of audiovisual input and captions (i.e., subtitles in the same language as the audio) for L2 learning have shown that such input can positively influence L2 learners' acquisition of lexical items. Few studies have explored the effects of captioning on learners' capacity to segment the speech stream. This study investigates…

This case study explored Spanish-speaking educators' perceptions and experiences of dual-language immersion (DLI) professional learning (PL). The study aimed to understand how PL offerings could best support and meet the needs of DLI Spanish teachers' best practices in the target language. The perceptions and experiences of seven Spanish DLI…

The paper discusses the interpretation of adversative clauses introduced by "pero" and concessive clauses introduced by "aunque" in Spanish. Specifically, the discussion centers around structures that exhibit the forms: (i) "A, pero B," (ii) "A, aunque B-INDICATIVE," and (iii) "A, aunque…

Greek and Spanish are two languages that display a similar subject distribution with unergative/unaccusative verbs, but different word orders with focused subjects (SV in Greek and VS in Spanish). Here we consider subject-verb word order in second language (L2) Greek and L2 Spanish in order to test the Interface Hypothesis (IH). To this end, we…

This dissertation examines heritage language learners of Spanish enrolled in university Spanish courses, focusing on their strategic use of suprasegmental speech features in two speaking tasks. The research investigates attitudes' influence on heritage language learners' speech production in different task types. Participants engaged in two…

In a replication of Daly and K. Dounavi (2020), the researchers evaluated the effect of foreign tact and bidirectional intraverbal teaching on the emergence of untaught relations. Three university students learned three stimulus sets through three types of teaching: native-foreign intraverbal teaching (vocalizing Spanish words that refer to a…

This paper presents a collaborative effort between a Head Start lead teacher and an educational scholar, focusing on a Head Start classroom in a non-traditional migration area in Pennsylvania. The joint initiative, called "Juntos," was undertaken to support children's bilingualism in a context where English is the dominant language. The…

This investigation examined the effectiveness of different types of explicit classroom instruction on second language (L2) development of the Spanish discourse marker (DM) "pues." While several studies have addressed the positive effect of explicit instruction on L2 DM development, the current investigation moves beyond the…

Multitiered systems of support hold promise for dual language learners when culturally and linguistically responsive practices guide instruction. We modeled growth on Spanish and English early literacy skills and examined the role of language exposure and use at the individual and classroom instruction level in a group of 313…

Although current approaches to second language (L2) pronunciation underscore that instruction should concentrate on pronunciation features that help learners be more intelligible (and not necessarily more native like), there is little empirical evidence as to what those features are, especially in languages other than English. To address this gap,…