L3T Research Group Members
Betina Arellano is an Instructor of Spanish. She holds a Masters of Arts in Spanish from the University of Arkansas and a bachelor’s degree in Tourism from the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca, Argentina. As a result of teaching a diversity of courses (online and face-to-face courses; from lower to advanced levels), she has gained experience in coordination and design of face to face courses as well as in updating online courses by working closely with the Online Coordinator. Also, she has been coordinating the Spanish Conversation Partner, one of the extracurricular activities offered by the Spanish Program, for three consecutive years.
Contact Betina Arellano – bnarell@uark.edu | 479-575-3035
Dr. Freddie Bowles is an Associate Professor in Curriculum and Instruction as a Foreign Language Specialist. She is also the Program Director for the Master of Arts in Teaching Program. Her research interests include Instructional Strategies in Language Learning Classrooms, Culturally Responsive Teaching, and Revitalization of Indigenous Languages.
Contact Dr. Freddie Bowles – fbowles@uark.edu | 479-575-3035
Dr. Edvan Brito is Assistant Professor and Director of the Portuguese Program at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. In the area of Sociolinguistics, his research is centered around the question of how language use and power relations among people and institutions shape and are shaped by the identities they perform and negotiate in different interactional contexts. In the area of Applied Linguistics, Dr. Brito focuses primarily on the elements that influence the teaching and learning of Portuguese as a foreign language in the United States context. He has published several peer-reviewed articles in these two areas. His research interests include language, identity and power, language variation and change, language and race, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, media discourse, and Portuguese as a foreign or additional language.
Contact Dr. Edvan Brito – brito@uark.edu | 479-575-3359
Dr. Raquel Castro is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures. Her research interests include Spanish for heritage speakers, Spanish for the professions, translation and interpretation studies, and second language acquisition. Dr. Castro is working in community engagement by having service-learning students collaborate with community partners through experiential learning opportunities that address social needs.
Contact Dr. Raquel Castro – rcastros@uark.edu | 479-575-2384
Joe Covey is the Director of the Center for World Languages at the University of Arkansas. This language center supports the Department of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures in a variety of ways. Joe is involved in a number of faculty research projects, helping facilitate space and technology needs, and participating as a co-researcher on some projects. In the realm of applied linguistics, he is primarily interested in how visual mediums affect the way that people learn language.
Contact Joe Covey – jcovey@uark.edu | 497-575-5167
Dr. Rebecca Foote is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Language, Literatures & Cultures. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Second Language Research, and Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience; her research centers on psycholinguistic aspects of second language acquisition, including bilingual and multilingual language processing and production. She is interested primarily in the nature of morphological processing and production in the L2 and heritage learner.
Contact Dr. Rebecca Foote – rebeccaf@uark.edu | 479-575-5947
Dr. Linda Jones is an Associate Professor of Language Area Studies in the Department of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as The Modern Languages Journal, The CALICO Journal, The Language Learning and Technology Journal, The Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion, as well as The Arkansas Historical Quarterly. Her research centers on listening comprehension and technology and more global aspects of technology in language learning. She is also engaged in research on French and Native American encounters, Colonial French Mississippi History and Spirituality in the Workplace. One book focused on Management and Spirituality is forthcoming with Springer International Press.
Contact Dr. Linda Jones – lcjones@uark.edu | 479-575-7608
Dr. Brenda Magnetti is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Spanish and the Supervisor of graduate students in the Spanish M.A. Program at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include Professional development of teachers, Curriculum and instruction, Second Language Teaching and Learning, On-line and flipped models of instruction. Dr. Magnetti has extensive experience in developing a variety of face-to-face and online university courses.
Contact Dr. Brenda Magnetti – bmagnet@uark.edu | 479-575-5939
Dr. Danjie Su is an Assistant Professor in both the Chinese section and the new Ph.D. program in World Languages and Applied Linguistics in the Department of World Language, Literatures & Cultures. She has published articles in refereed journals such as Chinese as a Second Language Research, Discourse Studies, and Journal of Pragmatics and has reviewed for over two dozen international journals/publishers such as Foreign Language Annals, Chinese as a Second Language, and John Benjamins. She is on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. More info about her research at: www.danjiesu.com/research.
Contact Dr. Danjie Su – danjiesu@uark.edu | 479-575-6061
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Current Research Projects
Inflectional frames in L1 and L2 Spanish and English word production.
This project examines whether speakers of Spanish and English as a first or second language produce inflected words in two stages, as has been found in some Germanic languages, including German and Dutch. Specifically, I ask whether Spanish and/or English speakers first form an abstract word frame that specifies the number of possible inflectional affixes, and then fill that frame with the appropriate stem and affix forms. I am also interested in whether speakers do this in both their native language, and in a language that they have learned later in life.
RESEARCHERS: Dr. Rebecca Foote
Implementing the Integrated Performance Assessment Unit in French Secondary Classrooms: Does It Increase Proficiency?
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RESEARCHERS: Dr. Freddie Bowles
Weaker links? Grammatical gender in L2 noun production.
In this project, I investigate whether second language learners of Spanish have weaker links between nouns and their gender specifications than native speakers do. Previous research has found that native speakers of Romance languages are slower to name pictures of objects when presented with a distractor word with the same grammatical gender, implying that the selection of grammatical gender during word production is competitive in nature. I ask whether this competitive process also occurs in second language learners, and whether it differs based on whether the words in question are transparently marked for gender or not.
RESEARCHERS: Dr. Rebecca Foote
The processing and production of agreement morphology in native, L2, and heritage Arabic.
This project investigates how native speakers, second language learners, and heritage speakers of Arabic process and produce person, number, and gender agreement in Arabic. We use a variety of comprehension and production tasks to examine participants’ processing of morphologically-complex verb and noun forms, their sensitivity to agreement errors during sentence comprehension, and their accuracy and error patterns in the production of verbs and noun phrases. The objective is to gain an overall picture of agreement in Arabic, as carried out by these three speaker groups.
RESEARCHERS: Dr. Rebecca Foote & Dr. Eman Saadah
Vocabulary Assessment Preferences: What Teachers and Students Say
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RESEARCHERS: Dr. Freddie Bowles
Graduate teaching assistant personality and teaching strategies.
This study examines graduate students’ personality types and their classroom didactic tendencies as they begin to teach. The objective is to gain new insight into how the language program orientation provided at the beginning of the academic year, as well as guidance and follow up during their stay in the program can be more personalized based on their individual differences.
RESEARCHERS: Dr. Brenda Magnetti
Spanish graduate teaching assistants’ website-blog and e-portfolios.
This projects aims to honor the graduate assistants for their contribution to the Spanish program and provide them with a virtual space to share their e-portfolios and thoughts on language education matters while they also prepare for the future job market.
RESEARCHERS: Dr. Brenda Magnetti
Re-development of self-paced basic Spanish courses
This project involves the redesign of the four self-paced basic Spanish courses to align them with their corresponding face-to-face versions and online semester duration models of instruction. The goal is to implement new strategies that improve the quality of the material, the teaching approach, and communication with the students.
RESEARCHERS: Dr. Brenda Magnetti
Recent Publications
Gregory, G.A., & Bowles, F. (2017). Decolonization, complete bilingualism, academic achievement, and national identity: Arguments for literacy in indigenous languages. In J. Reyhner, J. Martin, L. Lockard, & W. S. Gilbert (Eds.) Honoring Our Teachers, (99-115). Flagstaff, AZ: NAU College of Education Press.
Howlett, K.M., Bowles, F.A., & Lincoln, F. (2017). Infusing multicultural literature into teacher education programs: Three instructional approaches. Multicultural Education, 24(3 & 4), 10-15.
Foote, R. (2017). The storage and processing of morphologically-complex words in L2 Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 39, 735-767.
Su, D. & Tao, H. (2018). Teaching the Mandarin utterance-final particle le through authentic materials. Chinese as a Second Language Research 7(1), 15–45.
Su, D. (2018). Discourse-pragmatic functions of a Chinese topic-comment construction and L2 teaching strategies based on authentic media materials. Taiwan Journal of Chinese as a Second Language 16(1), 55–89.
Su, D. (2017). Semantics and chunking in written and conversational discourses: A corpus study of two near-synonymous words in Mandarin. Chinese Language and Discourse 8(1), 51–94.
Zhang, Q., & Bowles, F. (2017). Promoting performance through arts integration in the elementary Chinese classroom. In J. A. Foss (Ed.) 2017 Report of the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, (149-165). Richmond, VA: CSCTFL.
Spinner, P., Foote, R., & Acen Upor, R. (2018). Gender and number processing in second language Swahili. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 8, 446-476.
Bidaoui, A., Foote, R., & Abu Nasser, M. (2016). Relative clause attachment in native and L2 Arabic. International Journal of Arabic Linguistics 2, 75-95.
Su, D. & Tao, H. (2018). Teaching the shi…de construction with authentic materials in elementary Chinese. Chinese as a Second Language Research 7(1), 111–140.
Su, D. (2017). Significance as a lens: Understanding the Mandarin ba construction through Discourse Adjacent Alternation. Journal of Pragmatics 117, 204–230.
Lee, H., Su, D., & Tao, H. (2017). A crosslinguistic study of some extended uses of what-based interrogative expressions in Chinese, English, and Korean. Chinese Language and Discourse 8(2), 137–173.