Nicole Tracy-Ventura, Ph.D.
Nicole Tracy-Ventura completed her BA in liberal studies with a minor in linguistics at Humboldt State University, and her MA in TESOL and PhD in applied linguistics at Northern Arizona University (NAU). Before joining the faculty at WVU she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Southampton and as an assistant professor at the University of South Florida. Earlier in her career, Dr. Tracy-Ventura taught English as a foreign language in Peru and academic English at the Program in Intensive English at NAU, in addition to Spanish while completing her MA.
Dr. Tracy-Ventura is an applied linguist whose research focuses on second language acquisition (SLA), study abroad, task-based language teaching, and corpus linguistics. Much of her research focuses on the second language learning of English, French, and Spanish. She is a founding member of the Languages and Social Networks Abroad Project (LANGSNAP), which began in 2011 to investigate individual, linguistic, and social benefits of study abroad, and has since evolved into the first major study of foreign/second language maintenance in the field of SLA. The resulting learner corpus from this project is publicly available: http://langsnap.soton.ac.uk and https://slabank.talkbank.org/access/ . She is co-author of the book Anglophone Students Abroad: Identity, Social Relationships, and Language Learning (with Rosamond Mitchell and Kevin McManus – Routledge 2017) which details the LANGSNAP results from 2011-2013. Her work can also be found in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Applied Psycholinguistics, International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, The Modern Language Journal, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education, System, TESOL Quarterly, among others. Most recently, she co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Corpora (with Magali Paquot – 2021).