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Research

Our internationally acclaimed faculty reach across the world to study the language, literatures and cultures of varied countries. These works are published in international journals and presented at conferences worldwide. See below for most recent research and feel free to visit each Faculty member's page for their full Curriculum Vitae:

  •  The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and corpora. Routledge, 2021. By:Tracy-Ventura, N. & Paquot, M. (Eds.)

    The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Corpora is a state-of-the-art collection of cutting-edge scholarship at the intersection of second language acquisition and learner corpus research. It draws on data-driven, statistical analysis to outline the background, methods, and outcomes of language learning, with a range of global experts providing detailed guidelines and findings
  • “Understanding the long-term evolution of L2 lexical diversity: The contribution of a longitudinal learner corpus.” In Le Bruyn, B. & Paquot, M. (eds.). Learner corpus research meets second language acquisition (pp. 148-171). Cambridge University Press (2021). By: Tracy-Ventura, N., Huensch, A., & Mitchell, R.

    This study investigated the long-term evolution of lexical diversity of adult L2 learners of French and Spanish (n=33) over a 5-year time period. A longitudinal learner corpus was collected that includes oral and written data. Three data collection waves are investigated in the study: a) before learners studied abroad as part of their university degree program, b) at the end of their 9-month stay abroad, and c) 3 years post-instruction. 
  • “Léonora Miano’s Les aubes écarlates:  An Africa-Centered Memorial to Victims of the Middle Passage.” French Review 95.1 (2021) : 129-43. By: Janice Spleth This article demonstrates how Leonora Miano’s novel addresses the imperative for Africa to remember its role in the transatlantic trade and to recognize those who died at sea during the Middle Passage. It analyzes Miano’s work as an Africa-centered monument to the suffering wrought by what the author has re-baptized “la déportation transatlantique des subsahariens,” an exploration of the marginalized but complex role of the African continent and its people, whether as victims, collateral damage, or perpetrators.  
  • Staging Violence: Gender and Social Control in Jácaras and Entremeses. Routledge, 2021 By: Tania de Miguel Magro
    • Staging Violence explores gender violence in Spanish early modern short theater. It argues that many "jácaras" and "entremeses" stage subversive discourses that repudiate or complicate official narratives of gender and the use of violence as a tool for achieving gender compliance. Short comic pieces are read against comedias. Each section of the book is expertly contextualized through an overview of the legal and moral contexts and the analysis of a variety of primary sources. Staging Violence invites the reader to consider the transgressive potential of performance.
  • “Increasing Motivation among Language Learners through Individualized Assessment.” Central European Journal of Educational Research, 3.2 (2021) By: Chalupa, Cynthia.
    • Based on the results of an action research project, this article highlights the benefits of two types of individualized assessment used to improve students’ motivation while evaluating their performance. This combined assessment model, based on the work-cycle projects and the portfolio, allows students to identify what and how they best acquire new information and to maximize their learning. By employing creative approaches to writing and speaking through a variety of technologies, students also develop 21st-century skills and improve multimodal forms of communication. The findings of this project demonstrate that the encouragement of learners to utilize and reflect on their strengths as a form of assessment significantly improves their motivation and ultimately their course performance.
  • "‘In an African Context’:  Eustace Palmer’s Critical Studies of African Women’s Writing.” Critical Masters Series. Journal of the African Literature Association 15.2 (2021): 161-170.  DOI:10.1080/21674736.2021.190026. By: Janice Spleth
    • This article discusses how Eustace Palmer’s volumes of criticism on African literature have provided a continually updated introduction to major African novelists and perceptive analyses of their works. It addresses his readings of several landmark works by women in which he emphasizes the cultural matrices within which they had been created and places them in the context of African feminisms, focusing on his presentation of So Long a Letter by the Senegalese author Mariama Bâ and relating his criticism of Bâ’s narrative to other interpretations of her work.
  • "The longitudinal development of oral complexity, accuracy, fluency, and lexis before, during, and after study abroad". Applied Linguistics, 41, 136-163. https://academic.oup.com/applij/article-abstract/42/1/136/5804125 By: McManus, K., Mitchell, R. & Tracy-Ventura, N. (2021).

    This study investigated advanced L2 learners’ linguistic development before, during, and after a nine-month stay abroad, the extent to which contextual changes (home-abroad-home) influenced the nature and magnitude of development, and the ways in which relationships among different linguistic elements changed over time. Participants were 56 university learners majoring in French (n = 29) and Spanish (n = 27), who spent an academic year abroad in the middle of a four-year BA degree program. Results showed ongoing, improvements over time on most measures, including accuracy. 
  • "Phonetic Effects in Child and Adult Word Segmentation". Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, Feb. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-19-00275 By: Katz, Jonah & Michelle Moore. (2021)
    • This paper reports on the results of word-segmentation experiments on children and adults. In a word-segmentation experiment, listeners have to identify repeating 'words' in a stream of nonsense syllables. The experiments here show that adults can do this task easier when the words have phonetic patterns (lenition and fortition) that are common across many languages, but not when words have the opposite pattern, which is rare or non-existent in natural languages. Children's performance on the task was much weaker in all conditions than we expected based on previous studies, and we explore some possible explanations for that in the paper.
  • “Gender, Trauma, and Resilience in Amba Bongo’s Une femme en exil.” La littérature féminine d’Afrique Centrale. Special issue of Women in French Studies, 8 (2021): 67-76.  DOI: 10,1353/wvs.2020.0034. By: Janice Spleth
    • Une femme en exil (2000), a fictionalized memoire by Congolese immigrant writer Amba Bongo, recounts the narrator’s experience as the victim of injustice, arrest and torture before fleeing Mobutu’s Zaire for London, where she eventually rebuilds her life and establishes herself in her new country. Drawing on feminist articulations of resilience theory in such works as Feminist Rhetorical Resilience by Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady, this article follows the protagonist in her struggle to overcome her past and to cope with her present, emphasizing the distinctive ways in which resilience is inflected by women’s experiences.
  • "Study abroad for Anglophones: Language learning through multilingual practices". In U. Lanvers, A. Thompson, & M. East (Eds), Language learning and teaching in Anglophone countries: Challenges, policies, ways forward. Palgrave Macmillan (2021). By: Mitchell, R. & Tracy-Ventura, N

    This chapter draws on a longitudinal study of the year abroad (YA) experience of British university students specialising in French or Spanish. Data on linguistic development, on social integration, and on language use was collected from the participants at eight time points before, during, and after their YA. For all of the participants, the YA was a bilingual or multilingual experience, including substantial and varied use of English throughout, alongside the target language. However, participants generally succeeded in making important L2 proficiency gains. 
  • "Nuevos asedios a la conquista de México." (Lima: Centro de Estudios Literarios Antonio Cornejo Polar, 2021). Co-edited by Pablo García Loaeza and Héctor Costilla Martínez (BUAP) 
    • The chapters in this collection offer new approaches to the Conquest of Mexico and its representation from various disciplinary perspectives. The volume aims to increase our understanding of the Conquest as both an event and an idea, taking into account its immediate and long-term consequences, not only in Mexico but worldwide.
  • “Strategies of Nonviolent Resistance: Syrian Women Subverting Dominant Paradigms.” In Rita Stephan, (ED.), Women Rising: Resistance, Revolution, and Reform in the Arab Spring and Beyond. (452-463). New York University Press. 2020. By: Manal Al Natour
    • This essay explores how women employed different nonviolent approaches in their resistance, some gaining consciousness of nonviolent ideology and feminism, others applying practical tactics in response to injustice.
  • “De El juez de los divorcios a El descasamentero de Salas Barbadillo.” eHumanista 44 (2020): 89-108. By: Tania de Miguel Magro.
    • “De El juez de los divorcios a El descasamentero de Salas Barbadillo” studies the influence of Cervantes in Salas’s piece and concludes that by transferring the divorce court to fictitious pre-Christian setting, Salas is able to more openly attack the negative effects of the impossibility of divorce under Spanish legislation. 
  • "After study abroad: The maintenance of multilingual identity among Anglophone languages graduates." The Modern Language Journal, 104, 327-344 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/modl.12636 (Winner of The Best of MLJ 2020 award). By: Mitchell, R., Tracy-Ventura, N., & Huensch, A. (2020)
    • This article reports a study of 33 specialist languages graduates from a UK university, 3 years post-graduation, who had previously participated in a longitudinal study tracking their linguistic, social and personal development through a 2-semester stay abroad. This article provides insights into the career entry and related ongoing development of linguistic identity among Anglophone languages graduates, including the ongoing impact of SA-related influences.
  • “De jácaras y coimas.” Peculiar Lives in Early Modern Spain. Essays Cellebrating Amy Williamsen. Vol. I. University Press of the South, 2020: 155-68. By: Tania de Miguel Magro.
    • “De jácaras y coimas” highlights the importance of women in the genre of the jácara, a reality that had been often overlooked by critics who traditionally considered the core of the genre was the celebration of the bravery of male thugs, and that the female characters, always prostitutes, were subservient and unimportant.
  • "The phonetics and phonology of lenition: A Campidanese Sardinian case study." Laboratory Phonology, 10(1), 16. http://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.184 (2019) By: Katz, Jonah & Gianmarco Pitzanti
    • This paper gives a thorough phonetic description of the consonant system in Campidanese Sardinian, as well as a series of sound patterns involving consonants that are referred to as lenition and fortition. Campidanese has a complex system of lenition that has stumped a lot of phonologists over the years. Our acoustic data suggest that the system was not being described completely, and our results may help make sense of some of the apparently puzzling properties of the Campidanese sound system. 
  • “Unearthing a Post-Humanist Ecological Socialism in Christa Wolf’s ‘Selbstversuch,” Kassandra, and Störfall.” In Christa Wolf: A Companion. Eds. Sonja E. Klocke and Jennifer R. Hosek. Companions to Contemporary German Culture. Vol. 8. Boston: DeGruyter, 2018. 81-95. By: Dr.Deborah Janson
    •  This article highlights ecocritical insights contained in three of Christa Wolf's works. It appears in a volume that offers an English-speaking academic readership new perspectives on Christa Wolf, East Germany’s best known and most important author. 

  • “Auditory disruption improves word segmentation: a functional basis for lenition phenomena.” Glossa 3(1) (2018): 38.  http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.443 By: Dr. Jonah Katz & M. Fricke.
    • This article shows that certain common sound patterns make it easier to learn words in a fake 'language'.

  • “’An inescapable network of mutuality’:  The Conversation between Senghor’s Philosophy and King’s Vision in ‘The Elegy for Martin Luther King.’” Spec. issue of the Journal of the African Literature Association 12 (2018): 269-78. By: Dr. Janice Spleth
      • This article reads the elegy as a dialogue between Léopold Sédar Senghor and Martin Luther King, Jr., and shows how the African-American humanist’s principles are confirmed and illustrated in the imagination of the Senegalese poet
  • “An Exploration of Human Rights in the Postcolonial Text: ‘The Conspiracy’ by Henri Lopes.” African Cultural Production and the Rhetoric of Humanism. Ed. Lifongo Vetinde and Jean-Blaise Samou. Lexington Books, 2019, pp. 167-76. By: Janice Spleth
    • Exploring human rights issues through the reading of texts by Francophone African writers can make literature more meaningful by relating it to some of the serious ethical issues that students will be facing in their adult lives as citizens of a global community. This chapter focuses on a single work, “Conspiracy,” a 1971 short story by the Congolese writer Henri Lopes, in order to show how it might generate a unit on human rights with a particular emphasis on the situation of the political prisoner. The analysis looks at the story from three perspectives: 1) the dynamics of prejudice and discrimination in the justification of torture; 2) the relationship between the text and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; 3) the transition to statehood as a context for the development of human rights.
  • “Historiografía mestiza: Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl y Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 86 (2017): 171-192. By: Dr. Pablo Garcia
    • This article compares historical works by these two seventeenth-century authors, one from Mexico and one from Peru, to show the lasting impact of cultural models brought by religious missionaries on ideas about and representations of the indigenous past in both North and South America.
  • “Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl: A New Native Identity,” To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America, Ed. Mónica Díaz, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. 243-265. By: Dr. Pablo Garcia
    • This chapter argues that this seventeenth-century historian used his research and his writing to create for himself an identity that was the harbinger of the one claimed by most Mexicans today. 

    • The article examines Boni’s representation of civil war in the Ivory Coast in order to situate the narrative effectively with respect to transnational discourses on the role of gender in warfare and in the preservation of peace.