Dr. Mariana Restrepo-Ortiz
Mariana is an applied linguist and university Spanish faculty member. Colombian-born, she came to the United States for graduate school and has spent the last fifteen years studying how second-language acquisition theory does and does not translate into actual US classrooms. Her work has appeared in Studies in Second Language Acquisition, the Modern Language Journal, and Hispania. She writes for LanguagePlans about the theoretical foundations that classroom teachers most often hear about second-hand.
- Comprehensible input
- Output and interaction
- Processing instruction
- Skill acquisition theory
- Interlanguage and fossilization
6 pieces in the archive.
The Output Hypothesis, revisited after forty years.
Merrill Swain spent fifteen years inside French immersion classrooms in Canada and watched something nobody expected. Kids who had been swimming in comprehensible input for seven hours a day still produced French that was, on close inspection, badly broken. She wrote one of the most consequential follow-up papers in the field.
Skill acquisition theory, the missing link between knowing and doing in your Spanish classroom.
Robert DeKeyser borrowed the most useful framework cognitive psychology had on offer (John Anderson's ACT framework) and applied it to language learning. The result explains why your students can pass a grammar quiz on Monday and produce broken Spanish on Friday.
Interlanguage, and why your Spanish 4 student stopped improving.
Larry Selinker named one of the most useful constructs in second language acquisition in a 1972 paper. The construct is interlanguage. Its consequence is fossilization. Together they explain the student who has been studying for four years and still says no me gusta los gatos.
Frequency effects, the boringly powerful predictor of what your students will learn.
Nick Ellis spent twenty years arguing that the most boring variable in second language acquisition was also the most powerful. How often a learner encounters a form predicts how well they learn it. The usage-based revolution in linguistics took the field a while to catch up.
Why comprehensible input still matters.
Stephen Krashen published Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition in 1982. Forty-four years later, his central claim is still the most contested idea in language teaching, and it is still mostly right.
Processing Instruction, the most effective technique you have never used.
Bill VanPatten spent thirty years showing that traditional grammar drill loses to a technique almost no commercial Spanish curriculum has implemented. The research is overwhelming. The reason it never reached your classroom is more interesting than the technique itself.
Meet the rest of the team.
All ten educators →