PhD in Spanish with a Concentration in SLA

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is a field of research that investigates how humans learn a language that is not their native language. This can be in any context (e.g., a college student learning Spanish in Florida, non English-speaking immigrants who come to live and work in the United States, etc.). Researchers study the processes and products as well as the social environment in which this learning takes place. Research in SLA draws upon insights from a number of disciplines including linguistics (including syntactic theory, pragmatic theory, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis), cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics (including first language acquisition), educational psychology (especially reading research and comprehension), and others in an attempt to address some of the problems and questions that confront researchers.