FLARE faculty members

Many FLARE students and alumni agree that one of the more attractive features of FLARE is the opportunity to take different courses from a variety of faculty who teach and research in diverse departments and programs across campus. The interdisciplinary nature of FLARE brings together a very eclectic group of dedicated faculty members with whom students get to study, work, and research. FLARE students will tell you that these faculty members are devoted to helping you grow as a scholar, teacher, and person. Each faculty member plays an important role by sharing his/her knowledge and expertise about a variety of issues that help us better understand the multi-faceted nature of SLA. Here are what some FLARE faculty members have to say about FLARE and about the courses they teach.
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Judith Liskin-Gasparro
Co-Director of FLARE
Associate Professor
Department of Spanish and Portuguese

I regularly teach SLA Research and Theory II, one of my favorite courses, because I work with FLARE students as they carry out and write up their major first-year research project. I recently taught Topics in SLA: Speaking, and I plan to develop some new courses for the program as well. I also regularly teach the Foreign Language Teaching Methods course for new TAs in Spanish and Portuguese, which is a constant source of insights about language teaching.

As co-director of FLARE, I know all of our students from the time of their first contact with us until they graduate (and beyond). There is nothing more rewarding than working with students over a period of four or five years as they move through our program and become experts in their field and skilled researchers. I particularly enjoy seeing the variety of student research projects at the FLARE Poster Session, held at the end of each semester.

FLARE attracts excellent students with a wide range of languages and diverse research interests. We specialize in helping students find and develop those interests, and we take pride in producing young scholars who are making their marks on the profession in many ways.

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Carol Severino
Associate Professor
Rhetoric Department

I’m the director of the writing center (www.uiowa.edu/~writingc/)  which is a great resource for FLARE students.  We can help you with your writing projects and with your letters of application.  It’s also the place where tutoring conversations with second language writers foster second language acquisition.  Every two or three years I teach Topics in Second Language Acquisition: Writing. You might also be interested in becoming a writing center tutor yourself by taking Teaching in a Writing Center, which I teach every fall.

I like working with FLARE’s linguistically astute, internationally minded, hardworking grad students.  It’s a pleasure to be their teacher or committee member because they are always willing to go the extra mile in their research and writing.  I also like the fact that FLARE is a community in which people care about one another’s ideas, but more important, they care about one another. 

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Sue E. K. Otto
Director, UI Language Media Center
Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese
and International Programs/FLARE 

I teach Multimedia and Second Language Acquisition (164:211) each year and have also directed individual work for the Practicum in CALL Software Development (164: 212), Readings in Second Language Acquisition (164:301), and Special Projects in SLA (164:302). 

I revel in the interdisciplinarity and diversity of FLARE. It is wonderful to collaborate with faculty from multiple departments and to work with graduate students who have many different language backgrounds and career interests.  Because I teach a required course (Multimedia & SLA course), I have the pleasure of getting to know all the students personally, which makes me feel very connected to the program.  And nothing reflects our diverse and congenial community like the FLARE potlucks—nobody does it better!

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Bruce H. Spencer
Assistant Professor
German Department 

The best thing about FLARE is that it provides an opportunity to interact with faculty and graduate students working on such a wide variety of languages with research interests that span an enormous range of topics in linguistics and language learning and teaching. I really appreciate the insights and perspectives of people working in different areas and the network of “FLARE-folk” on campus contains an enormous amount of knowledge and experience.  

Classes taught by Prof. Spencer:

      013:299 – Sociolinguistic Approaches to Bilingualism

      013:299 – Introduction to German Sociolinguistics

      013:256 – Modern German Syntax

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Jason Rothman
Assistant Professor
Spanish and Portuguese Department 

I study the acquisition of morphosyntax and semantics from the generative paradigm. I am especially interested in the acquisition of interface properties (where the narrow syntax meets other linguistic modules such as syntax/semantics, syntax/pragmatics, syntax/prosodic interfaces). Mainly, I work on L2 Spanish and L2 Portuguese, although I also research child language acquisition and sociolinguistic phenomena as well. This Spring I will teach the SLA II Theory course for Flare.

FLARE is a wonderful program that stretches across the many disciplines that comprise the multifarious and multidimensional nature of SLA. What I enjoy most about FLARE is the breath of expertise that the faculty provide. From formal linguistic and pedagogical approaches to cognitive and sociolinguistic approaches to the study of adult acquisition, FLARE has well respected faculty from all of these paradigms. At the end of the day, there is no current theory that is able to account (descriptively or explanatorily) for how adults learn/acquire non-primary languages. While I have my personal opinions as to which approaches are and are not on the right track, programs like FLARE allow for collaborations and discussions that as individual researchers within our own paradigms we could/would never have. Through these discussions, it is everyone's hope that we will all move closer to being able to account for the phenomenon that we collectively study, albeit from complimentary and sometimes contrasting views.

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Steve Alessi
Associate Professor
Psychological and Quantitative Foundations Department

Although I'm more of a language learner than a language teacher, I enjoy traveling and working with students from all over the world. I've done teaching in six continents (all except Antarctica) and have worked with students from all of them. I'm in the educational psychology program in the College of Education and my teaching and research area is educational technology. My two main courses of interest to FLARE students are Web-Based Learning (07P:215) and Designing Educational Multimedia (07P:208). My research interests include learning with simulations, facilitating interaction in web-based courses, and human interface design.

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Roumyana Slabakova
Associate Professor
Linguistics Department

Roumyana Slabakova is an associate professor of linguistics and a FLARE core faculty member. She teaches classes in syntax, the structure of languages like English and Slavic, generative second language acquisition and linguistic pragmatics. She specializes in the second language acquisition of meaning, and her overarching research question focuses on the psychological representation of meaning in the brain and how second language learners compute the meaning of sentences and discourse. More specifically, she has worked on the acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect, interpretation of nominal phrases, and scalar implicatures. Her future projects will look at the acquisition of temporal meanings and the interaction of quantifier meanings. She is on the editorial board of Second Language Research and the Journal of Slavic Linguistics. Her native language is Bulgarian.


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To see a list of all FLARE faculty members and their official departmental webpages, click here .