Andrew D. Cohen's Website

Welcome to my website!

You are invited to download numerous writings of mine (see Publications). If the publication that you wish to read is not downloadable, it is available upon e-mail request. I also post the PowerPoints for my conference presentations as well (see Presentations). I have edited this section on my Projects so that they are grouped according to general area of focus. If you want more information on any of these project areas, please feel free to contact me by email.

I recently added a section called "Instruments" (under Publications) where I posted measures used in styles, strategies, and motivation studies.

My address: 1850 Alice Street Apt. 613, Oakland, CA 94612

email: adcohen@umn.edu  /  Website: https://z.umn.edu/adcohen

                                                                             

Learning Pragmatics

I conducted a study with Marta Vacas Matos following up on a corpus of pragmatics data that she had collected for her doctoral dissertation in Spain. Our study looked in depth at three Americans who performed Spanish pragmatics extremely effectively. That study was published in the journal Contrastive Pragmatics in 2021.

I am also collaborating with Dr. Julie Sykes and her Assistant Director, Stephanie Knight, at the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS)  at the University of Oregon to promote the teaching of pragmatics in language instruction. A study focusing on Spanish just appeared in print in 2023 (see my publications on pragmatics). 

Language Learner Strategies

I continue to do research on language learner strategies to better understand what the processes actually entail. For example, Isobel Wang and I have been doing research which demonstrates that the function of a given strategy fluctuates from moment to moment, rather than having a fixed function as solely metacognitive, cognitive, social, or affective. We have also found that strategies tend to appear in combinations rather than in an isolated fashion.  We have published three studies on our findings in the journal System.

In addition, we have been doing research on how language learners actually engage in strategy instruction and what the takeaway turns out to be.