Andrew D. Cohen's Website

I recently completed a study with Marta Vacas Matos following up on a corpus of pragmatics data that she 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 recently in the journal Contrastive Pragmatics.

Presently, Dr. Vacas Matos and I are working on a project with Dr. Julie Sykes and her staff at the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) at the University of Oregon to promote the teaching of pragmatics in language instruction, with a focus on Spanish.

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.