Biography

Dr Ares Llop Naya is an Assistant Professor of Language Acquisition and Teaching at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain). She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (awarded the Joan Solà International Prize in Catalan Philology plus the publication of her first monograph). She also has two master’s degrees in Language Teaching and Learning (Spanish and Catalan). 

She has taught and conducted research at the Universitat de Barcelona, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Cardiff University and University of Cambridge. She has also been a visiting researcher at the Université de Montréal and Universidade de Lisboa.

Her doctoral research focused on microvariation and linguistic change of the Romance languages. She explored the mechanisms and acquisition processes underlying both diachronic linguistic change as well as the micro-synchronic variation of unexplored Romance negation systems. From 2020 to 2024 she was an affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics (University of Cambridge) and held the Batista i Roca postdoctoral Fellowship at Fitzwilliam College. During this time, she led a funded project titled Negation in the Foreign Language Classroom: A Multidimensional Approach to its Acquisition, Learning and Teaching), in collaboration with researchers from King’s College London and the University of Oxford.

Her current research explores how grammatical knowledge and theoretical insights can be transferred to the language classroom and foreign language textbooks. She is also interested in building bridges of dialogue and collaboration between language acquisition research and classroom practice. Her publications include articles on variation and change in Romance languages, teaching Catalan and Spanish as a first and foreign language, and several Catalan language textbooks.

You can learn more about her research and publications on her institutional profile.