Jeannette Sánchez-Naranjo
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Jeannette Sánchez-Naranjo is an assistant professor, teaching stream, of Spanish Applied Linguistics and Language Pedagogy in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She began her trajectory as a field researcher with the goal of describing the sound and the morpho-syntactic systems of the Hupda, a language belonging to the Amazonian linguistic family Maku-Puinave, and Spanish.
By describing how languages were structured and how people used them, she eventually realized that languages exhibit an intricate interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics and, more importantly, that they are embedded in rich cultural processes which are essential to our experience of being human. Appreciating their social nature and role in our society made her bring together language, users and contexts, and develop research and teaching programs that have focused on the Spanish language and the study of three main aspects: its structure, its use and its learning and teaching in first- and second-language settings.
Sánchez-Naranjo’s recent research and teaching have been focused on the third aspect. Learning a second or a foreign language is a complex, time-intensive task that requires dedication, persistence and hard work. As a researcher and a language learner herself, her awareness of language learners’ difficulties grows continually because learners differ in many ways (e.g., aptitudes, learning strategies, linguistic backgrounds) and these differences have a significant impact on their representations and use of linguistic, rhetorical and sociocultural resources. Adult language learners are resourceful language users and negotiate meaning through complex patterns, which are revealed by their difficulties in the learning process. The nature and degree of these difficulties have different implications for instructional decisions and how we design, select and use teaching materials and technology in the classroom.
Her work aims to help second/foreign language learners develop as fully proficient language users in the 21st century. Sánchez-Naranjo’s research has been published in scholarly journals such as Foreign Language Annals; Language, Culture and Curriculum; Canadian Journal of Linguistics; and Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana.