Ortega Lourdes

Visiting Faculty

School of Arts and Sciences

Lourdes Ortega is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She held previous faculty positions in applied linguistics and second language acquisition at Georgia State University (2000-2002), Northern Arizona University (2002-2004), and the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa (2004-2012). Her main area of research is in second language acquisition, particularly sociocognitive and educational dimensions in adult classroom settings. She has also long-standing interests in second language writing and foreign language education and has published widely about systematic research synthesis and epistemological and ethical dimensions of second language acquisition research. In the last few years she has become interested in applying insights from bilingualism and from usage-based linguistics to the investigation of second language development. She is originally from Spain, where she also received her first degree in Spanish Philology. She studied abroad in Germany, lived in Greece for 7 years as a teacher of Spanish, and relocated to the United States in 1993, where she did her studies and where she has rooted her academic career. She was co-recipient of the Pimsleur and the TESOL Research awards (2001) and has been a doctoral Mellon fellow (1999), a postdoctoral Spencer/National Academy of Education fellow (2003), and a senior research fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (2010). Her work has appeared in books and articles in journals such as the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Modern Language Journal, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. She is the author of several books, including Understanding Second Language Acquisition (Routledge, 2009, revised edition 2017). Lourdes is a frequent keynote speaker at international conferences, including the American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference in 2010, the AILA Conference in 2014, and the TESOL Convention in 2015. She is a visiting faculty member and teaches in the Doctoral program at Hellenic American University.