Biographical note

María J. de la Fuente is a Professor of Spanish at The George Washington University, where she teaches all levels of Spanish, from elementary to content-based, advanced language classes. Her general area of research is instructed (classroom) second language acquisition (ISLA). One of her main research areas is Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and the role of pedagogical tasks in second/foreign language learning. The results of her research have appeared in refereed journals such as Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and Language Teaching Research. Her teaching interests include task-based language pedagogy, content-based language pedagogy (sustainability-based) and the use of case studies in language teaching. She is the author of 2 Spanish textbooks. At The George Washington University she was the recipient of a 2008 Bender Teaching Award and she is a founding member of the GW Academy of Distinguished Teachers.

Carola Goldenberg has more than 20 years of experience in second language acquisition. She started her career teaching at the highest corporate and government levels in Europe, including CEOs of major multinational companies and Cabinet ministers in the UK. She was responsible for the design, standardization and production of curriculum development and evaluation courseware in 26 languages for the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council in Brussels as well as the Foreign Common Office in the UK. In addition, she was in charge of the recruitment and training of world language instructors around the world. Since 2014, she has been teaching and coordinating Spanish courses at The George Washington University, where her excellence in teaching was recognized with a runner-up position for the Bender Teaching Award in 2019. Her research interests focus on instructed second language acquisition (ISLA), particularly in the role of the first language in the second language learning process, the mental lexicon and task-based learning. The results of her research have been presented at several domestic and international conferences such as the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) and Second Language Research Forum (SLRF). She started her career in Argentina as a bilingual translator and interpreter with a degree from Emilio Stevanovitch’s Interpreters’ School and then moved to the UK to continue her studies where she earned a Master of Arts in Bilingual Translation from the University of Westminster and a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching from the University of Nottingham.