Doctoral student Stephen Fafulas was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation grant to support his dissertation research on second language acquisition under the supervision of Professor Kimberly Geeslin. His project, entitled “First and SecondLanguage Patterns of Variation: Acquisition and Use of Simple Present and Present Progressive Forms in Spanish and English” will include data from English-speaking learners of Spanish at several proficiency levels as well as Spanish-speakers from Spain and Mexico. The highly competitive Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants in Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences are awarded to a limited number of doctoral students on a competitive basis in order to improve the quality of their dissertation research. These grants encourage doctoral students to undertake significant datagathering projects and to conduct field research in settings away from their campus. This award will support data collection outside the United States and provide new information about how the present progressive is used in different Spanish-speaking regions. Proposals are judged by National Science Foundation panels and outside experts on the basis of their scientific merit, including the theoretical importance of the research questions and the appropriateness of the proposed data and methodology to be used in addressing these questions.
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