Gabrielle Klassen and Dr. John Schwieter published study on second language acquisition and immersion in Applied Linguistics Review

HBA in Languages graduate Gabrielle Klasses (Class of 2012) has published a peer-reviewed article with WLU's Dr. John W. Schwieter and Dr. Aline Ferreira, Associate Professor of Linguistics (Department of Spanish and Portuguese) at the University of California Santa Barbara in the international journal Applied Linguistics Review.

Their article "The role of immersion learning in the acquisition and processing of second language (L2) gender agreement," shows the real benefits of Study Abroad courses. In their study, English speakers learning Spanish participated in a reading task and a picture selection task prior to and after a short-term study abroad experience. The result from the reading task demonstrated that although learners relied on the masculine article "el" ("the") as the default for assigning grammatical gender to nouns pre-study abroad, this effect was no longer observed post-study abroad.

Gabrielle Klassen, after completing Laurier's HBA in Languages program, earned an MA in Hispanic Linguistics from the Univeristy of Toronto in 2013. She has now nearly completed the PhD program in Hispanic Linguistics and will defend her disertation "An investigation of L2 Spanish acquisition, integration, and predictive processing of definiteness" in early 2021.