Faculty

Collins, Laura Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Education TESL and Applied Linguistics

lcollins@education.concordia.ca Phone: (514) 848-2424 ext. 2445 Office: Z-302 Website: N/A

Laura Collins is an applied linguist whose broad research area is second language acquisition in classroom settings. Her research is informed by several years of language teaching, both domestically and overseas. Her specific research interests include the development of tense and grammatical aspect among second language learners, the teaching of tense and aspect (and pedagogical grammar in general), and the relationship between the distribution of instructional time and language learning outcomes.

- Education
- Representative publications
- Current projects
- Courses taught

Education

• Ph.D. in Humanities, Concordia University
• Master in Education, Second Language Teaching/Didactique des langues secondes, University of Ottawa
• Bachelor of Education, Specialized in Second Language Teaching, University of Toronto
• Bachelor of Arts, York University, Toronto

Representative Publications

• Collins, L. (in press). Accessing second language learners' understanding of temporal morphology. Language Awareness.
• Collins, L. (2004). The particulars on universals: A comparison of the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology among Japanese- and French-speaking learners of English. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 61(2), 251-274.
• Collins, L. (2004). Review of "The L2 acquisition of tense-aspect morphology". Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 26(4), 622-624.
• Collins, L. (2004). Learning verb tenses in English: How francophone are francophone learners? Speaq Out, 32(2), 27-30.
• Collins, L. (2002). The roles of L1 influence and lexical aspect in the acquisition of temporal morphology. Language Learning, 52, 43-94
• Collins, L., Halter, R.H., Lightbown, P.M., Spada, N. (1999). Time and the distribution of time in second language instruction. TESOL Quarterly,33(4), 655-680.

Current Projects

• Explaining and enhancing efficiency in classroom second language learning (with Pavel Trofimovich, Marlise Horst, Joanna White, and Walcir Cardoso)
• Tense and aspect in the second language classroom. Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC)
• Age, intensity of instruction and metalinguistic awareness in EFL learning. TESOL International Research Foundation (with Carmen Muñoz and Joanna White)

Courses Taught

Undergraduate

• Language Acquisition (TESL 341, Concordia University)
• Grammar for Teachers (TESL 331, Concordia University)
• Modern English Grammar (TESL 231, Concordia University)
• Practicum (TESl 433)
• TESL Pedagogy: General/Primary (currently TESL 326; TESL 426, Concordia University)

Graduate

• The Grammars of English (APLI 604, Concordia University)
• Pedagogical Grammar (APLI 616, Concordia University)
• Cross-linguistic influence (APLI 634, Concordia University)
• Classroom-based SLA Research (APLI 651, Concordia University)