Dr. Lourdes Ortega

Biography

Lourdes Ortega is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University, and she has held previous positions in applied linguistics and second language acquisition at Georgia State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Hawaii. Her main area of research is in second language acquisition, particularly socio-cognitive 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 has lived in Germany, Greece, and since 1993 in the United States. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii (2000) 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 publications include the book Understanding Second Language Acquisition (Hodder, 2009) and several collections with John Benjamins and Routledge. She is the editor of Language Learning for the five-year term of 2010-2015 and serves on the editorial boards of a number of other journals.