Agurtzane Azkarai

Dr. Azkarai obtained her PhD in 2013 within the program ‘Language Acquisition in Multilingual Settings’ from the UPV/EHU under the direction of Prof. García Mayo, and was awarded the Outstanding Thesis Award for the Academic Year 2012/2013. She has worked as a post-doctoral researcher with Prof. Rhonda Oliver at Curtin University (Perth, Australia) for three years (2014-2016). After that she has worked as a teacher in the German Department at the UPV/EHU, also in the Faculty of Humanities at Mondragon University (HUHEZI), and the Faculty of Education at the UPV/EHU.

She is an associate professor of English at the Department of English and German Studies and Translation and Interpreting at the UPV/EHU, and teaches “Multilingual Education: theoretical and research perspectives” in the Language Acquisition in Multilingual Settings (LAMS) MA program. She has been a visiting professor under the Erasmus + Teaching Staff Mobility Programme at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and Stellenbosch University (South Africa).

She has two recognized research periods (i.e., sexenios), and her work has been published in well-known journals (e.g., TESOL Quarterly, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, System, Language Teaching Research), and presented in international conferences (e.g., TBLT, AESLA).

Her research interests include collaborative work, computer-mediated communication, the use of the first language in L2 learning, writing tasks and task-based interaction in different L2 settings and with children and adults. Moreover, her research focuses on different factors such as age, gender, motivation, or setting that might affect the opportunities that language learners have to develop their target language.

Research Interests

Applied Linguistics, Second/Foreign Language Acquisition, Interaction, Task-based Language Learning