In the Spotlight:

Kim Geeslin, Director of Hispanic Linguistics and associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portugese, has always studied languages. She was born in California, raised by Texans in Durham, New Hampshire, and moved back to California before settling in Bloomington. Geeslin says her upbringing allowed her to appreciate language differences from one region to another.

“On family trips to Texas on holidays and in the summers, I had frequent exposure to Spanish and to Spanish-speakers, but I didn’t begin to study Spanish until high school,” Geelsin said.

Geeslin spent her junior year at the University of New Hampshire in Granada, Spain, solidifying her interest in Spanish language. She earned her graduate degrees—an MA in Hispanic Linguistics and a PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching—in Tucson, Arizona, at the University of Arizona, where she was able to hone her Spanish language skills with Spanish-speakers in the Southwestern United States.

Today, Geeslin’s research focuses on second language acquisition. She is particularly interested in the intersection of sociolinguistics and second language acquisition and the variety of ways in which social factors influence language learning and language use. She is currently working with several different research teams, which include both colleague and graduate student collaborators. One of her current projects is a study on second language acquisition of geographically-indexed variants (e.g. leísmo, interdental fricative) in a study abroad setting. The research team evaluated the effects of a home-stay program in Leon, Spain, on the acquisition of a variety of structures, such as object pronouns, perfective past time reference and intonation across utterance types. Geeslin said that in all cases, these examinations of development during study abroad provide new insights about how languages are learned and how learners can modify their own developing grammars in relatively short but highly-intensive immersion programs.

“In all of my research, the underlying philosophy is that one must recognize the linguistic and social variation inherent in the target language, as well as the value it has in effective communication, in order to adequately examine acquisition of the target by non-native speakers,” Geeslin said.

Geeslin is also a committed professor, teaching a variety undergraduate courses on Hispanic linguistics and language acquisition as well as graduate courses on second language acquisition. During Fall 2011, she gave the keynote address at the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, entitled “the acquisition of variable structures in Second Language Spanish: the state of the discipline(s)”, in which she provided an overview of research on second language variation in Spanish conducted over the past decade and made a case that additional cross-disciplinary research is needed to continue to advance the field. 

Geeslin recently finished co-editing the Refereed Proceedings of the 14th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium with Manuel Diaz-Campos and this work will appear in Spring 2012. Geeslin is also under contract to edit the Handbook of Spanish Second Language Acquisition (Wiley-Blackwell) which will contain 35 chapters contributed by experts in a range of areas of research on second language Spanish.

Geeslin says her favorite aspect of being a professor is problem solving aspects of research, teaching and service and ensures that the job is always exciting. Geeslin has two children—a three-year old and a five-year old, and runs in her free time.