Contact Information & Background

Julie Sykes has lived in Spain, Mexico and Costa Rica. She received her MA in Spanish Linguistics from Arizona State University in May, 2004. She is currently a doctoral student in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Minnesota and a Research Assistant for CARLA. Her areas of emphasis include interlanguage pragamtics and computer-aided language learning (CALL). Her most recent publication "Synchronous CMC & Pragmatic Development: Effects of Oral and Written Chat" appeared in the CALICO Journal (2005, Vol. 22, No. 3).

Current information about Julie

Andrew D. Cohen was a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural community development with the Aymara Indians on the High Plains of Bolivia (1965-67). He was professor of ESL in the English Department at UCLA (1972-1975), professor of Language Education at the Hebrew University (1975-1991) with a year as Fulbright Lecturer and Researcher at the PUC in São Paulo, Brazil (1986-87), and then assumed a position as professor of second language studies at the University of Minnesota in 1991, until he retired with Professor Emeritus status in the Spring of 2013. During his Minnesota years, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Hawaii (1996-7) and at Tel Aviv University (1997), and a Visiting Lecturer at Auckland University in New Zealand (2004-5). He co-edited Language learning strategies with Ernesto Macaro (Oxford University Press, 2007), co-authored Teaching and learning pragmatics with Noriko Ishihara(Longman/Pearson, 2010), and most recently authored the second edition of Strategies in learning and using a second language (also Longman/Pearson, 2011). He has also published many book chapters and journal articles.

In retirement, he remains active professionally, presenting at conferences, doing consulting, and writing. For example, Cohen is consultant on a 3-year research project (2013-2015) in Doha, Qatar to improve the reading strategies in EFL and Arabic L1 of middle-school students reading in science. In addition, he has recently written a guide for young language learners, with a companion guide for teachers.  He has piloted the guide with a 5th-grade Spanish immersion class in Forest Lake, MN. For the last three years he has been studying his 13th language, Mandarin, having weekly tandem sessions (Mandarin and English respectively) with a Chinese woman in Minneapolis.

More information about Prof. Cohen.