Alanna Quinn, is a Spanish major and elementary education minor, as well as an honors student. She recently received the $1000 grand prize in William H. Hannon Library’s 2018 Undergraduate Library Research Award (ULRA) competition. The awarded research project is Alanna’s honors thesis titled, “Grammatical gender acquisition in L2 Spanish,” written under the direction of Spanish Professor Mónica Cabrera. Her thesis investigates grammatical gender, identified as “one of the most difficult structures that non-native speakers need to acquire” in Spanish (Alamry & Sabourin, 2017). Combining both of her programs of study, Spanish and education, Alanna investigated how grammatical gender is presented in Spanish textbooks at the college and high school levels through analysis of their content based on recent hypotheses on the acquisition of gender in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). She made strong and research-grounded pedagogical recommendations. Alanna’s research is being positively received. In addition to presenting a poster at the 10th Annual LMU Undergraduate Research Symposium, her work was presented at the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese Southern California Chapter (AATSP So Cal) conference on April 21. The AATSP So Cal meeting is a venue where language teachers and professors present their research and practice on different aspects of L2 Spanish. It is not a student conference, but mostly a venue for faculty members. The fact that Alanna’s work was accepted for presentation there speaks to the high-quality of her research project.
