🎉 Congratulations! Erik Garabaya-Casado is this week’s Author Spotlight! Garabaya-Casado’s article “Considerations on the Teaching of Pragmatics and Speech Acts to Heritage Language Learners of Spanish: Beneficial or Counterproductive?” explores speech acts, an essential part of pragmatics, specifically in the realm of how explicit instruction of speech acts influences or affects first, second, and heritage language learners. The author describes linguistic and acquisitional phenomena, while emphasizing the role of pragmatics in language development, and offers a literature review of speech acts and heritage language learners. Garabaya-Casado also provides ideas and insight into future realms of research that could make important contributions to Spanish as a heritage language acquisition and teaching. The author’s contributions are insightful, thought-provoking, and well-researched! Great job on an excellent article!

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Erik Garabaya-Casado is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oviedo, Spain. Erik recently graduated with a MA in Language Pedagogy from the University of Utah, where he served as a Spanish TA for two years. Erik is currently teaching as an Associate Instructor of Spanish at the University of Utah, and also as a middle school Spanish teacher in Salt Lake City. His research focuses on the teaching of Spanish both as L2 and heritage language following innovative and collaborative pedagogical approaches. Connect with Erik on LinkedIn!