Home Department: French and Italian
Faculty Advisor: SLAT Student Association (SLATSA); Journal of Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (JSLAT)
SLAT Areas of Specialization: Instructional Dimensions of L2 Learning, Sociocultural Dimensions of L2 Learning
Borbala (Borbi) Gaspar earned her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (language use, pedagogy and an interdisciplinary minor in Italian literature). She also holds an MA degree in ELL (UofA), and a B.A. degree in Teaching Italian as a Foreign language from Szeged, Hungary. She has been teaching Italian for more than fifteen years at all four undergraduate levels at the University of Arizona.
Her research focuses on how (underrepresented) language learners maneuver through social and symbolic power as they gain agency, use their imagination and engage in pedagogies such as project-based learning, task based, (multi)literacies, living literacies and social justice.
As a SLAT faculty member, she takes on the role of mentoring first-year PhD students.
Besides her teaching and research interest she has been regularly organizing Italian movie nights, Cooking nights, and Italian mini poster conferences for learners of Italian. She is the faculty advisor of the student-run Dolce Vita Italian Club, the SLAT Student Association (SLATSA), and the Journal of Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (JSLAT).