María González-Ferrer

Born in Madrid, Spain, María is a Ph.D. candidate in the Hispanic Linguistics program. She was recently honored with the Sigma Delta Pi Award for International Research and spent the Fall 2024 semester conducting research in Spain and Mexico. This Spring 2025 semester, María is teaching SPAN 3050: Introduction to Spanish Linguistics and SPAN 1110: Accelerated Spanish for Beginners.

Her primary research interests are Second Language Acquisition, Language Variation, Language Attitudes, Applied Linguistics, and Language Pedagogy. For her dissertation, María is examining how English-speaking learners acquire Spanish pronoun doubling structures and exploring variations of this structure among native Spanish speakers from Argentina, Spain, and Mexico. Previous to this research, she examined the semantic evolution from Latin of the Spanish prepositions por and para, as well as the cognitively-based semantic senses that these prepositions encode. Her study presented convincing evidence in favor of taking an alternative conceptual and meaning-based approach to teaching these prepositions to L2 learners of Spanish, and abandoning the more traditional treatments presented in 34 first and second-year college Spanish textbooks. Her ultimate goal as a linguist and a Spanish teacher is to improve didactic materials and raise awareness of the importance of accurate and authentic data that language students are exposed to.

In the last 6 years at UGA, María taught beginning, intermediate, and advanced Spanish, both in person and online (SPAN 1002E, SPAN 1110, SPAN 1110E, SPAN 2001, SPAN 2001E, and SPAN 2002). She also served as a TA for the Service learning class (SPAN 4090), and as the Writing Intensive Program TA for the Latin American cinema class (SPAN 4082).

In addition to teaching regular classes, María received Graduate School Research Grants for the 2020-2021 and 2023-2024 academic years. During the 2020-2021 year, she served as a Graduate Research Assistant with Dr. Quesada and Dr. Blackwell. In 2023, she was honored as one of the 15 UGA graduate students selected for the Future Faculty Fellowship Program. She also coordinated the UGA Study Abroad program in Valencia during the summers of 2022 and 2023.