María del Pilar García Mayo - Biography#

I am a Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the Department of English and German Philology, Translation and Interpretation at the University of the Basque Country, of which I was the Head (2016 - 2024). I am also an Honorary Professor at University College London and an Honorary Consultant for the Shanghai Center for Research in English Language Education. I am a member of the Governing Council of the Spanish State Research Agency as a scientist of recognized prestige.

Throughout the years, I have maintained two active lines of research. The first one is grounded in generative linguistic theory and explores second and third language acquisition processes. My theoretical focus is the acquisition of English grammatical structures by bilingual Basque-Spanish speakers. My second research line is grounded in cognitive-interactionist theory, which assumes that the process of acquiring an additional language is a complex one, involving learner-internal cognitive abilities as well as the social and educational contexts in which learning occurs. I have been invited to give plenary talks to universities in Canada, Germany, Greece, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, The Netherlands, the UK, the USA and most Spanish universities. I have published widely in international Q1 journals and have also been an invited editor of special issues and edited books for major publishers. I appeared as linguist of reference in De Bot’s (2015) A History of Applied Linguistics. From 1980 to the Present (Routledge) and have been included in the Stanford list of the world’s top 2% most-cited researchers. In 2014 I was awarded the XVIII Spanish Society for Applied Linguistics (AESLA) research award for senior researchers. I have supervised eighteen Ph.D. dissertations and a large number of MA and undergraduate theses. I have also served in numerous national and international Ph.D., MA and promotion committees both in Spain and overseas (Australia, Canada, China, India, Israel, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the USA). I have been the Principal Investigator of several projects awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. I am the editor of Language Teaching Research (Sage- Q1).

I am the director of the research group Language and Speech, noted by the Basque Government for excellence in research and of the MA program Language Acquisition in Multilingual Settings. I was also the International Relations representative of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistic, a member of the AILA Executive Board and member of its Research Network, I am a member of the External Advisory Committee of the Linguistic and Literary Research Institute (iLTIUS) – Universidad de Santiago de Compostela -, an assessor for the Spanish Evaluation and Foresight Agency and the Spanish National Agency of Quality Evaluation and Accreditation. I have been distinguished with the highest level (A2) in research, teaching and management by the Basque Government.