Core Faculty | Bruna Sommer-Farias

Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching – University of Arizona

Dr. Sommer-Farias came to the U.S. from her native Brazil to pursue her doctorate in the interdisciplinary Second Language Acquisition & Teaching program at the University of Arizona. While there, she contributed considerably to the program in Portuguese as a foreign language through designing courses, teacher training, and program evaluation. Her dissertation focuses on the ways that genre-based writing instruction in an additional language can also benefit writers in their first language. She has conducted research funded by CERCLL and other entities, and she has presented and published on these topics, with articles appearing in journals such as Written Communication, the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research and the Journal of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLTCL). A Fulbright alumna who graduated summa cum laude from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, she has proficiency in Spanish and French as well as her native Portuguese. She teaches FLT courses such as Methods, L2 Literacy, Language Concepts, and Culture in Foreign Language Teaching. She is involved in additional projects such as the video-based inquiry professional development project called ViVID and funded by the National LCTL Resource Center, the large learner corpus collection project called MACAWS, a repository of resources for teaching literature and literacy in additional languages known as FLLITE, and the American Association of Teachers of Portuguese (AOTP).