Elena Shimanskaya

Assistant Professor, French; Basic French Language Program coordinator
Elena Shimanskaya

Summary

Shimanskaya is an assistant professor of French linguistics in the department of World Languages and Literatures and is currently the Basic French Language Program Coordinator (FREN 111-212).

She obtained her Ph.D. in second language acquisition from the University of Iowa and her M.A. in linguistics from Syracuse University. She studies how adults learn foreign/second languages. More specifically, her research focuses on the impact of one's native language on second language acquisition – L1 Transfer. The ultimate goal of this research is to understand in what ways the linguistic knowledge of a second language speaker is different from that of a monolingual speaker.

She has presented her theoretical and empirical research on second language acquisition of French at several national and international conferences (Second Language Research Forum, Boston University Conference on Language Development, Generative Approaches to SLA Conference, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America).

Education

  • Ph.D., second language acquisition, University of Iowa, 2015
  • M.A., linguistics, Syracuse University, 2009