Overview
Emilia Illana joined the Romance Studies Department at Cornell University in Fall 2019. She completed her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition at The University of Iowa and her M.A. in Foreign Language Literature and Pedagogy at the University of Delaware. Her fields of specialization are second language teaching, curriculum design, second language writing, digital narratives, technology, and assessment.
The beginning of her career focused on K-12 language education, teaching internationally in Spain, Denmark, and the US. Since 2012 she has focused on higher education. She taught Elementary and Intermediate Spanish courses, as well as upper level courses in Writing and in Speaking.
Her main research interests lie in language pedagogy, second language writing development, and technology enhanced learning. Working at the intersection of these areas, her Ph.D. thesis used a Mixed Methods research approach to explore feedback giving and peer reviewing in the online context.
Emilia is also interested in curriculum design, Open Educational Resources (OER), Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), and social justice in the L2 classroom. In relation to these topics, she has carried out several projects throughout her time at Cornell.
Recent Projects
- Connecting language teaching and social justice: A call for diversity, equity, and inclusion (Conference co-organizer) | 2022
- Featured in the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning conference website
- Giving purpose to students’ second language practices: Fulfilling meaningful and authentic tasks through Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) | 2022
- Featured in: Center for Teaching Innovation
- Integrating social justice through the arts in the second language classroom | 2021
- Featured in: Cornell Chronicle and the LRC Podcast (February 2022)
- Open Educational Resources (OER) | 2022
- Reviewer and content-creator of OER, including the website “Curso de escritura en español”
- Vice-president of the organization “Higher Ed Resources for Open Education, Spanish” [HERO-S]
- Video series production on peer reviewing | 2021
- Featured in: (1) Faculty Voices on Teaching, (2) Peer Review Series and (3) Turnitin’s Educator Series
Publications
- Illana-Mahiques, E. & Severino, C. (2021). Spanish Writing Learners’ Stances as Peer Reviewers. Journal of Response to Writing.
- Illana-Mahiques, E. (2021). Re-Thinking Peer Reviewing in the Virtual Context: The Roles of Giving and Receiving Online Feedback in L2 Spanish Classrooms. Languages, 6(3), 151.
- Severino, C. & Illana-Mahiques, E. (2019). Second Language Acquisition Theories and Writing Center Research. In J. Mackiewicz & R. Babcock (Eds.), Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies. A practical guide (pp. 94-105). Routledge, NY
- Illana-Mahiques, E. (2018). Peer reviewing in L2 Spanish classrooms: Action research. Proceedings of the 2018 Second Language Acquisition Graduate Symposium. The University of Minnesota, MN
