Dr Renia Lopez, our Associate Professor, has been awarded a one-month study-stay at the University of Alcalá, Spain, under their prestigious programme Giner de los Ríos, established in 2015. Under this programme, renowned scholars are invited to work with Alcalá’s researchers to explore new topics and develop international co-operations.
This residency will also serve to strengthen existing cooperation. Dr Lopez has been working on with scholars and students at the Department of Philology, Communication and Documentation of the University of Alcalá for a few years now. With their help, she has led a project studying the benefits of online learning of Spanish as a foreign language when the input is presented in different modalities (video, audio or text). A second project, still ongoing, evaluates the benefits of online teaching when the teacher's grammatical explanations are presented with or without gestures. Among the new co-operations Dr Lopez will explore is a study on the affective elements of the foreign language teaching and learning process.
Dr Lopez will also be giving talks to students and staff at Alcalá as well as exploring the opportunities for further collaborations and possible exchanges between the University of Alcalá and PolyU.
The first University of Alcalá was founded in 1499, becoming one of Spain’s most prestigious universities during the 16th and 17th centuries. It was moved to Madrid, and renamed Madrid Complutense University, reopening a campus in Alcalá in 1975 that eventually became an independent public university. Today, Alcalá has about 28,000 students a year and just over 2,000 teachers on two campuses. Among their degrees, they offer English studies and Modern Languages and Translation.
