Faculty Spotlight: Katharine Burns
By Stacy Kish
Katharine Burns, assistant professor of second language acquisition and Hispanic studies, takes an interdisciplinary approach to applied sociolinguistics. Her research explores language ideologies, language policy & planning, heritage language learning and much more. She mentors graduate students and teaches several graduate and undergraduate courses in the Department of Modern Languages.
Tell me about your scholarly work.
I study applied linguistics. The applied part is where I take theoretical concepts from linguistics and work on real-world issues through language. I am focused on second language acquisition, as well as how language is used, learned and taught. There are three areas of my research: 1) how Spanish in the U.S. is spoken and taught; 2) bilingual and multilingual identities and 3) language policy and planning.