Maria del Pilar
Garcia Mayo

I am a Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of the Basque Country, of which I have been the Head since February 2016. I hold a B.A. in Germanic Philology from the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela and an M.A. (TESOL and Linguistics) and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Iowa (thesis: On certain null operator constructions in English and Spanish). I have been invited to universities in Canada, China, Germany, Greece, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, the UK and the USA. My publications span the areas of second (L2)/third language (L3) acquisition of English morphosyntax and the study of conversational interaction in EFL. I am also interested in bilingual/multilingual education. I have supervised fifteen Ph.D. dissertations (all of them with the highest distinction and five awarded ‘Extraordinary Ph.D. Prize’) – eleven more are in progress- and numerous MA and undergraduate theses. I have also served in numerous national and international Ph.D., MA and promotion committees both in Spain and overseas (Australia, Canada, India, Israel, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the USA). I have been the Principal Investigator (PI) of several projects awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the current one on balancing interaction and L2 grammar learning by children in an EFL context (2021-2025). Since September 2018, I am co-editor of the journal Language Teaching Research (Sage- Q1). My teaching includes undergraduate courses on English syntax and an MA course on the acquisition of morphosyntax in the MA program in Language Acquisition in Multilingual Settings (LAMS) at the UPV/EHU. I have been awarded the UPV/EHU’s prize for excellence in teaching. Since 2007 I have been the director of the research group Language and Speech (www.laslab.org), noted by the Basque Government for excellence in research in the field (IT311-10, 2010-2015; IT904-16, 2016-2021; IT1426-22; 2022-2025). I belong to the Editorial Board of the volumes EUROSLA Yearbook and Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics and those of the journals Language Teaching for Young Learners and Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism (all of them published by John Benjamins), Instructed Second Language Acquisition (Equinox), European Journal of Applied Linguistics (EuJAL) – De Gruyter- and VIAL (Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics). I am also a reviewer for all the major journals in the SLA field. Since 2009 I have been the director of the MA program Language Acquisition in Multilingual Settings (http://www.ehu.eus/en/web/lams/aurkezpena) with access to doctoral studies (Ph.D.). The Ph.D. program has been awarded Distinction of Excellence by the Spanish Ministry of Education. I was also the International Relations representative of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics (AESLA) and a member of the AILA (International Association of Applied Linguistics) Executive Board – International Committee (EBIC) (2011-2017). I am also an assessor for ANEP (Spanish Evaluation and Foresight Agency) and ANECA (Spanish National Agency of Quality Evaluation and Accreditation). From June 2016 to July 2019 I was the coordinator of the Modern Languages section and the Language and Linguistics section in the Spanish State Research Agency and I have been a member of its steering committee since June 2021. I am also an Honorary Consultant for the Shanghai Center for Research in English Language Education (SCRELE).