H. D. Adamson

Doug Adamson has taught English as a second language in Ethiopia, Spain, and the United States. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Georgetown University in 1980. After teaching at Geroge Mason University and serving as a Mellon Fellow in the Linguistics Department at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the English Department at the University of Arizona in 1989. At Arizona he has served as Director of the MA/ESL program, Director of Graduate Studies in English, and Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. His research interests include the study of variation in interlanguage (the speech of second language learners) and classroom research, especially as pertaining to content-based instruction. In the former field he as written two books: VARIATION THEORY AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION (Georgetown University Press, 1988), and INTERLANGUAGE VARIATION IN THEORETICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL PERSPECTIVE (Routledge, 2008). He has also written two pedagogically oriented books that include classroom research: ACADEMIC COMPETENCE: THEORY AND CLASSROOM PRACTICE (Longman, 1993) and LANGUAGE MINORITY STUDENTS IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS: AN EDUCATION IN ENGLISH (Erlbaum, 2005). He is presently writing a textbook on Stylistics and investigating the acquisition of features of Utah English (such as the fronting of /ow/) in the speech of Spanish-speaking immigrants to Salt Lake City. Dr. Adamson welcomes inquiries regarding his research or the applied linguistics programs at the University of Arizona.