Dr.María José de la Fuente

Dr. María José de la Fuente is a Professor of Spanish and Applied Linguistics, and affiliated faculty of the GW Alliance for a Sustainable Future.

Her research is situated at the intersection of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Foreign Language Pedagogy, and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), with a focus on how language instruction can support advanced cognitive, intercultural, and sustainability-related learning outcomes. Her scholarship has made sustained contributions to Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA), particularly in the areas of learner attention, task-based instruction, and the principled use of the first language (L1) in the foreign language classroom. This work has appeared in leading refereed journals such as Studies in Second Language Acquisition, The Modern Language Journal, Language Teaching Research, and Computer Assisted Language Learning, as well as in major edited volumes and reference works.

Building on this theoretical foundation, her more recent work examines the pedagogical and curricular integration of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) into higher-education language pedagogy. She has edited Education for Sustainable Development in Foreign Language Learning (Routledge, 2022), a volume that foregrounds language classrooms as spaces for critical inquiry and global citizenship education. Her current publications extend this agenda through empirically informed and classroom-tested models for developing sustainability literacy in Spanish, including Desarrollo Sostenible en América Latina (Cognella, 2025) and a collaborative study in Language Learning in Higher Education (2025). In parallel, her contribution to Elsevier Encyclopedia of Linguistics synthesizes foundational SLA research on the role of attention in SLA for scholarly and pedagogical audiences.

She has authored three Spanish textbooks: Gente (LingroLearning), Puntos de encuentro: A Cross-Cultural Approach to Advanced Spanish (Cognella Publishers), and most recently Desarrollo Sostenible en América Latina: Developing Sustainability Literacy in Spanish (Cognella Publishers). Her teaching has been recognized with a GWU Bender Teaching Award, and she is a founding member of the GW Academy of Distinguished Teachers.