Contact
Biography
Dr. Gabriela C. Zapata was born in Rosario, Argentina. She received her MA in TESOL and PhD in Spanish (Linguistics track) from the Pennsylvania State University in the United States. While at Texas A&M University, Dr. Zapata served as an ADVANCE Administrative Fellow in the Office for Diversity. Throughout her career, she has also directed/coordinated six Spanish and Portuguese basic language programs in public and private universities in the United States and Canada.
Expertise Summary
Dr. Zapata's research foci are Learning by Design and second (L2) and heritage language (HL) pedagogy, multimodal social semiotics, computer supported collaborative learning, and teacher education. She is also involved in the development and implementation of inclusive open educational resources. She has published articles on bilingualism, L2 and HL pedagogy, Learning by Design, multimodal social semiotics, and teacher cognition and practice in journals such as Computer Assisted Language Learning; Foreign Language Annals; The International Journal of Bilingualism; The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning; Language, Culture, and Curriculum; Language Learning; and Language Awareness, among others, and in a variety of edited volumes. Dr. Zapata is the main author of the first Canadian edition of Puntos de partida, and of the OER L2 Spanish textbooks Trayectos (published digitally by COERLL) and Introducción a la escritura (Pressbooks). She is also the co-editor (with Dr. Manel Lacorte) of the volume Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Learning: Teaching Spanish to Heritage Speakers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Her co-authored (with Dr. Mary Kalantzis and Dr. Bill Cope) book Las alfabetizaciones múltiples: Teoría y práctica was published in December 2019 by Editorial Octaedro. Her single-authored book, Learning by Design and L2 Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice (Routledge), appeared in April 2022. Dr. Zapata received her certification as ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview Tester in Spanish in 2014. She has also served as an ACTFL mentor and the Vice-Chair, Chair, and Past-Chair of ACTFL's Spanish for Heritage Learners Special Interest Group. In 2019, she was awarded the SGA Open Education Champion Award by the Student Government Association at Texas A&M University. Dr. Zapata is also a CIMER Entering Mentoring Trained Facilitator.
Dr. Zapata offers supervision to master's and doctoral students in the following areas: Second and heritage/community language pedagogy and assessment; multiliteracies (Learning by Design) and second/heritage/community language teaching and learning; second language vocabulary acquisition; translanguaging; open educational resources (development and implementation); multimodal social semiotics; multimodality in second/heritage/community language education; computer supported collaborative learning.
Selected Publications