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Paul Toth Recognized in National Award
UW-Madison assistant professor of Spanish Education Paul D. Toth is the first person since the award’s inception in 1997 to receive the ACTFL/MLJ Paul Pimsleur Award for Research in Foreign Language Education twice for a single-authored paper. The prestigious national award of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and the Modern Language Journal (MLJ) recognizes one article each year that makes an outstanding contribution to research in foreign language education or second language acquisition. The most important criterion for the selection of the annual award is the quality of the research and its impact on foreign language learning and teaching.
Toth’s most recent award-winning article, “Processing Instruction and a role for output in second language acquisition,” appeared in 2006 in the journal Language Learning. In the article, Toth investigates how meaningful speaking activities help foreign language learners to develop grammatical proficiency in the target language. “In this study,” states Toth, “I sought to identify some of the ways that teachers may enhance learning outcomes through careful use of the target language and active support for learners during both receptive and productive communication. I hoped to share insights about the ways that specific pedagogical tools may be used to benefit learners.” Toth’s previous work that was recognized for this same award was entitled “The interaction of instruction and learner-internal factors in the acquisition of L2 morphosyntax,” published in the journal Studies in Second Language Acquisition in 2000.
Toth (PhD Spanish Applied Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh) holds appointments in the Department of Curriculum Instruction and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He is also affiliated with the Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition and the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is a national leader in foreign language education and research. Two other current UW-Madison language faculty members have also recently been recognized by ACTFL: professor Sally Sieloff Magnan (French and Italian), awarded the Florence Steiner Award for Leadership in Foreign Language Education, Postsecondary in 2005, and associate professor Junko Mori (East Asian Languages and Literature), recipient of the ACTFL-MLJ Paul Pimsleur Award for Research in Foreign Language Education in 2003.
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