Dalila Ayoun
Professor of French Linguistics and Second language Acquisition and Teaching
Department of French & Italian
Faculty Director in Faculty Affairs
Office of the Provost
I teach French language as well as theoretical and applied linguistics courses. My research interests lie in the second language acquisition of morphosyntax (tense-aspect-mood/modality, grammatical gender), theoretical and applied French linguistics from a generative/minimalist perspective and cognitive linguistic perspective.
I hold a courtesy appointment in the Linguistics department and I am a graduate faculty in the interdisciplinary Second Language Acquisition and Teaching doctoral program.
I am Faculty Director in Faculty Affairs in the Office of the Provost where I am responsible for coordinating faculty recruitment efforts, supporting search committees, handling conflict of interest/commitment cases, and reviewing the career-track faculty promotion dossiers as well as applications for the Strategic Priorities Faculty Initiative.
Background: B.A. in English (Université Côte d’Azur); Certificate in Translation/ Interpretation (French, English, Spanish) and M.A. in International Studies (University of Nebraska at Kearney); Ph.D in French linguistics specializing in second language acquisition at the University of Florida. I was Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky and Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa before joining the University of Arizona.
I am the Co-Ordinating Editor for the Journal of French Languages Studies.
I spent my 2023-24 sabbatical year at the Université Côte d’Azur where I have been awarded one of two grants by the IDEX UCAJEDI Advanced Research Program 2023. I worked on a longitudinal study on the second language acquisition of English modality by French learners with Dr. Amanda Edmonds.
I had the pleasure to serve as Noam Chomsky’s interpreter for his talk entitled ‘The gallilean challenge : Architecture and Evolution of language’ at the BNF in November 2016. Watch here