Will Travers Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies

As a former monolingual, I learned my first foreign language (French) the hard way: through countless hours from the ages of 12-22, struggling to understand other people and to be understood in return. I honestly never considered myself all that good at language learning. But halfway through my junior year abroad, something clicked. All that time I had put in finally paid off, and by winter break I had a reached a conversational level in Spanish, which I’d only started learning less than a year earlier, during my second semester at Sciences Po in Paris. So what happened? How was I able to learn a third language (L3) in a mere fraction of the time it took me to learn French? This question led me to pursue a PhD in Spanish Linguistics at Georgetown University, where I recently completed my dissertation on instructed L3 acquisition and its facilitating factors, with a special focus on metalinguistic awareness.

Prior to joining the faculty at Davidson, I spent three years teaching, Spanish and Linguistics at Emory University in Atlanta. Before that I was a Fulbright scholar at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, in Germany, where I researched the teaching of German as a second foreign language. At Georgetown, I was committed to promoting the many L3 classes there, such as French for Spanish Speakers, which I created in 2016 and taught for two years. I have published academic articles in the journal Hispania, as well as a recent chapter in an edited volume by the UK-based Multilingual Matters.

In pre-pandemic times, I also enjoyed traveling to various national and international conferences, including the Second Language Research Forum (Montréal, 2018), the International Symposium on Bilingualism (Limerick, 2017), and the ACTFL Annual Convention and World Languages Expo (Boston, 2016; San Diego, 2015). And of course, I still love learning languages. In addition to those already mentioned, I have also spent time learning Portuguese, Italian, Hindi, Urdu, and most recently (and least proficiently) Danish.