Innovation in Language Learning

Vita V. Kogan is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Barcelona, Spain, where she explores individual differences in relation to language aptitude. She has graduated from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, USA, with MA in teaching foreign language and from the University of Edinburgh, UK, with MSc in psycholinguistics. In Edinburgh, UK Vita was a part of the Bilingualism Matters Center, the organization that educates the general public on second language education across the lifespan. Before moving to Europe, Vita has taught Russian at the Defense Language Institute, USA, where she was awarded the Commandant’s Coin for Excellence and the Provost’s Teaching Excellence Award.

Vita combines the psycholinguistic study of individual differences with contrastive linguistic analysis to investigate individual biases for specific languages. Currently, her research concerns how individual’s phonological memory capacity varies across unfamiliar languages when L1 is controlled.

Areas of expertise: Second language aptitude, working memory and phonological short-term memory, language pedagogue, adult education, e-learning.