Ana Thomé Williams

Ana C Thomé Williams teaches Portuguese 111-112, Portuguese 201, Portuguese 202, and Portuguese 397 – “Topics in Luso-Brazilian Culture”.

Ana Williams’s areas of research and interest are:

• Portuguese language teaching and learning in the USA
• foreign and second language acquisition (Portuguese and French)
• applied technology in the classroom, and
• intercultural communication.

Ana Williams holds both her MA and her PhD in Linguistics from the University of São Paulo. In her MA research, she did a study in Applied Linguistics where she observed the relationship between age and the onset of learning a foreign language at school. Her findings were published in journals in Brazil and Italy. In her PhD research, she was concerned with cultural matters and their application to language teaching and learning. In this study she did a cross-linguistic and cultural comparison between French and Brazilian soccer announcers’ discourse. She has published her research findings in the Journal of Intercultural Communication Studies. Ana has also taught French for several years in Brazil. She has given several lectures on teaching and learning languages in international conferences and special events in Linguistics in Brazil, Italy, the United States, France, Japan, Germany and Canada.

Currently, she is involved in two research groups: The Teletandem Brazil project: www.teletandembrasil.org. (her focus: computer mediated communication between American and Brazilian College students) and a project on grammar titled Grammar: History, description and discourse, with colleagues from the University of São Paulo (her focus: grammar books for foreign language learners).

She is also preparing a course book of Portuguese for Intermediate Students.