Editor’s Message: Introducing Hispania’s New Feature

We are pleased to announce that, beginning with the December issue of Hispania, we will publish a regularly spotlighted article called the State-of-the-State Feature. These articles will provide an overview of an area of interest from the broad array of topics on which we publish, including language, linguistics, literature, literary criticism, film, culture, cultural studies, applied linguistics, and pedagogy having to do with Spanish and Portuguese. Featured articles will emphasize key topics, accentuate current events and trends, and, surely, incite further scholarship.

Our first State-of-the-State Feature is an article by Carrie L. Bonilla (see her bio below) titled “Tense or Aspect?: A Review of Initial Past Tense Marking and Task Conditions for Beginning Classroom Learners of Spanish.” Her article will be relevant for classroom practitioners who teach the past tense and researchers in linguistics alike. As linguist Steven Pinker points out, tense and aspect are often confused in traditional grammars and in language lessons (see The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature [New York: Penguin, 2007], page 192). Bonilla’s article allows you to sort out these concepts and provides up-to-the-minute research on this vital topic. I thank Dr. Bonilla for sharing her work with our readership, and I invite you to learn more about language, time, and space.