A spring break trip to Mazatlán, Mexico, during Joe’s sophomore year of college awakened his interest in Hispanic cultures and the Spanish language. His week living with a Mexican family affected him so profoundly that, upon returning to the University of Northern Iowa, he changed his major from accounting to Spanish. Recognizing that Arizona had a larger Spanish-speaking population, Joe transferred to Arizona State University in Tempe, where he continued his undergraduate studies and lived with fellow students from Puerto Rico.

After graduating, he earned a Master of Arts in Spanish at ASU, where he studied with and was mentored by Barbara Lafford. Their mentor-mentee relationship developed into a lifelong friendship and professional collaboration. Joe and Bobbie co-authored articles on (lexical and grammatical) access errors in learner speech during his graduate studies and early career and

collaborated on numerous other research projects over the years.

In 1988, Joe moved to Austin, Texas, to pursue a doctorate in Spanish Linguistics, specializing in applied linguistics and second language acquisition, at the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated in 1993.

Joe spent much of his career teaching Spanish linguistics at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, while also serving the university in several administrative roles, including two terms as department chair and a term as associate dean of the college. In 2004, he and his NAU colleagues established the Master of Arts in Teaching Spanish program, which has prepared numerous graduates to teach Spanish in K–12 schools throughout Arizona. As a result, many of the state’s Spanish teachers studied with Joe at some point in their academic careers. In the latter part of his career, he returned to his love of Brazilian Portuguese, having lived in Fortaleza for six months in 1991, and established an accelerated Brazilian Portuguese

program for Spanish speakers at NAU.

In terms of his research, Joe truly embodied the spirit of being an applied linguist: his research directly impacted his teaching, and his teaching led to new research questions. He presented at numerous national and international conferences, published widely, and continually sought new insights into how students learn another language. Much of his research examined how students acquire complex structures and speech acts using processing instruction, task-based language teaching, tutorial CALL, and virtual worlds.

To support much of this work, Joe learned numerous programming languages, enabling him to design and code computer applications and virtual worlds tailored to each research project. More recently, he published articles on computer programming for applied linguistics and volunteered his time teaching other researchers to use the languages and applications he had studied. He particularly emphasized Python for natural language processing, most notably in his

collaboration, beginning in 2022, with Brazilian researchers working in English corpus linguistics. Joe also found great fulfillment in serving on the dissertation committees of several students at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo.

His final projects explored the use of artificial intelligence in language learning, an area he had hoped to study further. One recent project focused on Extractive Question Answering Transformers, which can emulate conversations with virtual characters and enhance the authenticity of second-language acquisition tasks in 3D worlds. Without a doubt, his contributions will be felt for years to come.

Joe is survived by his wife of 33 years, Karina Collentine (PhD, University of Texas at Austin; Professor Emerita, Northern Arizona University), and his daughters, Adriana and Alisa, both of whom have undergraduate degrees from NAU. All three currently live in the Phoenix area.

-Karina Collentine

It is with great sadness that we announce the death, on April 14, of Dr. Joe Collentine, Professor of Spanish Linguistics at Northern Arizona University (NAU), where for more than 30 years he taught and conducted research in Spanish Linguistics and second language acquisition.

Joe was born on 23rd November 1961 in Iowa. In 1993, he earned his Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin, after which he taught Spanish Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Portuguese at East Carolina University and Northern Arizona University. His early research in Hispanic linguistics focused particularly on how learners of Spanish develop complex syntax and acquire the subjunctive mood (see his widely cited overviews in Hispania, 2010; The handbook of Spanish second language acquisition, 2013).

Building on this foundational work in second language acquisition, Joe became a prominent scholar of study abroad and the role of context in second language development. His influential work in this area included contributions to the 2004 special issue of Second Language Acquisition on learning contest, and, with Taguchi, a 2018 review Language Teaching.

Joe also had a special interest in technology and how it could be used to approach the study of linguistics, teaching, and human interaction. Describing his own intellectual and professional trajectory, he once wrote, “My whole life has revolved around language and culture.” For Joe, this lifelong fascination with language was closely intertwined with another passion: computer programming. He was already thinking computationally about language long before natural language processing became mainstream in applied linguistics. His computational interests also extended to corpus linguistics and what he sometimes described as “linguistic data mining,” leading to corpus-based investigations of learner Spanish as well as the development of tools for analyzing Spanish and Portuguese corpora. He not only developed applications for language analysis and learning but also investigated how computer-assisted language learning (CALL) tools and environments, including corpora, tutorials, virtual environments, and, more recently, artificial intelligence, could inform language learning and teaching.

An indefatigable worker, Joe remained actively engaged in research and professional activities throughout his career. He served as an Associate Editor for Hispania and an editorial board member for journals such as The Modern Language Journal, Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada and Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education. At Northern Arizona University, he also served as Chair of the Department of Modern Languages, Coordinator of the Master program in Teaching Spanish, and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Letters. 

Mentorship and teacher education were equally central to Joe’s academic life. Through the Master’s program in Teaching Spanish at NAU, which he coordinated for many years, he contributed to the preparation of more than 100 Spanish teachers. He was an exceptional generous mentor, sharing his expertise freely and encouraging students and junior colleagues in their teaching, research, and professional development.

Joe will be deeply missed by his colleagues and collaborators, and by generations of students whose lives and careers he touched. Those who worked with him will remember not only an accomplished scholar but also a generous mentor, loyal colleague, and warm and witty friend. His scholarly legacy lies in the bridges he built- between theory and practice, linguistics and technology, research and teaching, and computation and human interaction.

-Yuly Asención Delaney