Nafal Ossandón Hostens

Hi! I'm a third-year PhD candidate at the department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, currently working under the supervision of professor Nick Henry on the role of attention and awareness in the acquisition of syntax by beginner learners of Germanic languages.

I have an MA in Computational Psycholinguistics from the University of Antwerp, where I worked under the supervision of professor Sarah Bernolet and professor Orphée De Clercq from Ghent University on the automatic assessment of the syntactic complexity of texts written by learners of Dutch as a second language. Before that, I studied German, English and Spanish Linguistics and Literature at Ghent University.

My favorite acronyms are SLA – Second Language Acquisition, and NLP – Natural Language Processing. I'm interested in the psycholinguistics of SLA, especially Input Processing and the mechanisms driving comprehension and sentence processing, both in the case of proficient, balanced bilinguals and beginner learners. I am also very interested in Computer-Assisted Language Learning, more specifically AI for accessible language education and proficiency assessment.

I currently work as an Assistant Instructor of German, teaching beginner German to lower-division students. I center my classes around communication while being self-compassionate throughout the learning process, and I integrate authentic materials and pop culture as much as possible in my classes.

In addition to my teaching duties, in spring 2023 I started working as a Research Assistant in the UT Neurolinguistics Lab under the supervision of professor Fernando Llanos.

I have more hobbies than time allows, but among them I count running, language learning, (trying to) longboard, reading, watercolor painting and improving my coding skills. I also spend a significant amount of time with my cat Luke and my ferret Chewie.

Presentations

• Jones, E. & Ossandón Hostens, N. (2024, March 7). What Does the Student Say? Incorporating Student Input into Participation Assessment [Conference presentation]. 55th NeMLA Annual Convention. Boston, MA.
• Ossandón Hostens, N. & Jones, E. (2023). Accusative Case Comprehension Among Early L2 German Learners [Conference presentation]. Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC 2023), University of Calgary, Banff, AB, Canada.
• Ossandón Hostens, N. & Vanroy, B. (2022). A Transformer-Based Approach to Predicting German as a Foreign Language Proficiency [Research Group Talk]. Second Language Studies Series, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA (hybrid) [recording]
• Ossandón Hostens, N. (2022, May 14-15). Dutch on the Soccer Field – Language Policy and Practice in a West Flemish Professional Soccer Team [Conference presentation]. Congress 2022, Canadian Association for the Advancement of Netherlandic Studies (CAANS 22), Virtual.
• Ossandón Hostens, N., Bernolet, S. & De Clercq, O. (2021, July 9). Assessing Dutch as a Second Language Learners’ Writing Through Syntactic Complexity [Poster presentation]. 31st Meeting of Computational Linguistics in The Netherlands (CLIN 31), Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. [poster]