Andrea Révész
Andrea Révész is Professor of Second Language Acquisition at the UCL Institute of Education, and one of the most active empirical researchers inside the Cognition Hypothesis programme. Her work sits at the interface of SLA, instruction, and assessment, and asks a question that task-based literature keeps coming back to: what happens, cognitively and linguistically, when you actually change what a task demands?
The contribution is methodological as much as theoretical. Révész pushes task-complexity research past self-report and offline measures into eye-tracking, keystroke logging, and stimulated recall, so claims about "cognitive demand" become testable rather than stipulated. Her 2011 Modern Language Journal paper on task complexity and form-meaning connections won the TBLT Best Research Article Award and remains a standard citation. She has edited and co-authored foundational chapters in the current Cambridge Handbook of Task-Based Language Teaching.
Career
- Professor of SLA, Department of Culture, Communication and Media, UCL Institute of Education
- Active in the International Consortium on Task-Based Language Teaching
- TBLT Best Research Article Award; multiple UCL teaching awards
Published Work
- "Task Complexity, Focus on L2 Constructions, and Individual Differences," Modern Language Journal (2011)
- Research on eye-tracking, writing processes, and L2 task performance across Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, SSLA, and Language Teaching
- Chapters in handbooks on TBLT, task complexity, and SLA instruction
Influence
- Moved the empirical centre of task-complexity research toward online, process-level measures
- A central figure in the current generation of TBLT researchers working in Europe
- Trains and collaborates with doctoral students who now staff TBLT and assessment programmes across several continents