Roger Gilabert

Roger Gilabert Guerrero is a professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Barcelona and one of the key empirical collaborators on Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis. His research programme takes the theoretical taxonomy — Task Complexity, Task Condition, Task Difficulty — and runs it through a sustained set of classroom and laboratory studies on Spanish-Catalan learners of English.

The 2007 International Review of Applied Linguistics paper co-authored with Robinson is the standard reference on how to operationalise task complexity and what predictions the Cognition Hypothesis actually makes about production, interaction, and individual differences. Subsequent work has manipulated reasoning demands, number of elements, and displaced time reference across task types and modes, and extended the approach to computer-assisted collaborative writing. He sits inside the Barcelona research network that runs across Muñoz's BAF-era programme and the wider Spanish applied-linguistics community.

Career

• Professor, University of Barcelona, Department of English and German
• Frequent collaborator with Peter Robinson, Andrea Révész, Roger Gilabert's Barcelona PhD students, and the broader TBLT network
• Active across European TBLT and SLA research communities

Published Work

• Robinson & Gilabert, "Task complexity, the Cognition Hypothesis and second language learning and performance," IRAL (2007)
• Chapters in Robinson (ed.), Second Language Task Complexity (Benjamins)
• Papers on manipulating task demands across task types and modes
• Recent work on task complexity in CALL and collaborative writing

Influence

• Provided much of the empirical foundation for the Cognition Hypothesis
• A frequent co-author and methodological collaborator across the TBLT research programme
• Bridges the Anglophone and Spanish-language TBLT research communities