Prof. Dr. An Vande Casteele

An Vande Casteele professor in Spanish linguistics at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. She defended her PhD in 2008 on “Las construcciones apositivas en el discurso periodístico informativo” at the University of Ghent and started as a professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2009. Her research interests are in the field of interlanguage pragmatics and Spanish discourse analysis, more precisely on the use of discourse markers and politeness strategies in Spanish, anaphora resolution in L2 Spanish and pragmatic peculiarities in the use of Spanglish. 

PhD-students who defended under her supervision

• Collewaert Kim: “Los mecanismos referenciales en el discurso oral del español como lengua extranjera (ELE): un estudio de corpus basado en neerlandófonos aprendices de ELE” (joint-PhD with Universidad de Granada, co-supervisor: C. Lozano) (defended in 2020).
• José García Perez “Macrosintaxis del adjetivo calificativo. Uso persuasivo-valorativo en redes sociales” (joint-PhD with Universidad de Sevilla, main supervisor: C. Fuentes Rodríguez) (defended in 2023)
• Valentina Di Nunno “Pragmatic competence in Spanish second language acquisition. Analysis of interaction in different language learners and teaching incidence.” (joint-PhD with Universidad de Sevilla, co-supervisor: C. Fuentes Rodríguez) (defended in 2024)

Ongoing PhD’s

• Hua Gu: “An Empirical Study on Chinese ESL Speakers' Discourse Competence - A Cross-Cultural Perspective” (co-supervisor: J. Xu) - Yishan Gao “Analysis of nouns in L1 and L2 writing”
• Jovana Stanojevic “Pragmatic competence in second language learners: the analysis of the speech act of refusal in L2 Spanish” - Mariela Clara Andrade Maureira “Marcas identitarias en redes sociales: el Spanglish en el discurso de youtubers hispanounidenses” (joint-PhD with Universidad de Sevilla, Main supervisor: C. Fuentes Rodríguez)
• Krenare Cerkini “Analysis of the cross-cultural pragma-linguistic characteristics of youth representatives meetings. A case study on politeness and turn allocation mechanisms in European Student Union and Union of Students of Kosovo” 
• Nisreen Karhili “The Teachability of Speech Acts EFL Arab Learners: A Pragmatic Perspective”
• Anastasija Jagafarova “Metaphors learners live by: metaphoric anaphora resolution in L2 Spanish”
• Gemma Rovira Gili “La introducción del modo subjuntivo en ELE a partir de A1 con un enfoque pragmático” (joint-PhD with University of Ljubljana, Co-supervisor: G. Santiago Alonso)
• Brenthe Tilburghs “Bueno, pues... Learning pragmatic competence from a multilingual perspective: the use of turn-initial pragmatic markers in L2 Spanish.”
• Jesika Kustec “Uso y funciones del lenguaje formulaico en corpus de español oral y digital: un análisis comparativo entre hablantes nativos y hablantes de ELE” (joint-PhD with University of Ljubljana, Main supervisor: B. Pihler Ciglič)
• Samantha Pérez Rodríguez “Tracing Sibilance: A Sociolinguistic Exploration of Spanish Heritage Language Varieties in Brussels” (Main supervisor: R. Vosters).