Marcela Ruiz-Funes received her PhD and MA degrees in Second Language Education from Virginia Tech, US, and her dual BA degrees in English and Translation from the Facultad de Lenguas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. She is currently Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Coordinator of the Second Language Education Program at East Carolina University, US. Her research examines second/foreign language writing, including the cognition of reading to write, task representation, task complexity, and syntactic complexity measures, as well as second language and literacy development of children in two-way immersion programs. Ruiz-Funes is the author of On Teaching Foreign Languages: Linking Theory to Practice (2002); she has published in Foreign Language Annals and Hispania, among other journals, and has received grants for her research in foreign language pedagogy and two-way immersion. She has presented her work at conferences such as ACTFL, TESOL, AAAL, and the Symposium on Second Language Writing.