Natalia Petrova

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) Doctoral Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I have been studying since 2021. With over seven years of experience as a language educator, I specialize in teaching Russian across all proficiency levels, from absolute beginners to heritage speakers. My research in SLA takes a cultural anthropological approach, exploring how people make meaning of language learning in their local institutional conditions. I focus specifically on proficiency, seeking to characterize and compare the conceptualizations of proficiency expressed by students, instructors, and program directors to better understand how these conceptualizations inform L2 teaching and learning as well as curriculum design.