Bill VanPatten is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Chanpaign, where he is Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and the Advisor for the undergraduate program in Spanish teacher education. He received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983. His areas of research are input and output processing in second language acquisition, the impact of instruction on second language acquisistion, and the acquisition of Spanish syntax and morphology. He teaches a wide range of courses from beginning Spanish to doctoral seminars on language acquisition. He has published numerous… articles and chapters in books and is the co-author of several McGraw-Hill Spanish textbooks. He is also the designer of Destinos, a television course for PBS.