View Content #23891

CASLS would like to welcome four new student employees!

Valeria Ochoa (pictured below) has a bachelor’s degree in Romance languages, with a primary focus on French and a secondary emphasis on Spanish, from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. She earned her master’s degree in Language Teaching Studies here at the University of Oregon. Given her background as a Spanish Heritage Learner (SHL), for her capstone MA project, she created a teaching portfolio designed to integrate service-learning into SHL courses for American universities. Valeria’s main research interests are Hispanic linguistics, bilingual education, heritage language learning, and sociolinguistics. Valeria says, “Language has sparked my curiosity since I was a little girl and it continues to amaze me to this day.”

Zach Patrick-Riley (pictured on the right) is a current graduate student in the Language Teaching Studies master’s program. Zach has a CELTA certificate from Cambridge and previously received a BA in Psychology from Lawrence University. He has been teaching English since 2009 and most recently trained and taught for two years in Brazil. He is primarily interested in using strategy instruction to empower student’s autonomy as well as developing curriculum designed to enhance students’ pragmatic and intercultural competence. Zach says that he is passionate about language because, “it is what connects us on an emotional, cognitive, interpersonal, and global level.”

Misaki Kato (middle) is a PhD candidate in the University of Oregon Linguistics department. She received a BA in International Studies from Meiji University and a Masters in Language Teaching from the University of Oregon. Her primary research focuses are speech production and perception and second language acquisition. Misaki is interested in language because, “It’s so fundamental to our everyday life but we take it for granted.”

Isabelle Sackville-West (left) is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Oregon majoring in Linguistics and Chinese. She is interested in second language acquisition and pedagogy. Isabelle began her journey at CASLS this summer as an intern, and is now continuing with us through the fall. She says, “Language is what I study, it’s my work, and it’s my hobby. Language is the foundation of society, without which today’s world would be unfathomably different. To me, that is remarkable.”

Welcome everyone!