I am currently a Lecturer in Linguistics at California State University, Chico. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Language Teaching in the English Department and the Department of Languages and Cultures. In the past, I've taught courses in Language Change as well as Spanish language proficiency at the University of New Mexico. Sample teaching materials for a semester-long introductory Spanish for Second Language Speakers course can be found at the links below.

Apart from these courses, I have further experience as a teaching assistant for Linguistic Field Methods - a graduate-level course at the University of New Mexico aiming to familiarise students with current methods, resources, and ethical practices in linguistic fieldwork and language documentation. I also worked as an academic writing mentor at Ghent University.

My teaching philosophy, specifically regarding second-language teaching, is built around three main tenets: I believe that (language) teaching is most efficient when it is communicative, (mostly) inductive, and inclusive.

Usage-based theories in linguistics have, over the last decades, taught us that grammar is not stored in our memory as sets of fixed rules, but rather as emergent schemas over experienced tokens of language use. Therefore, I believe the most efficient way of helping my students advance in their Spanish proficiency is by exposing them to as many examples of naturalistic language use as possible. This means that one must present enough input in Spanish (audio excerpts, written materials), buto also that one must offer opportunities to use Spanish in communicative situations. My classes are typically built around naturalistic reading or listening samples (see e.g. vocabulary activity and grammar activity linked below), and advance from more passive, comprehension-based activities to more open-ended speaking or writing activities situated in simulated real-life language use contexts.

In a similar vein, rather than starting grammar topics with overviews of the paradigms or rules at hand, I prefer to present students with (adapted) naturalistic input in which the feature of interest is richly present. Through sets of guiding questions, students' attention is drawn to the relevant patterns, and students are invited to participate in collective discussions about what e.g. the different forms in a verbal paradigm have in common and how they differ. In this way, they form inductive hypotheses about the grammar of their target language before such grammatical features are systematized in a more formal way of presentation.

Lastly, I attempt to be as inclusive as possible both in the content I teach and in my pedagogy. On the former point, I believe it is important to expose students to a range of varieties of Spanish, both implicitly (by presenting texts and listening excerpts from different regions) and explicitly (by drawing their attention to how e.g. verbal conjugations and pronoun usage differ by region). This gives students the message that even though their own Spanish idiolect may be different from what any specific textbook says, this does not make it less valid - after all, native Spanish speakers from different regions use different variants of Spanish. In linguistics classes, I make a point of connecting course contents to issues of linguistic discrimination and how linguists can contribute to addressing them. Regarding pedagogy, I find it important to be aware that students in a classroom come from a variety of different backgrounds, which influences the ways they can engage with the class. I try to tailor the content of readings etc. that are used in class to the interests of my students. In content-oriented classes, I include less formal assignments in which I invite students to write in whichever variety they feel most comfortable. I make a point of periodically checking in with students who do not come to class or who otherwise seem to be struggling to discuss with them personally what I can do to help them succeed in my courses.