DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

Dr. María Jesús Barros García is an Associate Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University (NU) and the Director of the Spanish Language Program. She holds an M.A. in Teaching Spanish as a Second Language and a doctoral degree with Honors in Spanish Linguistics from the University of Granada. Between 2011-2012, she conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her primary areas of interest are intercultural pragmatics, politeness theory, and second language acquisition. Dr. Barros has more than thirty publications on these topics and has presented at both national and international conferences.

 Her undergraduate teaching experience includes courses on linguistics, literature, culture, border studies, language pedagogy, film, Spanish as a heritage language, Spanish for specific purposes, community-based learning, and all levels of Spanish as a second/foreign language. At the graduate level, she teaches courses on curriculum development and assessment, methods for teaching Spanish as a second language, intercultural communication, the development of pragmatic competence, and integrating culture into the Spanish second language classroom.

Dr. Barros serves in several committees across Northwestern University, has been the course coordinator for Spanish 121, and the co-organizer of Tacita de Café, an extracurricular activity that brings together Spanish heritage speakers from Northwestern University, to celebrate, appreciate, and speak their heritage culture and language.

 In addition to her work at NU, Dr. Barros is the Communications/PD Coordinator of the Downstate Illinois chapter of The American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, a Collaborator Member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, a certified tester of the DELE Spanish Diploma (Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera) A1-C2 levels granted by the Ministry of Education from Spain, and a member of the Modern Language Association, The American Council of the Teaching of Foreign Languages, the Applied Linguistics Research Group HUM-277, the Spanish Linguistics Society, and the Association for the Teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language.