Rosalva Alamillo Olivas, PhD.
Dr. Rosalva Alamillo is a Spanish Lecturer at Sam Houston State University. She received her Ph.D. in Spanish (Linguistics) from the University of Houston and her master’s degree in Spanish (Linguistics) form New Mexico State University. She has taught Spanish as a Heritage Language and Spanish as a Second Language. She is captivated by linguistic phenomena as linguistic convergence and linguistic transfer in bilingual speakers and its correlation with extra-linguistic variables, especially age of acquisition and language use. Her research is motivated by the pedagogical needs of the population that strives to serve. Dr. Alamillo is currently researching lexical prototypes in different cultural settings, graphic and semantics differentiation of lexical words in the acquisition of writing skills, the syntactic and semantic variation of the definite determiner in the Spanish of heritage speakers, and she is working in the creation of a Linguistic Corpus from archival anarchist newspapers. One of the most enlightening experience she has had in her academic career is to work with heritage speakers of Spanish, from which she had learned so much. She was born and raised in Chihuahua, Mexico. In her spare time she enjoys gardening, reading, traveling, and spending time with her cats. Dr. Alamillo teaches face-to-face and online courses on Spanish language at the 1000 and 2000 levels.
Current research interests
- Heritage Language Education
- Second Language Acquisition
- Applied linguistics
- U.S. Spanish
- Linguistic convergence
- Heritage Language maintenance
- Hispanic Culture and its history
Selected Peer-Reviewed Publications/ Conferences
“Uso, omisión e interpretación del artículo definido en hispanohablantes de herencia,” Estudios de lingüística aplicada, 67 (forthcoming)
“Creating a Linguistic Corpus from U.S. Hispanic Anarchist Newspapers,” Co-author: Diana Reyes, American Periodicals. A Journal of History and Criticism (forthcoming)
“Using Technology for Communicative Purposes: Implementing Google+ Hangouts in the Language Classroom to Expand Oral Communication Skills.” 3rd Annual Innovative Teaching and Learning Symposium - Houston, TX, April 21, 2017
“Propiedades sintáctico-semánticas de plurales escuetos y definidos en el español de hispanohablantes de herencia.” 26th Conference on Spanish in the U.S. and 11th in Spanish in Contact with Other Languages - Provo, Utah, April 6-8, 2017
“Destrezas léxicas en la escritura formal e informal de estudiantes de español como lengua extranjera y como lengua de herencia: un estudio comparativo.” VI Jornadas de Español Lengua Extranjera - Montreal, Canada, March 31-April 1, 2017
“Diferenciación gráfica y semántica de homófonos en la enseñanza de español como lengua de herencia.” Southwest Council of Latin American Studies 2017 Conference - Campeche, Mexico, March 9-11, 2017
“Argumentos propagandísticos y conservacionistas a favor del mantenimiento del español en los Estados Unidos en periódicos de finales del siglo XIX y la primera mitad del siglo XX.” Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Conference - Syracuse, NY, October 9-11, 2014
“What is a heritage language?” 50 Anniversary of the Department of Philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua - Chihuahua, Mexico, May 5, 2013
List of courses regularly taught at SHSU
- Spanish 1411: Elementary Spanish 1
- Spanish 1412: Elementary Spanish 2
- Spanish 2311: Intermediate Spanish 1
- Spanish 2312: Intermediate Spanish 2