Spanish Program

Roberto holds a Master’s in Linguistics from the University of Concepcion and a Ph.D. in Psychology from York University, UK. He is currently the Head of the Department and Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages ​​(soon to be renamed Department of Language and Literature Sciences) of the Faculty of Education at the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción (UCSC) where he teaches undergraduate and postgraduate subjects in the areas of neurolinguistics, cognitive neuroscience and methods of research and statistics.

Roberto is a Principal Investigator of a Fondecyt Initiation Project (11130678) that aims to investigate word processing and word learning in bilingual speakers using behavioral methods, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). Within the framework of this project, Roberto implemented a psycholinguistics laboratory where he works mainly with undergraduate and graduate students, as well as research assistants. On the other hand, Roberto has been invited as a visiting researcher three times, twice at the University College London (UCL) and another at the Donders Institute of Brain, Cognition and Behavior in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. At UCL Roberto carried out an fMRI study that investigated the neural correlates of the new words in Spanish L1 and English L2 in collaboration with Professor Gabriella Vigliocco and Dr. David Vinson of the Psychology Department of the UCL. In his last postdoctoral stay, he conducted an EEG study on learning the semantic characteristics of words in a second language. He worked in collaboration with Prof. Ton Dijkstra, who is a prominent figure in the study of bilingualism. Finally, Roberto is the author of prominent publications in high impact journals (Q1) such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and Brain & Language.

Professor of Spanish and Masters in Linguistics from the Universidad de Concepción, Carlos has extensive experience in teaching Spanish as a native language in different universities in the Bio Bio Region. He has participated in various research projects and publications related to teaching Spanish as a foreign language. He is a professor and academic coordinator of the Spanish for Foreigners Program at the UCSC, where he specializes in the area of effective communication in ELE and teaches the Oral Interaction and Expression classes for both initial and advanced levels.

Anna is a Professor of Spanish, English and Russian as foreign languages. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Philology at Ivanovo State University in Russia. Afterwards she decided to further deepen her knowledge about teaching foreign languages in Ireland. She passed the Spanish as a Foreign Language (DELE) exam reaching a C2 (Masters) level. Anna is currently studying a Masters in eLearning at the Universidad de Sevilla. Currently, the main focus of Anna´s course is effective writing in Spanish. Along with the grammatical and syntactical rules of the language, she teaches the students to learn to write various types of texts in order to communicate effectively in the written form in Spanish.

Juan has a PhD in Latin American literature, his academic work is related to teaching and research on issues related to literary studies and communication. In regards to his teaching of Spanish to foreigners, he was a professor of the class “Introduction to the Reading of Classic Works of Latin American Poetry” for St. Cloud State University, Minnesota (USA) – Study Center in Chile, Universidad de Concepción, 2003 and 2004. Juan has been teaching the class “Introduction to Latin American Cultures” in our Spanish Program since 2010.