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Email:	mlparra@bu.edu
Office:	504C
Phone:	353-6203
Fax:	353-6246
Office Hours:	Fall 2009 T 2-3, W by appointment, R 2-4

María Luisa Parra

Lecturer in Spanish

Education

• BA, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
• MA, PhD El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Lingüísticos y Literarios

Background

María Luisa began teaching Spanish at Harvard in 1997 and has taught at BU since 2005 where she also coordinates the Fourth Semester LS212. She has designed and taught a broad range of Spanish language courses, from beginner to the advanced levels and from basic grammar to Latin American literature and history. In the spring of 2007, María Luisa will be offering the new course LS 305: An Introduction to Latino Cultures in the U.S.

Besides teaching Spanish she is also working on a variety of research projects. With a B.A. in Psychology from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and Masters and Ph.D. in Linguistics specializing in language development from El Colegio de México (2004), since the beginning of her career she has focused her studies and work on the cognitive, linguistic and social development of the child. In particular, she has been involved in different research, academic and community projects –at Harvard, Tufts and currently Boston University— related to Spanish teaching and the development of bilingualism among Latino children.

This professional experience, along with her personal experience as a Mexican mother of two bilingual and bicultural children, has resulted in both a comprehensive understanding of the challenging experience of immigration for children and parents, and a desire to support parenting practices, in particular in the areas of bilingual and bicultural development. This has lead María Luisa to put together a book project – Becoming Bilingual: Why Parents and Teachers Matter (under contract with the University of New Mexico Press) – that seeks to provide parents, teachers and other professionals with effective strategies to understand and promote sustainable bilingual development in the lives of children.