Miss Silvia Gonzalez-Barroso MA

Personal Statement

I studied a five-year university degree in English Philology with a minor in Italian at the University of Santiago de Compostela. As part of my degree, I spent a year at the University of Manchester, where I also had the opportunity to be a Spanish Teacher Assistant at Xaverian School. After my degree, I completed a research Master's degree in English Studies, with a speciality in English Linguistics. My dissertation was a corpus-based study that analysed the use of focusing adverbials in the written production of Spanish people learning English at an advanced level. In 2013, I studied a Master's Degree in Teaching in Secondary Schools, Baccalaureate, Vocational and Language Teaching, with a speciality in Languages and Literatures. My dissertation involved the development of an experiment based on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in the bilingual community of Galicia. Furthermore, I studied several courses on Dyslexia and ADHD and collaborated with Daruma for a few months, an organization for children with learning disabilities.

I started my career as a Spanish teacher at the University of Liverpool in 2014, teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language to undergraduate students and in Continuing Education. After teaching Spanish for four years at the University of Liverpool, I decided to study a Master's degree in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language at the International University Menéndez Pelayo in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes. My final dissertation involved research about teaching Spanish to native speakers of Chinese. After that, I had the opportunity to teach Spanish to International students at the University of Santiago de Compostela.

Recently, I finished a Master's degree in International Business at the University of Vigo. I am very interested in interculturality as, in today's world, it is not enough to be bilingual, you need also to be bicultural. My dissertation gave me the opportunity to investigate cross culture negotiations with Asian communities.