Profile

Originally from Argentina, Violeta (as everybody calls Laura Colombo) joined the UMBC community in 2003. She obtained her Master’s in Intercultural Communication (INCC) in 2005, where she learned about the LLC Ph.D. program.

Before coming to the U.S., Violeta earned her degree as an Elementary School teacher and completed her B.A. in Educational Sciences in Argentina. She taught English as a Foreign Language and Literature courses at elementary, middle, and high-school levels. She also coordinated creative writing workshops and participated in an independent literary magazine, Andrógina in Argentina.

While pursuing her Master’s degree in INCC at UMBC, she focused her research on the differences in academic writing across cultures and compared academic writing in the U.S. and Argentina in her final scholarly paper. The INCC program offered Violeta the opportunity to broaden her academic knowledge, participate and present at conferences, and also to improve her professional skills as an educator. Working as a Spanish Teaching Assistant and Instructor at UMBC allowed her to discover explicit connections between second language learning theories and their application to the foreign language classroom. She collaborated in the design of writing activities used in Elementary and Intermediate Spanish courses at UMBC, and she managed the educational online platform used in those courses.

In the LLC program, Violeta plans to further investigate writing, this time with a focus on the development of writing proficiency in Spanish as a second language. She would also like to explore the use of technology to tailor learning experiences in online settings in Advanced Spanish Content Courses.

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