Welcome To Virginia LoCastro's Homepage!
 |
| Experience is not what happens to you. It's what you do with what happens to you. --Aldous Huxley |
Here at the UF, I wear several hats. I am an associate professor in the Linguistics Program where I teach courses related to my areas of expertise in linguistics: TSL teaching methods, discourse analysis/pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and the analysis of everyday talk. I am in addition the director of both the Academic Spoken English (ASE), and Academic Written English (AWE) Programs.
My position at UF enables me to bring together my experiences as a teacher, researcher, and administrator in the U.S., Quebec, Japan, Czechoslovakia, and Mexico. My professional engagements and interests have taken me as well to the United Kingdom, China, Pakistan, the Philippines, Europe, and Colombia, to study, work, and present at conferences.
Those two hats as an associate professor and director dovetail with another hat and a major source of professional motivation, that is, as a researcher, which engages me in pursuing questions in my areas of interest: pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and second language acquisition. I have concluded a project on academic writing skills of Mexican learners of English I carried out in Mexico and in 2005 began a project on International Teaching Assistants in the context of the Academic Spoken English Program.. This project involves me in working with colleagues and students on intercultural pragmatics issues, effective teaching strategies, and respect for diversity.
As for my personal interests, I enjoy reading good literature and such magazines as The New Yorker, cooking, walking, doing yoga and t'ai chi, listening to a wide variety of forms of music, and participating in events related to art. Without music and art, I feel something very important is missing from my life.
