About Elizabeth

I love language, because it shapes our perception of the world. Language is identity.

Having previously worked as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, I am currently pursuing a PhD in linguistics at Texas Tech University. My scholarly interests focus on language ideologies in education and instructional development, the syntactic structure of translingual practices, and the intersection of race, language, and rhetoric.

In my professional life, I worked as an ESL teacher in Texas public schools for 11 years, with experience in both rural and urban settings. As a rural ESL teacher, I got to work with the same students every year until they either graduated or exited the program. I got to know these students on a deeply personal level, which drove me to learn more about their linguistically diverse funds of knowledge. During my time in this assessment-driven school system, I observed these students expertly shifting between varieties of Spanish, varieties of English, and casually meshing together their entire linguistic repertoires to meet the communicative needs of the moment. At times, their rhetorical expertise in the fluidity of language completely floored me. Even now, after working with emergent bilinguals in K-12 schools, at the university level, studying linguistics at Tech, and working within the university’s first-year writing program on translingual ideologies, I am still trying to fully understand the multifaceted complexities of students’ linguistic expertise. I expect this will be a lifelong journey.