About CAL
Board of Trustees
Dr. Judith Liskin-Gasparro
Member, CAL Board of Trustees 2005-2012
Vice Chair 2008-2009
Chair 2010 - 2012
Dr. Judith Liskin-Gasparro is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Iowa, where she also co-directs an interdisciplinary doctoral program in Second Language Acquisition. Her research focuses on classroom-based language learning. She teaches courses in teaching methods, second language acquisition, and Spanish language and applied linguistics. She is particularly interested in foreign language proficiency assessment, program evaluation and outcomes assessment, and the teaching materials (she is a co-author of two recent textbooks).
Dr. Liskin-Gasparro received her PhD in Foreign Language Education from the University of Texas at Austin. She is one of the developers of the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and the author of numerous articles, sections, and manuals on proficiency testing and proficiency-oriented instruction.
Liskin-Gasparro has done research on the discourse of oral proficiency interviews and on the acquisition of Spanish by advanced speakers in an immersion setting. She has published extensively on oral proficiency testing, language curriculum and program development, and second language acquisition. Since 1999 she has served as the Associate Editor for Reviews of the Modern Language Journal. In 1994, she was honored by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and the Modern Language Journal with the Emma Marie Birkmaier Award for Doctoral Dissertation Research in Foreign Language Education. In 1999 she received ACTFL’s Florence Steiner Award for Leadership in Foreign Language Education, and her teaching and mentoring have been recognized with awards at the University of Iowa. Dr. Liskin-Gasparro is the co-author of the college-level Spanish textbooks Mosaicos: Spanish as a World Language and Identidades: Exploraciones e interconexiones, both published by Pearson-Prentice Hall.