Education
- Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2011
- M.A. in Hispanic Linguistics, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2007
- M.A. in Spanish, University of Texas at Arlington, 2005
- Teaching Certification, University of Texas at Arlington, 1996
- B.A. in Spanish and International Business, North Park University, Chicago, 1992
Selected Research
My main areas of research involve Second Language Acquisition and Sociolinguistics. I am interested in syntactic and phonological variation in Spanish, native speaker perception and use of variable structures and how learners acquire these variable aspects of language.
Courses Taught
- Elementary Spanish I
- Intermediate Spanish I and II
- Applied Phonetics
- Professional Spanish
Advice for Students
Treat language acquisition as skill-building and relationship-building rather than learning facts about the language. Like playing an instrument, playing a sport, dancing, drawing, painting, gardening, etcetera, it is important to make attempts, fail, learn from your mistakes and get better with effort. More importantly, learning a new language is about people. While that may seem obvious, it is easy to get caught up in treating language learning as solely an academic endeavor. Once I focused on learning Spanish to communicate with others in their heart language, it was much more meaningful. I hope it will be for my students, as well.
Selected Publications
- Díaz-Campos, M. and Killam, J. (2017). Contribuciones de los estudios de percepción en la identificación y la descripción de las variedades diatópicas y diastráticas del español contemporáneo. In Leonor Orozco and Alonso Guerrero Galván (Eds.). Estudios de variación geolingüística. México: Secretaría de Cultura / Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
- Killam, J. (2014). Direct Object Marking and Word Order Processing in Spanish: An Unclear Connection. In Ryan T. Miller et al (Eds.) Selected Proceedings of the 2012 Second Language Research Forum. 101-109. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
- Geeslin, Kimberly L., Lorenzo J. García-Amaya, Maria Hasler-Barker, Nicholas C. Henriksen, and Jason Killam. 2012. The L2 Acquisition of Variable Perfective Past Time Reference in Spanish in an Overseas Immersion Setting. In Selected Proceedings of the 14th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, ed. Kimberly Geeslin and Manuel Díaz-Campos, 197-213. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
- Díaz-Campos, M. and Killam J. (2012). Assessing Language Attitudes through a Matched-guise Experiment: The Case of Consonantal Deletion in Venezuelan Spanish. Hispania 95(1), 83-102.
- Geeslin, Kimberly L., Lorenzo J. García-Amaya, Maria Hasler-Barker, Nicholas C. Henriksen, and Jason Killam. 2010. The SLA of Direct Object Pronouns in a Study Abroad Immersion Environment Where Use Is Variable. In Selected Proceedings of the 12th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, ed. Claudia Borgonovo, Manuel Español-Echevarría, and Philippe Prévost, 246-259. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Hobbies/Interests
- Music – playing instruments, thinking in song lyrics
- Sports – triathlons, disc golf, if something spins, I’m definitely in
- DIY – figuring out how to make it, maintain it, fix it