About our authors
A native of Chile, Elizabeth Guzman recently retired after a long teaching and administrative career. She directed Spanish language programs at several universities in the United States and supervised teachers of English in her country. Throughout her career, she designed face-to-face and flipped courses where Mosaicos, Unidos and Identidades were used, in addition to overseeing the design and implementation of online Spanish courses. She trained and mentored graduate teaching assistants and has served as a consultant to Spanish programs that were making the transition from face-to-face to flipped models of teaching. Teaching and learning have been at the center of her academic life, and she has shared her energy, passion and experience with undergraduates and graduate students. Teaching Spanish as a tool for communication to undergraduates taking Spanish courses to fulfill a requirement was one of the challenges that she undertook with love, understanding and determination during her career.
Dr. Paloma Lapuerta is from the Mediterranean city of Castellon, Spain. She holds a Licenciatura and a master's degree in Spanish Philology from the University of Salamanca, Spain, and a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She has taught at the universities of Geneva, Kwua-Zulu Natal, in Durban, South Africa, and Central Connecticut State University, where she is currently Professor of Spanish. She has also been invited to teach at the Middlebury College Spanish School, the University of Michigan, and Dartmouth College. Her research interests focus on 19th and 20th century literature and she has multiple publications on poetry and novels that deal with social and cultural issues. In addition to Mosaicos, Dr. Lapuerta is the coauthor of Unidos, Identidades, La escritura paso a paso and the author of Cortos en curso, all published by Pearson.
Judith Liskin-Gasparro (M.A. Princeton University; Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin) is Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Iowa, where she directed the Spanish language program and codirected the doctoral program in Second Language Acquisition. She taught courses in second language acquisition, applied linguistics and pedagogy and Spanish language. Her publications and presentations deal with the development of speaking skills, oral proficiency assessment and program evaluation and outcomes assessment. She is the coauthor of Unidos and Identidades, in addition to Mosaicos and she was the coeditor of Pearson's Theory and Practice in Second Language Classroom Instruction series. She was also a faculty member at Middlebury College, as well as the Middlebury College School of Spanish. While working at Educational Testing Service, she participated in the development of the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. She also designed and led the first oral proficiency interview workshops in the early 1980s and she was principally responsible for training the first generation of OPI testers and trainers in Spanish.
