Agustina Carando

Agustina Carando

Assistant Professor of Spanish
Director, Heritage Spanish Program

613 Sproul Hall

PROFILE:

Agustina Carando studies diverse Spanish speakers immersed in an English context, looking at the unique ways that bilinguals use their two languages and how one may influence the other, leading to long term changes in their mental grammar. Her research focuses on the structural innovations produced by heritage speakers of Spanish and their implications for multilingual language education. Over many years, she has collected data from speakers in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida, and California, seeking to explore cross-language interaction in the bilingual mind, how similarities and differences between the grammars are negotiated, what structures might be more or less vulnerable and under what circumstances, the role of frequency of exposure and, ultimately, the internal mechanisms underlying linguistic change.

Current Projects

  • Code-switching in California
  • Heritage Spanish writing development
  • Heritage Spanish teacher preparation
  • Peer-tutor education
Education and Degree(s)
  • Ph.D. in Linguistics, City University of New York
  • B.A. in English Literature, William Paterson University
Honors and Awards
  • Transcollege Cluster Grant
  • UC Online
  • Global Affairs Seed Grant
  • CREATE Fellowship
  • Aggie Square Planning Grant
  • Davis Humanities Institute Grant
Courses
  • Spanish for the Professions
  • Spanish for Native Speakers
  • Spanish in the US
  • Seminar on Bilingualism
  • Seminar on Heritage and Writing Pedagogies
Research Interests & Expertise
  • Sociolinguistics
  • Bilingualism and Language Change
  • Heritage Language Education
  • Writing Development
Publications
  • Dykstra, S., & A. Carando (Forthcoming). Measuring Critical Language Awareness in Spanish as a Heritage Language Classrooms. Spanish as a Heritage Language Journal.
  • Carando, A. & C. J. Lozano. (Forthcoming) “Not the player nor the coach”: Considerations for peer tutor education in HL writing centers. Writing Center Journal.
  • Carando, A., S. Minnillo, P. Fernández-Mira, S. Davidson, K. Sagae, & C. Sánchez-Guitiérrez (2023). Writing Development in Spanish as a Second and Heritage Language: A Corpus Study on Complexity. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching. https://doi.org/10.1080/23247797.2023.2201989
  • Carando, A. & C. J. Lozano. (2022). “Me veía hesitant en contestar su pregunta and how to break things down”: Peer tutors’ experience at the Heritage Spanish Writing Center. Spanish as a Heritage Language Journal , 2(2), 139-160. https://doi.org/10.5744/shl.2022.1008
  • Lozano, C. J. & A. Carando (2022). Heritage Spanish writing development: Online vs. in-person peer-tutoring interventions. Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura, 27(1), 50-66. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ikala.v27n1a03
  • Carando, A., M. Jiménez-Silva, & M. B. Buttiler (2021). Translanguaging Nests: Building Community for Future Bilingual Teachers & Educational Advocates. Proceedings of the 20th Hawaii International Conference on Education, pages 509-526. https://hiceducation.org
  • Minnillo, S., C. Sánchez-Gutiérrez, A. Carando, S. Davidson, P. Fernández-Mira & K. Sagae (2022). Preterit-imperfect acquisition in L2 Spanish writing: Moving beyond lexical aspect. Research in Corpus Linguistics , 10(1), 156-184. https://doi.org/10.32714/ricl.10.01.08
  • Fernández-Mira, P., Morgan, E., Sánchez-Gutiérrez, C., Carando, A., Davidson, S., and Sagae, K. (2021) Lexical Diversity in an L2 Spanish Learner Corpus: The Effect of Topic-Related Variables. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.20017.fer
  • Davidson, S., A. Yamada, P. Fernández-Mira, A. Carando, C. Sánchez-Gutiérrez & K. Sagae (2020). Developing NLP tools with a new corpus of learner Spanish. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pages 7238–7243. Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
  • https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.894.pdf
  • Yamada, A., Davidson, S., Fernández-Mira, P., Carando, A., Sagae, K. & Sánchez-Gutiérrez, C. (2020). COWS-L2H: A corpus for measuring learner Spanish writing development. Research in Corpus Linguistics, 8(1), 17-32. https://doi.org/10.32714/ricl.08.01.02
  • Fernández, E. M., R. de Souza, and A. Carando (2017) Bilingual innovations: Experimental evidence offers clues regarding the psycholinguistics of language change. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 20(2): 251-268. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728916000924
Membership and Service
  • Affirmative Action and Diversity Committee (Academic Senate)
  • Representative Assembly (Academic Senate)
  • English Language and Literacy Committee (College of Letters & Sciences)
  • Language Committee (Department of Spanish & Portuguese)
  • Undergraduate Committee (Department of Spanish & Portuguese)
  • Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee (Department of Spanish & Portuguese)
  • Faculty coordinator for the Heritage Spanish Transcollege Cluster (Davis Humanities Institute)
  • Executive Council (Academic Senate)
  • Davis Language Center Board