Kiley Specht is a PhD candidate in Spanish Applied Linguistics. She received her BA from Illinois State University in Spanish Education (2018) and her MA in Spanish Linguistics from UW-Madison (2024). Kiley also worked as a high school Spanish teacher for a few years in Bloomington, IL, where she was inspired to learn more about second language acquisition in educational contexts.
Her current research focuses on second language acquisition and dialectal variation representation in the classroom setting. In addition, she is interested in Spanish in the U.S. and heritage language learners.