Dr Alejandro Palomares Ortiz joined King's College London Language Centre in 2020. He completed his BA in Translation and Interpreting (English-French) (2016) at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain and his MA in Linguistic Studies (2018) at Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium. He completed his Linguistics PhD (2025) funded by the AHRC/UKRI TECHNÉ studentship at University of Roehampton, UK. He speaks Spanish, English, French, Italian and Greek. 

Alejandro is a lecturer in Spanish Language Education. He teaches Spanish as a foreign language to both undergraduate and postgraduate students at various levels, ranging from complete beginners (A1) to advanced learners (C1). He is also the module convenor for Spanish Language Module 6, Spanish for Business 4, and the PG-only Intermediate course.

Research, Scholarly projects and Academic Awards

Alejandro’s academic interests primarily centre on semantics and pragmatics from both theoretical and applied perspectives. His research focuses on the study of linguistic meaning at cognitive and social levels, especially in relation to conceptual and connotational values, and its applications in second language acquisition and teaching. He is currently investigating slurs and dysphemistic language from a theoretical perspective, developing a model to describe their conceptual, connotational, and ideological import. He is also interested in analysing the semantic and pragmatic processes involved in L2 reading comprehension, particularly in relation to the design of comprehension exercises. Alejandro is further engaged in various pedagogical projects aimed at improving language-teaching practices and is especially interested in the gamification of reading-comprehension materials.

Academic Publications:

Vande Casteele, A. and Palomares Ortiz, A., 2020. An exploratory study on pro-drop in a written description task in L2 Spanish. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching.