Sikritaria, Kumisión i Fino’ CHamoru

Governor of Guam Appointee

Siñora Rosa Salas Palomo, is an indigenous CHamoru woman who has studied the CHamoru language since she was 19 years old under the tutelage of the late Donald Topping. At that time, she was hired as a Bilingual Intern in the very first bilingual education program on Guam. Upon graduating from college with a BA in Elementary Education and Early Childhood Education, she taught kindergarten, and four years later was hired as a Curriculum Writer for the same program. Prior to returning to school, she served as Project Director of the GDOE’s Bilingual-Bicultural Education Program and Indo-Chinese Refugee Program. Palomo obtained her MA in Education in Reading in 1970 and attended three years at UCLA studying Applied Linguistics to strengthen her knowledge and expertise in language teaching and education. She was appointed Director of Education and served for only a year at which time she took a first full-time position at the University of Guam as a CHamoru language instructor. She developed three courses in CHamoru, CM102, CM201 and CM202, at the onset of her career at the UOG and just recently developed the third-year CHamoru language courses for more advanced students, CM301 and CM302. It is through her teaching of the language in her classes that she discovers changes in language use. For each discovery, she spends a surmountable amount of time trying to understand the situation so she can better teach her students to speak the language. She continually assists the GDOE CHamoru Studies Division in their efforts to train and certify CHamoru language teachers. She began the Inacha’igen Fino’ CHamoru or CHamoru Language Competition for public and private CHamoru language students in Guam schools in 1994 and continues to this day. Palomo has applied and successfully awarded federal funds for projects pertaining to curriculum and teacher certification and English as a Second Language. She has brought in approximately $3.5 million in grants for projects she has successfully directed. Palomo has made numerous presentations in both international, national, regional and local conferences, some of which were invited such as the ones by the University of Bremen and Ateno de Manila University. Her areas of research interest are language shift, the hispanicization of CHamoru, and changes in the CHamoru language particularly among younger speakers. Language documentation is a relatively new interest after she attended the Language Documentation Conference in Hawaii two years ago.