Our Faculty

Background

Sarah Rubio is a Spanish linguistics researcher and professor who earned her PhD in Hispanic linguistics from the University at Albany. She is currently an assistant professor of Spanish pedagogy at Binghamton University. Her research focuses on second language pedagogy and acquisition, as well as applied sociolinguistics.

Her dissertation examined the efficacy of language pedagogies grounded in cognitive linguistics and highlighted the importance of incorporating sociolinguistic variation into the language classroom. Related to this, her master’s thesis, titled “The Cognitive Approach and the Use of Visual Representations for Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language: The Case of the Preterit Form versus the Imperfect,” investigated the effectiveness of the cognitive approach. It demonstrated how schematic images help learners create mental metaphorical representations, enhancing their understanding of grammatical forms.

Rubio has previously taught at the University at Albany as a visiting assistant professor and at the College of Saint Rose as a lecturer. She has also taught at various institutions of higher education, including the Instituto Cervantes of New York and the Department of Continuing Education at New York University.

Mentoring Philosophy 

As an instructor of Spanish as a foreign or second language, Professor Sarah Rubio implements a multifaceted teaching approach that offers students the opportunity to acquire the target language through a meaningful interaction process that fosters their motivation to learn the language. Her aim in motivating students is to help them achieve their communicative competence in Spanish, as well as to expose them to the cultural realities of the Spanish-speaking world, embracing all its identities and communities through engaging themes and related topics.

As students today face a complex social and political landscape, Rubio prioritizes her students' identities and backgrounds to ensure that the lesson plans meet their personal needs, while incorporating real-world, authentic communicative situations that promote their critical thinking. Consequently, she ensures that the pedagogical approach she applies combines different teaching methodologies to fulfill students’ interests and learning needs in Spanish.

This multifaceted teaching style incorporates three evidence-based pedagogical approaches. The first is the project/task-based approach, in which every unit of the course focuses on a complex real-life project that requires students to work with specific grammatical forms and vocabulary. In conjunction with this approach, Rubio follows a content-based instruction approach that provides students with real-life documents in Spanish, exposing them to authentic academic content. Lastly, to facilitate students’ understanding of grammatical structures, she also implements the cognitive grammar approach, which requires students to use higher-order cognitive strategies, including metacognitive strategies, to move beyond memorization toward a deeper understanding of how language works.

Education

• PhD, University at Albany
• MA, Nebrija University, Madrid, Spain
• BA, University of Arizona, Tucson

Research Interests

• The teaching of prepositions in Spanish through prototypes that provide the embodied meanings for prepositions through spatial perceptions
• Facilitating students’ understanding of the meaning of difficult Spanish structures through the operational cognitive approach and its variations depending upon the speaker’s perspective (e.g.: the subjunctive mood, the verb ‘ser’ vs. ‘estar’, etc.).
• The role of lexically-specific usage patterns in L2 Spanish determiner production

Teaching Interests

• Teaching methodologies and approaches
• Second language acquisition
• Cognitive linguistics
• Cognitive sociolinguistics
• The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation

Research Profile

• Google Scholar