Victoria Rodrigo

Ph.D., University of Southern California, Los Angeles

Spanish, L2 Reading, L2 Listening, and material design

Dr. Victoria Rodrigo (Ph.D. in Spanish with concentration in Applied Linguistics) is an active researcher in the field of second language acquisition. Her area of research is receptive skills –reading and listening– as means to enhance language acquisition. Rodrigo has published numerous articles in prestigious national and international journals in the States, Spain, Mexico, and Argentina. She has also authored teaching material —Infórmate con CNN and Spanish Audio Library— and is a co-author of an intermediate Spanish textbook –Opiniones— based on her research on Narrow Listening, an alternative approach to developing listening skills. Rodrigo has been invited to be a reviewer in specialized journals in her field —Foreign Language Annals, Hispania, Language Learning, Reading in a Foreign language— and to impart courses for language teachers in Spain as in teacher-formation programs organized in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes and University of Granada. She is also an affiliated faculty of Universidad Nebrija in Madrid, where she collaborates and teaches in their MA of Lingüística Aplicada a la Enseñanza del Español como Lengua Extanjera. Program.  Dr. Rodrigo was a co-PI in a five-years federal grant from the Department of Education in which she was responsible for an extensive reading intervention with low literate adults.

Rodrigo teaches graduate seminars in her area of expertise as well as undergraduate courses on Spanish language and Spanish Linguistics. Her latest books are La comprensión lectora en la enseñanza del español LE/L2: de la teoría a la práctica (Routledge, 2019) and Estrategias de lectura. Leer para comprender (Edelsa-Anaya, 2021, with E. Alonso.) Both are useful reference tools for researchers and teachers.

Currently, she is working on Serie Leamos, a free digital library of engaging stories written and illustrated by Georgia State students, where she is the founder and editor of the collection. The purpose of this library is to provide easy access to interesting and comprehensible reading material that allows implementing pleasure reading from beginning levels. This innovative reading project serves three purposes: (1) it is a creative writing activity for authors, (2) it is reading material for readers, and (3) it is a real-world task for illustrators.

The library can be filtered (by level, readership, and topic), and the titles are accompanied by pedagogical material and audio, all free to download. Currently, the library is in Spanish and English, but we are working on replicating the stories in other languages. You can get to the site through this link.