INTRODUCTION

EspaNYol is an open educational resource for students beginning their study of Spanish. It is a media-enhanced resource designed to accompany learners throughout their language development while incorporating a cultural approach and offering frequent opportunities to engage with, practice, and strengthen their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills as Spanish is used in diverse communities around the world.

Grounded on the principle that access to knowledge should not depend on cost, this open educational resource is free for everyone. In addition, cultural materials were selected to widen the frame of the Spanish speaking world, making room for multiple identities, class and gender realities rather than a single dominant narrative.

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AUTHORS

Lorena Hernández Ramírez

Lorena Hernández Ramírez is Clinical Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Language Program in Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She received her M.A. from Arizona State University in Second Language Acquisition/Applied Linguistics (Spanish) in 2008, and her PhD from The Graduate Center (CUNY) in Hispanic Sociolinguistics in 2016. She has taught both at the undergraduate and graduate level in CUNY (Lehman College and City College), and since she joined NYU in 2014, she has taught a variety of language, linguistics, and translation courses. Her research interests include language teaching and learning, sociolinguistics, language ideologies, and Spanish in the US.

She would like to thank her family and friends for their support with this project, as well as the rest of the team for their hard work.

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Wilmiriam Cotto Castellano

Wilmiriam Cotto Castellano is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, where she coordinates both Intensive Beginners and Intensive Intermediate Spanish courses. She is an alumna of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, where she earned a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with an emphasis in Creative Writing in English. She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University in 2018. She has worked at NYU since 2016, teaching a variety of language, heritage, and creative writing courses. She is a recipient of New York University’s Teach/Tech Award. Her research and pedagogical interests include communicative language teaching; inclusive, accessible curriculum design with a focus on disability and Universal Design for Learning (UDL); digital tools in the language classroom; Spanglish across national and cultural contexts; and Caribbean cultural production, particularly at the intersections of rhythm, poetry, and music.

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Sofia Fernández

Sofía Fernandez is a Clinical Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Spanish 1 and 2 in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She also serves as the faculty lead for NYU’s Buenos Aires Sophomore Scholars Program. She earned an M.A. in Spanish Literature and Linguistics in 2017 and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics in 2019 from Ohio University, and a Ph.D. in Spanish Linguistics from Arizona State University in 2023. She also holds certificates in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Throughout her teaching career, she has taught all levels of Spanish as a second language, Spanish as a heritage language, as well as English and Spanish linguistics. Her research interests include second and heritage language acquisition and assessment, phonetics and phonology, and curriculum and instructional design.

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