Christina Agostinelli-Fucile

Christina Agostinelli-Fucile is an Associate Teaching Professor of Spanish whose passion for teaching goes hand-in-hand with her specialty in second language acquisition and pedagogy. Her research in the acquisition of pronunciation and dialectal variation seeks to offer language instructors practical approaches to prepare students for interacting with a variety of native speakers outside the classroom.

Christina’s interests also include standards-based language proficiency assessment and curricular development. As coordinator of the Spanish program at Northeastern, she has worked to align the Spanish curriculum, provide professional development on new technologies and culture-based language teaching, and develop more academic and extra-curricular opportunities for Spanish students at Northeastern.

In the classroom, Christina creates an engaging environment in which students not only apply what they have learned to real-life situations and problems but participate as creators of knowledge through self-expression in the target language. She uses methodologies such as the flipped-classroom and project-based learning to give students the opportunity to practice real-world skills and to demonstrate what they can actually DO with the language. Her objective is to inspire and guide students to develop the skills they need to effectively employ Spanish in their everyday lives, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Christina regularly teaches courses such as SPNS 3102 Hispanic & Latinx Identity, SPNS 3502 Authentic Spanish Grammar, and SPNS 3601 Exploring Spoken Spanish which she has designed to integrate authentic materials and projects to help students develop their linguistic abilities and further their cultural understanding.

In addition to teaching, she enjoys working closely with students as the Spanish Minor advisor and as advisor of Northeastern’s local chapter of Sigma Delta Pi, the National Collegiate Hispanic Honors Society.