Nicole’s research interests include Spanish Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Language Assessment, and Teacher Education. While at UB, she was the 2019-2020 RLL Graduate Student Association President, and a NeMLA Award Fellow. She also awarded a Dean’s Scholarship. Her publications include “Los éxitos y desafíos de la lengua española globalizada,” presented at the RLL 2018-2019 GSA Conference, and “An Exploratory Case Study of Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) Implementation in First Semester,” soon to be published in the SUNY Buffalo Romance Studies Journal. Near-term plans include securing a full-time (visiting) assistant professor position, and publishing her dissertation in a series of articles and manuals; long-term, she hopes to become an associate or tenured professor and make impacts on the fields of Applied Linguistics and Language Education through her future research.
Looking back at her years in RLL classrooms as a graduate student, Nicole particularly remembers the way that Dr. Ávila-Shah presented sociolinguistic principles through concrete language samples, leading her to specialize in applied linguistics to research practical language use. She counts collaboration and gathering, whether to accomplish a goal or to celebrate a goal that was accomplished, with faculty, staff, and fellow graduate students among her best moments as a graduate student. As a teacher, she reports that seeing students’ Spanish abilities improve by the end of the semester by fostering their use of the language to communicate has been extremely rewarding.