Sabrina Ippolito

A teacher’s perspective, across languages and borders

Learning and teaching languages have shaped both my education and my professional life. My work has taken me into classrooms in the United States and internationally, with learners of different ages, backgrounds, and goals. Italian and Spanish are central to my identity, and my own experience learning languages continues to inform how I teach.

At West Virginia University, I taught undergraduate Italian in person and online. At St. Joseph Catholic Academy in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I taught high school Spanish, including honors courses, and provided additional support to English language learners. My international experience also includes teaching Italian and Spanish to adults at InLanguage Boutique in Melbourne.

My approach combines meaningful communication, comprehensible input, scaffolding, and authentic materials. I want students to understand and use language, recognize cultural perspectives, and build the confidence to keep learning.

Selected teaching work

These examples show how I translate teaching ideas into activities that invite students to create, communicate, and make choices.

Questions I want to explore

My research interests grow out of classroom experience and my own multilingual background. I am interested in pursuing doctoral study in second language acquisition and language education, particularly around these questions:

• Curiosity and motivation. How can teachers sustain learners’ curiosity and encourage meaningful engagement beyond a single activity?
• Input and classroom practice. How can comprehensible input, authentic materials, and scaffolded tasks support language development across different learning contexts?
• Technology and AI. When do digital tools support attention, independent thinking, and language use, and when might they distract from those goals?
• Language, culture, and identity. How do learners’ linguistic backgrounds and cultural identities shape participation, belonging, and communication?

These are directions for future investigation. I hope to develop them through doctoral mentorship and collaboration with educators and researchers.

TeachUp Languages: a project in development

Where Teachers Learn From Teachers.

Teachers regularly discover excellent articles, videos, tools, and classroom ideas. Yet a link alone rarely tells another teacher whether it fits their learners or how to use it well. TeachUp brings resources together with practical context: what they contain, whom they help, and ways to adapt them for teaching.

The site brings this idea into practice through resource cards, teaching ideas, lesson plans, and a Research Library. Its language collections include Spanish, Italian, ESL, French, Portuguese, Turkish, and Hamshen, with room to grow.

What I want to develop next

My aim is to build a useful, accessible collection shaped by teachers’ needs. Future development could include gathering educators’ feedback, improving the guidance that accompanies resources, and working with research partners to understand how teachers use and adapt shared materials.

Potential support would help develop resources, strengthen accessibility, and evaluate the project’s usefulness. Specific activities, timelines, and measures of success would be defined with a funding or research partner.