Paula Rodríguez-Abruñeiras is a lecturer and researcher at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC), where she works in the Department of Applied Learning. She holds a degree in English Language and Literature and a PhD in English Linguistics (USC, 2015), which was funded by an FPU research grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education. She also holds an MA in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (USA, 2015), which partly explains why Spanish occasionally finds its way into her research too.

Before returning to USC in 2021, she taught at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2013–2015), the Universidade de Vigo (2015–2016) and the Universitat de València (2016–2021). She also undertook research stays at the Universities of Helsinki (2007–2008), Manchester (2009) and Freiburg (2010), as well as at the British Library (2011) on an ESSE bursary.

Corpus-based research has been a constant throughout much of her career. Her earlier work examined language variation and change, particularly in the history of English, with a focus on grammaticalization and discourse markers. Her more recent research brings this interest in language use and variation into language education, looking at how languages are learned, used, and perceived in multilingual settings, with a primary focus on foreign languages, but also on minoritized languages such as Galician. This includes work on learners’ language, attitudes towards English and Galician, and the use of language portraits to explore multilingual repertoires and identities. She also investigates innovative approaches and resources for language teaching, including game-based learning, gamification, and artificial intelligence. Another strand of her research addresses issues related to gender inequality and gender-based violence.

Her work has appeared in journals such as Linguistics, English Studies, English Today, Atlantis, and Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada, among others, and she has participated in several national and regional research projects.

She has co-supervised the PhD dissertation of Pau Serrano Menero (Universitat de València) on lexico-semantic change from Old to Middle English and has been involved in the organization of several national and international conferences, including SEDLL XXIV, CILC2019, and ISLE8. From 2019 to 2023, she coordinated AEDEAN’s Sociolinguistics and Dialectology Panel. In May 2025, she was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Research in Corpus Linguistics (RiCL), the official journal of AELINCO, jointly with Zeltia Blanco-Suárez.

Rodríguez-Abruñeiras, Paula. Accepted. El apéndice generalizador y tal en el español oral de Galicia: Un estudio sociolingüístico y funcional basado en corpus. Verba: Anuario Galego de Filoloxía.

Faya-Cerqueiro, Fátima & Paula Rodríguez-Abruñeiras. Accepted. Multimodal resources for teaching contrastive politeness in EFL contexts: An activity for pre-service teachers. In Pragmatics and our changing world: Globalization and diversity.

Faya-Cerqueiro, Fátima, Isabel Fernández López, Paula Rodríguez-Abruñeiras & María José Caamaño Rojo. 2026. Proxecto de innovación docente “Aprendizaxe baseada no xogo e uso de metodoloxías lúdicas nas aulas de lingua e literatura”: Integración de recursos dixitais na formación do futuro profesorado. In III Xeira CLARIAH-GAL. Santiago de Compostela: Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20596262

Rodríguez-Abruñeiras, Paula. 2026. Viejas historias, nuevos lectores: El Aprendizaje-Servicio como acción dinamizadora de la lengua y la cultura gallegas. In Fátima Faya Cerqueiro (ed.), Lenguas iniciales en contexto. Innovación y desafíos en la Didáctica de la Lengua y Literatura, 261-280. Barcelona: Octaedro. https://octaedro.com/libro/lenguas-iniciales-en-contexto/

Complete list of publications

10-12 June 2026: “El retrato lingüístico como herramienta sociolingüística en la formación del profesorado: Análisis de un corpus multimodal en una comunidad plurilingüe” [with Pedro Álvarez-Mosquera]. XVII Congreso Internacional de Lingüística de Corpus (CILC 2026), Autonomous University of Madrid.

29 May 2026: “Proxecto de innovación docente ‘Aprendizaxe baseada no xogo e uso de metodoloxías lúdicas nas aulas de lingua e literatura’: Integración de recursos dixitais na formación do futuro profesorado” [poster, with Fátima Faya-Cerqueiro, Isabel Fernández López & María José Caamaño Rojo], III Xeira CLARIAH-GAL, University of Santiago de Compostela.

26-28 November 2025: “¿Actividades de repaso o juegos de repaso? Percepciones del alumnado de Ciencias de la Educación” and “Cortesía y competencia intercultural en lengua extranjera: Propuestas de formación docente en contextos plurilingües para alumnado del Grado en Maestro/a de Educación Primaria” [with Fátima Faya-Cerqueiro], XXVI Congreso Internacional de la SIDLL, University of Alcalá de Henares.

5-6 November 2025: “Exploring the potential of AI-generated images for foreign language learning: A case study with future primary teachers” [with Fátima Faya-Cerqueiro], 4º Congresso Internacional. Inovaçao e Tecnologia no Ensino de Línguas, Inteligência artificial e Aprendizagem personalizada (iTel 2025), Universidade Aberta (Portugal).

26-27 June 2025: “Enhancing L2 politeness awareness through children’s literature:
A proposal for pre-service yeachers”, [with Fátima Faya-Cerqueiro], ITAP Annual Conference 2025: Resources for L2 pragmatics teaching across instructional contexts, University of La Laguna.

15-17 May 2025: “Más allá de la vaguedad: Los apéndices generalizadores en el corpus ESLORA”, 16th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, University of Salamanca.

9 May 2025: “Contribuíndo ao avance das Humanidades Dixitais: Recursos para o estudo do inglés histórico e contemporáneo” [poster; with María José López-Couso, Zeltia Blanco-Suárez, Tamara Bouso, Teresa Fanego, Fátima Faya-Cerqueiro, Belén Méndez-Naya & Paloma Núñez-Pertejo ], II Xeira CLARIAH-GAL, University of Santiago de Compostela.

8-10 January 2025: “Gramaticalización, variación ‘y tal’: Una aproximación desde la lingüística de corpus”, I Symposium: Corpus Linguistics developments and applications (CORPLING2018-425), University of Valencia.

10-11 October 2024: “Y entonces es en plan… yo qué sé… mola y tal. Los términos de vaguedad en un estudio de tiempo aparente”, Términos de vaguedad. Orígenes, usos, contrastes, Université Paris Cité (France).

29 November-1 December 2023: “El breakout como recurso educativo en Educación Superior. Una experiencia Genial.ly.” & “Que (non) morra o conto! Fomento de la lectura y dinamización de la lengua gallega a través de un proyecto de ApS”,  XXIV Congreso Internacional SEDLL, University of Santiago de Compostela.