Estefanía Sánchez Auñón

Estefanía Sánchez Auñón is a pre-doctoral fellow at the Department of Didactics of Modern Languages and their Literatures (Spanish, English and French) at the University of Murcia, in Spain. Her major research interests include the use of cinema as a didactic resource for the teaching of foreign languages, especially English, and its implementation together with critical pedagogy as an approach. Concerning the latter, Estefanía focuses on environmental awareness, carrying out research on environmental education in general and, in particular, on the use of cinema to foster ecological consciousness in the English classroom. She has published research on these topics in JCR and Scopus indexed journals such as Porta Linguarum and Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education. Given language teachers' infrequent and vague use of cinema for educational purposes, the studies Estefanía has conducted so far have led her to concentrate on teacher practices and training as well. As cinema is a great ally for the implementation of critical pedagogy, Estefanía has combined her research areas in the last papers she has been writing (for instance, a cinema-based didactic proposal to introduce environmentalism in the English class and the impact film viewing has on English students' environmental behavior). She intends to continue widening her research expertise and also analyze the effects working on cinema has on students' language learning process. Estefanía has reviewed some manuscripts, for instance, a book chapter for IGI Global, and she frequently disseminates her research results in international conferences such as Innovation in Language Learning (Florence, 2022) or IV Congreso Internacional de Innovación Docente e Investigación en Educación Superior: Retos de la actualización en la enseñanza de las ÁREAS DE CONOCIMIENTO (Online, 2022). Added to research, Estefanía teaches several English courses at the University of Murcia, she supervises degree and master's degree dissertations, and she has participated in two teaching innovation projects exploring multimodality and the exploitation of cinema in the English as a foreign language class.