From the Complexity of Language Teaching to the Significance of Pedagogical Decision Making
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Speakers
Description
About the Presentation
Today’s language learning is very different from that of the 20th century. Learners’ curiosity about the world around them continues to grow; however, the difference now is that they have that world at their fingertips. They are experiencing the world through technology in a way that their parents and teachers never did. The COVID-19 pandemic has particularly emphasized digital technologies to engage in language learning through asynchronous and synchronous online teaching.
Language learning is changing, and how we teach and assess that learning should change as well. Its focus cannot be longer on grammar, monolithic and ethnocentrist representations of the target culture, memorization, learning from repetition, or largely confined to the classroom. On the contrary, it should serve a diverse community of language users, and emphasize language use and cultural knowledge to communicate and connect to others around the globe. In other words, language users and their needs must be kept at the heart of language teaching.
This presentation aims to stimulate discussion and provoke thought about the teaching of Spanish in Canada and its possibilities to create more collaborative models to empower language users and foster their multiple literacies and repertoires and impact our communities.
About the Presenter
Jeannette Sánchez Naranjo is an Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition in the Department of Spanish at Amherst College. Her research is grounded in the interplay between language, instruction, and culture, with a particular focus on understanding difficulties that adults experience when learning a second language (L2) in instructional contexts. Her work aims to help L2 learners develop as fully proficient language users in the 21st century. Dr. Sánchez Naranjo’s research has been published in scholarly journals such as Foreign Language Annals, Language, Culture and Curriculum, Canadian Journal of Linguistics, and Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana.