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Black Scholars in Study Abroad and Language Teaching
My blog is normally on break for the summer, but I’m coming off this break temporarily to share some of the brilliant work by Black scholars that is central to my research and teaching. The protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd have led to a stronger interest in understanding systemic racism among White people,…
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Summer Planning: Yes, really, even this summer
Needless to say, this summer looks very different than other summers. Our STARTALK program is postponed to 2021. One conference was canceled, and another has gone virtual. All the dancing events are canceled. I was on the planning committee for the U.S. Championships that were going to be in Denver this Summer, so this is…
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Ideologies of Study Abroad: Tourism
I’ve written a lot on this blog about language ideologies, including different types of language ideologies, and why I think they’re important for the classroom. However, I haven’t written much about study abroad ideologies, another set that I think all too often is unquestioned. If language ideologies are beliefs about language, study abroad ideologies are…
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Trello Templates for Repetitive or Recurring Tasks
I am a longtime fan of checklists, especially for repetitive types of things like packing, teaching prep, weekly planning, etc. Recently, Trello added template cards, which as the name suggests allow you to create new cards from a template, rather than a blank card. Trello cards also allow you to add checklists, which means that…
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Language Ideologies in the Wild: Science of Learning
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I think it is really important for language teachers to be aware of our language ideologies as there are major implications for our classrooms. The funny thing is, once you start noticing your own language ideologies, you also see language ideologies, and even more so the lack of…
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Plurilingual and Translanguaging Approaches in the Intermediate Arabic Classroom
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the Intercultural Communication Conference in Tucson put on by CERCLL. I presented with my colleague Heather Sweetser on our attempts to implement plurilingual and translanguaging approaches in our Intermediate Arabic classroom, and will summarize this presentation in this post.
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Spring 2020 Semester Plan
Every semester, I make a plan using my semester planning sheet. In previous posts I’ve discussed my semester planning routine, and you can also read about my Fall 2019 plan. In this post, I’m sharing my 2020 semester plan, which looks a little different than most because I am on sabbatical this semester, which means…
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Fall 2019 Review
Happy 2020! Given the number of decade in review posts I’ve seen around, perhaps I should be doing that instead. As it happens, however, this was quite an eventful decade for me, and every time I think about reviewing it, I just want to go to sleep instead. So, I’ll stick with Fall 2019, which…
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Are monolingual models making us ask the wrong questions? Translanguaging in the language classroom.
(ACTFL), and then for the Arabic Language Conference at AUC, I’ve been having conversations with language teachers (mostly Arabic ones) about translanguaging in the classroom, and why I think it’s so important that we take this perspective. Or why, even if you don’t want to take a translanguaging perspective, it’s important to realize that you…
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Unexpected Benefits of Planning: Knowing when NOT to do things
While attending the recent conference of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, I had the opportunity to catch up with a friend I used to work with at the Middlebury Arabic Summer School. In the intervening ten or so years since we worked together, we’ve both had two kids, completed grad school,…