Category: Language Teaching
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Introducing: the We Can Learn Arabic website!
As I’ve detailed in my curriculum development posts over the last two years, we have slowly been replacing our textbook with our own materials, generally based on texts we find on the internet or create ourselves. Although I’ve frequently been asked when we will make our own textbook, I’ve actually never been interested in making…
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Ideologies of Study Abroad: Language Immersion
In the Spring, I started a new blog series on ideologies of study abroad with a post on study abroad as tourism. It’s time for the second post, and this time I’ll be focusing on one of the most prevalent and pernicious ideologies of study abroad as it relates to language teaching, that of study…
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Reframing Monolingual Ideologies in the Language Classroom
Wednesday is the one day I teach in person this semester, and this past Wednesday was the first time I’d been to my office on campus since March. I was excited to discover the 2019 volume of the American Association of University Supervisors, Coordinators, and Directors of Foreign Language Programs (AAUSC) in my mailbox! The…
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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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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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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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Curriculum Development: Event Planning Take 2
Last year, I blogged about the creation of our party planning unit in second year Arabic, including some of the challenges. Since we are on the verge of creating the second round of this unit, I thought I would give an update on how it is going this time (short version: much better!). First, we…
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Learning from Indigenous Language Revitalization Programs
This semester, I’m teaching the capstone class for the Languages majors at my university, and we recently finished a unit on Indigenous Language Revitalization. While this is an important unit for a Languages Capstone Class, it is not my area of specialization, so I was excited to learn more along with my students. While Indigenous…
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Telecollaboration in the Language Classroom: Challenges and Benefits
Although telecollaboration is one of my research contexts, I realized I’ve never written a post about it. So, here is a long overdue discussion of telecollaboration, the projects I’ve been involved in, and the lessons I’ve learned.