Cornell University Language Resource Center Speaker Series

Up to 20% of people in the U.S. have dyslexia, which means that about 4-6 students in every classroom struggle with reading and writing, spelling, and executive functions. How does this manifest in second language acquisition? This workshop will introduce dyslexia from a medical and educational perspective and explain how it presents in second language learning. We will conduct error analyses on writing samples to determine which errors are developmentally expected in language acquisition or could point toward auditory processing challenges or dyslexia. In the second part of the workshop, we will focus on classroom methodology to support learners with ...

Heritage language (HL) speakers tend to assess their linguistic competence in binary terms, such as “good” and “bad,” and to consider that they speak “slang” or a “broken” language (Byram et al., 2021). However, research on HL production does not confirm these perceptions: Rinke et al. (2024) show that structures that prove most challenging for HL bilinguals are also problematic for monolingual speakers. Furthermore, Torregrossa et al. (2023) indicate that age and formal instruction in the HL may lead to better performance in those challenging structures. Drawing on examples from Portuguese grammar, this talk discusses research on linguistic production in ...

As people who teach, learn, and research language, the time for us to work toward forms of gender justice that honor and revel in the knowledges and linguistic practices of trans people has long since been here and it grows ever-more overdue in the ongoing wake of globalized and localized forms of anti-trans, anti-education, and other oppressive actions (Knisely, 2023; Knisely & Russell, 2024). If we are to move toward gender justice in language education, we need not only increasingly inclusionary pedagogies, materials, research, and languaging, but also to think beyond the confines of inclusionary discourses alone. When we unscript ...

This presentation will showcase the latest feature developments to the iSpraak platform. This free online tool incorporates multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech technologies to both model and assess pronunciation in 36 different languages. Now generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, iSpraak has significantly expanded on its previous feature set and has adopted new tools for learners, teachers, and researchers.

This session begins with findings from a policy genealogy (Gale, 2001) of the Heritage Languages Program (HLP) in Ontario and the racialized conflicts over it between 1977–1987. Heritage-language education policies emerged across Canada in the 1970s, just after federal policies for official bilingualism (1969) and multiculturalism (1971) were established. As Haque (2012) argues, official bilingualism was only possible by excluding demands of Indigenous and other racialized communities for their own linguistic and cultural rights. The HLP challenged the logic of official bilingualism, and thus became the site of extended, racialized conflicts over fundamental questions of (1) whose language and culture ...

The purpose of this session is to give you tools and strategies to become comfortable making basic decisions regarding materials usage and copyright considerations in the pursuit of language teaching and learning. There are many of the more traditional ways that copyright impacts our work: Public Performance Rights, conversion of “obsolete” materials, and duplication of language learning media. However, with the evolution of technology and the advent of the user as creator, we are facing many new situations where the law has not caught up with reality. The paradigm shift in publishing and distribution contributes to the confusing nature of ...

Reverse design, also called backward design, is a framework for curricular planning that begins “at the end.” Targeted outcomes and their assessment form the basis for making the many decisions that belong to the process of curricular design and development. In this workshop, a reverse design model will be introduced, and its components defined and described. Multiple concrete examples of how reverse design was applied to solve curricular challenges at the course, course sequence, and programmatic level will be shared.

Learning a language is like learning to play a new game. Since the rules of the game are determined by the culture, players new to the culture will experience failures. These failures are both inevitable and frequent. Their consequences could be serious, too. Yet the game is thrilling enough to keep players at it, and through playing, the players who keep at it improve on their scores. The improved scores entice players to take more risks. Pedagogical materials offer ways for both language learners and their teachers to continuously improve their level of performance in the language game. I will ...

In recent decades, revitalization and reclamation programs for Indigenous languages have emerged at universities, both promoting the language and fostering community empowerment, particularly among youth. We will explore strategies to incorporate Indigenous cultures and languages of the Americas within the Humanities and Social Sciences as relevant and complex curricular components. For this presentation, we will discuss opportunities for building up academic and cultural programming to challenge and expand traditional notions of Indigeneity as a “thing of the past” into relevant and pressing issues, and to reflect on how colleges and language departments can support more diverse spaces for the representation ...

Tasks are everywhere. They are the things we do in daily life. Long (2016) argues that task-based language teaching (TBLT) is the strongest empirically supported teaching approach around. However, for many instructors of commonly and less commonly languages, TBLT is still an innovative approach that deviates from more familiar structure-based or form-focused teaching methods. They find it difficult to incorporate real-world tasks in their classrooms. Are real-world tasks the only option or can instructors integrate more pedagogical tasks? What do they look like and how do they incorporate (or not) grammar and vocabulary? This talk will focus on what makes ...

The goal of this interactive workshop is to help language educators understand how they can develop materials and implement classroom strategies that are informed by core principles of proficiency-based instruction, and doing so will help their students develop communicative ability in the target language. First, we will focus on setting goals informed by the ACTFL proficiency guidelines, and we will review some fundamental aspects of second language acquisition, particularly as they pertain to proficiency-oriented instruction. Then, participants will evaluate to what extent specific activities help to maximize proficiency development by dissecting their merits and shortcomings. Bio: Florencia Henshaw has a Ph.D. ...

Efforts toward peacebuilding in language education around the world have been gradual, diverse, and continuously growing despite a lack of systematic and comprehensive attempts to position the discipline of language pedagogy within the scope of peace education. This talk will explore the notions of peace linguistics within the field of (applied) linguistics and peace pedagogy within the general field of comparative education, their evolution, history, development, and diversification in connection to the fields of language teaching, language and culture pedagogy, and teacher education, where specific initiatives, frameworks, and practices for teaching about and for peace through languages will be illustrated. A particular emphasis will ...

Providing second language learners with space and guidance to critically reflect on their past and current learning experiences can set them up to better understand and evolve their own worldviews as they learn about and engage with ones different from their own (Crane & Sosulski, 2020; Cranton, 2016; Johnson, 2015). While reflection is often acknowledged as playing an important role in leading language pedagogies such as literacy-based approaches and intercultural language learning, it is rarely theorized from a pedagogical perspective, let alone integrated into formal language assessment. As reflective practice in language instruction has become more mainstream, it is important ...

A problem-based approach to language instruction infuses the communicative classroom with current events, critical thinking, and interdisciplinary connections. Through a process of identifying a problem, gathering resources to understand the problem, and then working with a group to process and report on what they have learned, students acquire language as they learn about the world around them and engage deeply with others’ perspectives. Although problem-based language learning can be used as the foundation of an entire course or program of study, this talk will emphasize how and why instructors can implement problem-based language learning right away through intentional, research-informed modifications ...

This talk discusses the inclusion of Black feminist poetic texts in language teaching. The objective is to rethink the roles of students and teachers in the classroom environment and contribute to inspiring new ideas and teaching practices. Black women’s voices in poetry may promote the development of pedagogical proposals that encourage a critical reading of the world in educational practices. Bio: Luana Reis is a poet, educator, and Black feminist scholar. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Literature at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches Portuguese and conducts research on Contemporary Black Women Literature and Quilombismo/Maroonage. As founder ...

The Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor Working Group on Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) invites you to attend a panel discussion on starting or growing a CLAC program. Dr. Stephen Straight and Dr. Suronda Gonzalez will discuss administrative, logistical, and cultural challenges and opportunities that affect CLAC programs. CLAC is a curricular framework that provides opportunities to develop and apply language and intercultural competence within all academic disciplines through the use of multilingual resources and the inclusion of multiple cultural perspectives. Dr. Stephen Straight is Professor Emeritus at Binghamton University and one of the original promoters and ...

ASL (American Sign Language) is experiencing a pop-culture moment. In the past few years, ASL has been visible in TV-shows, movies, commercials, and in sports and news broadcasts. ASL programs are popping up in schools and colleges all over the U.S. Despite dips in enrollment for many college programs, student enrollment in ASL classes is at an all-time high, as it has quickly become one of the most popular languages to take on college campuses. But despite its growing popularity, the hearing world knows little about ASL, its role in Deaf culture, its status as a real, human language, or ...

The Good Neighbors – Abu Tor/Al-Thuri project is a grassroots, volunteer-based initiative that started in 2014 in order to promote a shared life approach and to build a joint community between Jews and Palestinians who live side by side in Abu Tor, a binational neighborhood, which is located on the seam between East and West Jerusalem. This unique project, which is extraordinary given the long geopolitical and national conflict and the explosive daily tension between Arabs and Jews, includes initiatives such as language courses in Arabic and in Hebrew; a community organic garden; “Abu-Job” – a job placement project; a bilingual ...

This talk will focus on inquiry-based learning within the language classroom, more specifically WHY it is important as well as HOW we can successfully engage our students to ask more questions, sparking their curiosity and motivation to learn more about the language, culture, and people we teach about. Inquiry-based learning helps build intercultural communicative awareness and competence while fostering student agency and a sense of connection to our community through conscious global citizenship.

Critical thinking, an essential element across academic fields, has been at the heart of education for decades. While research on language education and critical thinking remains somewhat timid, it continues to gain ground among academic communities.  Available studies strongly suggest that pedagogical practices that wed world language teaching and critical thinking can facilitate language acquisition and enhance general proficiency. Despite this progress in the research field, there is nonetheless a general reluctance to integrate critical thinking in language teaching practices (Li, 2011; Pica, 2000) because, arguably, its integration presents more challenges for language educators than for teachers in other fields ...

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stephen Krashen put forward a model of language learning distinguishing between language acquisition (acquiring a language by listening or reading and understanding) and language learning (conscious, effortful study and practice of language). Today, many people look at Krashen’s monitor model as just a “method from the past.” However, most of these ideas are still very much present in contemporary research — just under different names, such as implicit vs. explicit language teaching and learning. This talk will share three of my studies using the acquisition/learning, or implicit/explicit, framework: one on elementary students learning Spanish, ...

Second language (L2) classrooms have undergone radical changes during the past 50 years, moving away from formal linguistic structures to drills and habit formation, then to comprehensible input, focus on form, cultural integration, sociocultural perspectives, and social networking. Throughout all of these shifts there has been surprisingly little emphasis on one aspect of L2 learning that all teachers and all students acknowledge as a critical factor in L2 communicative proficiency and literacy: Vocabulary. As someone once quipped: “If you don’t know any grammar, you can’t say much; if you don’t know any vocabulary, you can’t say anything.” This applies to ...

Unlike commonly taught languages, most Indigenous ones share a particular characteristic: The lack of material for language instruction and the challenge of identifying abundant sources of input for their classes. In many cases, it is necessary to adapt existing materials from other languages to achieve language learning goals, but in doing so, we usually find materials lacking the cultural knowledge of Indigenous people. In addition, many major languages have established proficiency standards (e.g., CEFR and ACTFL). Are these standards applicable to Indigenous languages? While Indigenous language courses may be similarly designed to those of major languages in their application of ...

This presentation describes the development of an e-textbook for first-year Portuguese classes. This pedagogical initiative strives to provide an inclusionary and open textbook for Portuguese, including the collaboration and feedback from Portuguese speakers of several economic and cultural backgrounds. In this context, “openness” means listening to the language of a given community and the commitment to reproduce it in a textbook format. Inclusion of minority groups in the textbook is perceived not as “curiosities,” but as an integral part of the cultures being represented so that a wider range of communities and language registers (from formal to informal) is portrayed. ...

We have all heard about revolutions in language teaching – big leaps in thinking that offer insights and new methods for the classroom (e.g., The Direct Method, ALM, Communicative Language Teaching). Yet, such revolutions wither quickly and never really take root. It seems that innovation in language teaching is difficult if not impossible. Why is this? In this talk, I will first differentiate between what I call “real innovation” and “pseudo-innovation,” suggesting that the vast majority of what people call innovation in language teaching is actually pseudo-innovation. I will then outline five interrelated barriers to real innovation: knowledge, personnel, institutionalized education, power, ...

Teaching for and about social justice positively influences all students, yet integrating social justice education into the college language curriculum can be challenging. In this talk, Drs. Cassandra Glynn, Pamela Wesely, and Beth Wassell, the co-authors of Words and Actions: Teaching Languages Through the Lens of Social Justice (Glynn, Wesely & Wassell, 2018), will address the principles of social justice education, looking specifically at how those principles connect with the guidelines and standards in world language teaching and common instructional practices in language programs. Attendees will be provided with illustrations, examples, and models of how social justice can be integrated in the ...

In his 2005 publication, John Levis highlighted the importance of promoting intelligible rather than nativelike speech as a target for second language (L2) pronunciation learning (and, more broadly, L2 speaking development). Broadly speaking, intelligibility refers to how well listeners understand L2 speech (Levis, 2006). However, “understanding” has frequently been operationalized via two dimensions, firmly established in Munro and Derwing (1995). Intelligibility (here used in a narrow sense) refers to listeners’ accuracy of understanding, frequently measured through learners’ word- and sentence-level transcriptions. Comprehensibility refers to the effort required by listeners to understand L2 speech, primarily measured using Likert scale ratings. Though a focus on ...

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a research-based framework for designing instruction to be more accessible to all learners. By following the principles and guidelines of the UDL framework, instructors can design a more inclusive learning environment that will provide an improved experience for all students. This talk will provide both a theoretical introduction to the UDL framework and practical suggestions for applying it to the language classroom. First, a brief introduction to UDL and information on learner variability (i.e., the diversity in how everyone learns) will be provided. Next, results of research that has investigated the effects of an ...