ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION:
What should be the knowledge base of foreign language
teachers in higher education?
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the L2 Journal, the BLC will hold a Roundtable on the relationship between research and practice in the teaching of foreign languages. With globalization, many of the traditional tenets of foreign language teaching and learning at the college level have been put into question (e.g., the native speaker target, communicative competence as a pedagogic goal, the concept of a monolingual target culture, and the traditional divisions between the teaching of language, literature/film, history, and culture). They are now slowly being replaced by such concepts as the multilingual speaker, multiliteracies, multimodality, translingual practice, translanguaging, and the development of social and historical consciousness. Meanwhile, the new instructional conditions currently imposed by the global pandemic are making teaching practice more challenging than ever. They are leading to a re-thinking of what we are teaching foreign languages for, and what knowledge language teachers need to have to meet today’s educational challenges. These changes have consequences for the professional development of language instructors, both GSIs and Unit 18 lecturers, at the University of California and beyond. The Roundtable participants will address three questions crucial for training, hiring, evaluating, and promoting foreign language teachers: 1) From where are foreign language teachers expected to draw the knowledge necessary for them to teach in person and online? 2) Which field(s) of inquiry are they expected to call their own, and what do any of these fields have to offer language teachers? 3) How have the knowledge and insights you have gained from this field or any other source of knowledge informed your teaching practice?
Speakers
Margot Szarke, Lecturer, French
Dominick Lawton, Graduate Student, Slavic
Ignacio Navarrete, Professor, Spanish
Minsook Kim, Lecturer, East Asian Languages & Cultures
Gabriella Licata, Graduate Student, Spanish
Annamaria Bellezza, Lecturer, Italian
Download Bellezza’s presentation as a PDF
Download Bellezza’s handout as a PDF
These speakers will be joined by the members of the Executive Board of the L2 Journal: Robert Blake, Mark Kaiser, Rick Kern, Claire Kramsch, and Emily Linares.
October 9, 2020
3 – 6 pm
via Zoom Session
(Register here)
Sponsored by the Berkeley Language Center and the L2 Journal