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Content Type: 3
Title: Languaging and Self-Care
Body:
By Christopher Daradics, CASLS Language Technician
Language Learning and the Self
The interplay between the Self and SLA is fascinating intellectual territory explored in detail in Mercer and Williams’ edited volume, Multiple Perspectives on the Self (2014). The collection of work places the Self at center stage in second language development. Mercer and Williams present topics associated with the Self that reveal it to be connected to extremely fundamental aspects of our human experience including: self-efficacy, self-esteem, self-concept, confidence, motivation, imagined possible Selves, and intersubjectivity.
As language educators, we can sometimes catch traces of these various facets of Self as they emerge and flourish in our students’ lives. In the flesh examples of this phenomenon abound in the lives of our students whose participation with their L2 becomes increasingly self-motivated, vivid, and consolidated into their personal identity. In our line of work, it is not uncommon for us to see students take root and nourish their sense of Self in the language contact areas our work together avails for them. This is to say, the process of learning a new language is fertile ground for the cultivation of Self. Teaching also affords the opportunity for meaningful cultivation of Self, if we choose to take time to do so. This month’s focus on Self is designed to do just that-- remind you to focus on you (i.e. your Self) in lots of comfortable and uncomfortable ways.
Language Teaching and the Self
As we know, the work of language teaching has its plusses and minuses. On the plus side, the work can be incredibly fun, interesting, and rewarding. As outlined above, language teaching afforded the cultivation of our own sense of Self and the blossoming sense of our own Self identity as we increasingly structured our own participation with what we once found to be a (more or less) foreign way of life and communication. Also on the plus side, by mastering the use of language (as language learners) as well as by being experts at teaching language (as language professionals) we have developed an uncommon awareness of how language works that can aid us in our communication with our Selves and with others. On the negative side, it can be very demanding, often occurring under difficult and exhausting conditions. Thus, Self-care becomes a fundamental priority for sustained work at our best. Fortunately, by blending and leaning in on our expertise as language learners and teachers, we can carry on with using language to curate and cultivate an ever more resilient, mature, and complex Self. This might be, for example, committing to a daily morning routine, or giving ourselves a break and not judging when we skip that routine to sleep in.
Languaging and Self-Care
The process of using and learning to use language (languaging) is not only a productive activity for the cultivation of Self, but it is also productive for the continued care of one’s Self. This is good news, because the Self constructing work we do with students can be exhausting and leave us feeling spent and depleted. Fortunately, we are languaging experts who have worked intentionally to develop a set of productive dispositions that we can use to tend to our emotional and intellectual resources when they become depleted. As expert communicators we have good reason to trust that our mature languaging skills will continue to orient us to and help us negotiate our way through whatever foreign, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable languaging environments we encounter.
As the Year Unfolds…
Taking proper care of one’s Self is not always celebrated by others, especially not in trying moments. However, over time, a self-conscious approach to one’s own communication and behavior yields a healthy and robust sense of Self and community. Reflection and rest are essential practices for bringing our best Selves to the table over the long haul. This week’s Activity of the Week is designed to unfold over the course of the next year and centers around three key languaging dispositions: suspending judgment, participating with intention, and elevating discourse. Consider nurturing your best languaging Self this upcoming year by scheduling some journaling time on your calendar at the beginning of each month. Timely journal prompts connected to these three dispositions are provided as opportunities to reflect and care for your Self each month of the school year.
Reference:
Mercer, Sarah, and Marion Williams, Eds. (2014). Multiple perspectives on the self in SLA. Tonawanda, NY: Multilingual Matters.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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Content Type: 4
Title: Year-Long Reflection on Languaging Dispositions
Body:
In this week's Topic of the Week article, we encourage you to schedule some journaling time at the beginning of each month over the coming year to care for your Self by reflecting on three key languaging dispositions: suspending judgment, participating with intention, and elevating discourse.
These three helpful dispositions can be revisited throughout the year. The journal prompts can serve as reminders to reflect upon each disposition and to thoughtfully and skillfully care for your Self throughout the upcoming school year.
Disposition 1: Suspend judgment
- Notice without passing judgment.
- Move beyond assigning blame.
- Reserve assigning value, gather more information before solidifying your position.
- Ask fundamental questions to challenge unconscious presuppositions.
Disposition 2: Participate with intention
- Know your capacity and give yourself permission to opt out or double down.
- Attune to your internal compass and learn to read it.
- Honor your boundaries and the boundaries of others.
- Play, explore, let your hair down.
Disposition 3: Elevate the discourse
- Cultivate a gracious internal dialog.
- Practice generous assumptions with others.
- Tend your own side of the street and mind your own business.
We encourage you to download these journal prompts and set aside some time in the beginning of August to begin this year-long exploration of your languaging Self.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
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Content Type: 3
Title: Stuck in a Rut: Three Ways to Refresh Your Language Class without Reinventing the Wheel
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By Julie Sykes, CASLS Director
Summer is close and you see some time on the horizon to recharge, reflect, and refresh. In doing so, you start to ponder ways you might refresh the language course you have now taught many, many times without spending the whole summer rewriting activities, assignments, and rubrics. This week, we explore ways in which you can refresh your course without reinventing the wheel or starting over.
- Add a few pragmatic tidbits to each lesson. For example, in week 1, when teaching greetings and leave takings, you might also include a small pragmatic component that asks learns to identify and produce pre-closings (i.e., intentions to end the conversation like Well, I probably should get to class) before they say goodbye; or when talking about future plans, you could teach a few ways to show interest through hedging (e.g. using words like maybe, possibly, and could, to soften the directness of language) and overlap (i.e., types of appropriate or inappropriate interruption). Adding these small pieces enables you to continue working with material and activities you find successful, but also refocus some of the curricular effort on new content. Since pragmatics can be infused throughout, you will not have to restructure the entire course to include the information and practice.
- Have learners experience something. Adding real world experience to a language class enables connections to people, places, and things. While some experiential learning can be extremely time consuming to administer, experiences can also be facilitated to allow learners to explore on their own. For example, for each chapter, you could add a thinking routine (e.g., I see…, I think…, I wonder…). As part of this experience, learners have to first take or find an image relevant to the topics in the chapter. They then are asked to journal about what they see, what they think about what they see, and what they still wonder. This takes their lesson to the world and brings the world to their own classroom as well.
- Switch out the readings. While it can seem like a simple fix, switching out reading passages to content you find both interesting and relevant to the world, can add a new element to your course. Using digital content or alternative genres can add depth to the course and engage students in a variety of reading contexts.
Regardless of the approach you take, making small changes can have a big impact on your course experience and that of your students.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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Content Type: 5
Title: Oregon Experience Program to Focus on Astronomy
Body:
CASLS is very excited to host a 2-week Oregon Experience Program (OEP) with collaboration between Kobe University and the Astronomy Department at the University of Oregon. The program is from August 27th to September 7th. The program contains 2 parts: the first week is language learning, for which the CASLS curriculum team worked with Dr. Robert Fisher and Dr. James Imamura at the Astronomy Department to design a week long place-based learning module including an introduction to astronomy, night sky view observation, a visit to Eugene's Science Factory, and a great amount of hands-on activities with content and language. In addition, CASLS and and the University of Oregon are proud to introduce Pine Mountain Observatory in Bend, Oregon, where students will be spending the following five days working closely with Dr. Fisher and his graduate students to use telescopes and professional equipment to document what they see. CASLS is thrilled to have the opportunity to design a new learning module for OEP in the STEM field and looking forward to having more STEM students interested in participating in OEP. “We are grateful that the astronomy department reached out to CASLS to build a meaningful place-based program together. This is our first collaboration and we cannot wait to see our first group of students in August. I am also delighted to see the expansion of OEP,” said Li-Hsien Yang, East Asia Program Director.
Source: CASLS Spotlight
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Content Type: 4
Title: Activity: Refreshing Your Curriculum
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By Ngan Vu, CASLS Fellow
This activity is designed to promote increased learner relevance within an existing curriculum. This activity exemplifies how current events could be used as an evaluation tool in lieu of a chapter test to promote deep understanding of a targeted language function. In this case, the language function is making predictions. This activity is most appropriate for Intermediate Mid to Intermediate High learners.
Learning Objective: Students will be able to:
- Make predictions based on their self-selected current events within a shared theme.
Mode: Interpretive
Materials Needed: Supplementary Vocabulary Handout, Inquiry Instructions Handout, Project Guidelines Handout
Procedures:
- Identify the chapter in your textbook in which students learn to make predictions.
- In accordance with the tenets of backwards design, conceptualize a project in which learners would use investigation of current events to promote their understanding and performance of the ability to make predictions. This Project Guidelines Handout provides a good example of one such activity. In addition to conceptualizing the project, it would be good to identify 5-6 current events that the learners might explore as part of the project in this step.
- Create questions to guide students in their inquiry of the current events. The Inquiry Instructions Handout provides an example of what a handout with these questions might look like.
- Next, consider whether or not to supplement the chapter’s preexisting vocabulary list to promote the acquisition of more specific vocabulary related to the current events you have chosen. Create the list of vocabulary if you need it and any handouts to supplement the vocabulary instruction.
- Finally, write your daily lesson plans. These plans will include direct instruction and contextual analysis of relevant vocabulary (see the Supplementary Vocabulary Handout for some ideas) and the future tense, activities that will scaffold the learners through their research of the current events as well as their presentation of the events, and will likely involve both text book resources and resources you have created.
Notes/Modifications:
This activity is easily adaptable provided that the final project matches the targeted language function(s). For example, while our examples involve using current events related to technological innovation to make predictions of what will happen in the future, historical events could be used to promote understanding and performance of the ability to narrate in the past.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
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Title: Book: Social Interaction and English Language Teacher Identity
Body:
Social Interaction and English Language Teacher Identity
By Tom Morton and John Gray
Published by Edinburgh University Press
This textbook uses analysis of interaction in a range of teacher education and professional practice settings in ELT to explore the different identities and power relationships which teachers orient to. It traces the role of identity and interaction in the processes of acquiring new teaching skills and knowledge, reflecting on professional practice and constructing teaching selves, and explores the limits and constraints on these processes imposed by global forces such as the marketization of education. The book is written for teachers, teacher educators, postgraduate students and researchers interested in the relationships between social interaction, identity and professional practice in ELT. It is suitable for use in conjunction with any postgraduate-level course on language in interaction, as it surveys and critically discusses various approaches and includes many practical examples.
Visit the publisher's website at https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-social-interaction-and-english-language-teacher-identity.html
Source: Edinburgh University Press
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Title: Book: The Multilingual Challenge
Body:
From https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/208308?format=B
The Multilingual Challenge: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives
Edited by Ulrike Jessner-Schmid and Claire J. Kramsch
Published by de Gruyter
This collection of scholarly articles is the first to address the challenges of multilingualism from a multidisciplinary perspective. The contributors to this volume examine both the beneficial and the problematic aspects of multilingualism in various dimensions, that is, they address familial, educational, academic, artistic, scientific, historical, professional, and geopolitical challenges.
Visit the publisher's website at https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/208308?format=B
Source: De Gruyter
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Title: Book: The Routledge Handbook of Spanish as a Heritage Language
Body:
The Routledge Handbook of Spanish as a Heritage Language
Edited by Kim Potowski
Published by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group
The Routledge Handbook of Spanish as a Heritage Language brings together contributions from leading linguists, educators and Latino Studies scholars involved in teaching and working with Spanish heritage language speakers.
This state-of-the-art overview covers a range of topics within five broad areas: Spanish in U.S. public life, Spanish heritage language use and systems, educational contexts, Latino studies perspectives and Spanish outside the U.S.
The Routledge Handbook of Spanish as a Heritage Language addresses for the first time the linguistic, educational and social aspects of heritage Spanish speakers in one volume making it an indispensable reference for anyone working with Spanish as a heritage language.
Visit the publisher's website at https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Spanish-as-a-Heritage-Language/Potowski/p/book/9781138833883
Source: Routledge
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Title: Young Writers' Competition for Babel Magazine
Body:
From https://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-2240.html
This year, Babel: The Language Magazine (http://babelzine.com/) will be running the fifth edition of our Young Writers' Competition, which encourages young linguists starting out on their study of language. We will be publishing two articles, one by a 16–18-year-old writer and one by an undergraduate student. Both articles will appear in Babel № 25, published November 2018. If you are a keen Babel reader or language lover, get writing to be in with a chance to get yourself published – as well as a free subscription to Babel!
Deadline: Friday 24 August 2018
Visit http://babelzine.com/events.html to get inspiration from previous winners on topics ranging from sign language to spoonerisms, and from Romansch to Konglish.
Source: LINGUIST List
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Title: Call for Papers: Consortium on Useful Assessment in Language and Humanities Education
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From https://sites.google.com/cas.uoregon.edu/cualhe-2018/home?authuser=0
The Consortium on Useful Assessment in Language and Humanities Education (CUALHE) is an inter-institutional collaborative effort that aims to share and to enhance useful assessment practices developed by college language and humanities programs and to develop a cadre of scholars who can serve as assessment experts/facilitators. The Consortium fosters a culture of reflective teaching in higher education and supports research into student learning, making useful assessment a regular part of the academic modus operandi.
The 2018 conference at the University of Oregon spans two days, October 27-28, and consists of presentations and discussions on three assessment-related strands:
1. working with standardized tests in a useful manner;
2. assessing reading/writing across the curriculum; and
3. assessment as a tool for articulation between community college and university programs.
The deadline for proposal submissions is Friday, June 29, 2018.
View the full call for papers at https://sites.google.com/cas.uoregon.edu/cualhe-2018/call-for-papers
Source: CUALHE 2018
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