Cornell University Language Resource Center Speaker Series

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 ...