Cornell University Language Resource Center Speaker Series

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 ...