Blog
Join us in our Fall series of free professional learning webinars for language educators! Often, opportunities to connect with peers abroad are limited to students who have the time and financial means to travel and stay for extended periods of time. Open Doors reports that less than 10% of U.S. undergraduates study abroad. As a low-cost or no-cost opportunity, virtual exchange has the potential to enable all students to connect and collaborate with peers from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds...
Digital Multimodal Composition in Language Education The call to broaden our understanding of literacy is not new. Over the past 20 years, scholars have been calling for the need to extend the range of literacy practices by bringing new forms of representation and communication, especially those of the digital age, into the L2 classroom. This call reflects a view of communicative competence which today is understood as multimodal communicative competence. The multimodal turn in language education is an outcome of the...
The word plons in Dutch describes the noise made by something splashing into a surface and is thus an apt name for the Professional Learning Online Network Space (PLONS), which is designed to create a ripple effect, by fostering linkages between language teaching, research and practice, and shared ideas and resources between educators. Intended for language educators in K-16 settings: elementary/middle school, high school and post-secondary institutions. 2024 PLONS: Bringing Ungrading to Language Teaching This PLONS is meant...
We are proud to have awarded two CERCLL Faculty Research Fellowships this year. Congratulations to CERCLL Faculty Research Fellows Dr. Melissa Fitch and Dr. Hongyi Jia! Melissa A. Fitch, University Distinguished Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, College of Humanities Caminho da Vida: Promoting Portuguese Study for Spanish Speakers O Caminho da Vida will be an online Adobe resource for language educators to promote the study of Portuguese among Spanish speakers. The materials and activities will all connect to the...
An open website was created by Project Leaders Wenhao Diao (University of Arizona), Yang Xiao-Desai (San Francisco State University), and Yi Xu (University of Pittsburgh), to respond to the dearth of research focusing on FL education in K-12 contexts (Urlaub & Watzinger-Tharp, 2016), and also to the fact that K-12 language teacher preparation programs do not address the specific linguistic and cultural issues of LCTLs like Chinese–which was the most studied language in the K-12 context at the time of this project, and...
In recent years, cutting edge tech tools such as neural machine translation (NMT), generative AI and extended reality (XR) have given rise to a mixture of excitement and concern as to their potential uses. In this webinar series, the opportunities and challenges these tools present will be explored and the pedagogies they require examined for the purpose of rebooting language teaching and learning. Click on the titles below to access the recordings, slides and resources for the webinars in...
Worlds of Experiences for Language Learning (WELL) is an innovative project that aims to provide professional learning support to language teachers in designing immersive experiences to globalize their curriculum. Educators participating in the program come from K-16 contexts across the US, with a few taking part internationally. The Spring session is coming to an end and it’s time for this semester’s participants to showcase their Virtual Field Experiences (VFEs). Their work has been amazing and their VFEs offer so many...
Presented by Kathy G. Short, Dorea Kleker, and Narges Zandi (University of Arizona). With Julie Kasper (Childhood Education International) and participating writer/illustrator Erika Meza, author of To the Other Side. May 30-31, 2024, at the University of Arizona Join us for an IN-PERSON two-day workshop at the University of Arizona, to engage in experiences and books that invite children to immerse themselves in literature about refugee and immigrant experiences! In this interactive workshop, participants will explore new picturebooks and novels...
LaTeS is a biannual workshop at which K-12 language teachers can share ideas and issues that are specific to their community, and leave with methods and materials that they can implement into their own classrooms. Arizona Continuing Education is available to those who participate. Read below to see the topics presented in 2024. Spring 2024 LaTeS, April 27: Creating an LGBTQ+-Inclusive Learning Environment for All Learners in the Language Classroom and Beyond Presented by Ben Fisher-Rodriguez (Seattle, Washington) Click the...
Apply for a 2024 CERCLL Faculty Fellowship! Application deadline: Friday, March 29, 2024. The CERCLL Faculty Fellows program promotes scholarly work connected to the mission of CERCLL as a Title VI National Language Resource Center: to research and develop the teaching of culture, language and literacy, especially within less commonly taught languages (LCTLs). In 2024, we particularly invite proposals focused upon research related to AI and critical digital literacy; critical global citizenship and language/culture learning; multimodal/multimedia literacies and LSP practice;...