Webinar presented by Young Ae Kim, Jieun Ryu, Sojung Chun, Seungmin Eum, Seojin Park, Sunyoung Yang (see individual bios below).
Language educators teach languages as well as important fields such as diverse cultures, social justice, interpersonal skills, and multimodal literacy. In addition to these areas, our project expands language education to include socioscientific issues (SSIs) such as Eastern/Western medicines, COVID-19, eco-friendly travel, and machine translation in Korean language classrooms. SSIs are closely related to STEM fields and as STEM has been gaining more currency in our daily lives, it is useful to incorporate SSIs in language classrooms. Moreover, SSIs enable us to diversify the areas of study we provide in our language classrooms while fighting against the “STEM divide.” Our students can advance their understanding of the target language by critically engaging in SSIs through multimodal projects such as writing tasks based on the guided use of machine translation (GUMT), making COVID-19 memes, or creating digitized guides of eco-friendly travel. Our webinar will present language educators of different languages our four semesters of developing SSI curricula and pedagogy by using Korean as a case study. We will offer detailed instructor guidelines and teaching materials so that language educators who are not familiar with STEM education can implement SSIs in their classrooms.
This event is part of the CERCLL project Socioscientific Issues in LCTLs Classrooms.
See presentation slides here (PDF)
Bios
Young Ae Kim (Ph.D., University of Georgia) is an assistant professor at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center. Her research interests include STEM education, teacher education, formative assessment, and integration of socioscientific issues in science as well as language learning.
Jieun Ryu (Ph.D., University of Arizona) is Director of the Critical Languages Program at the University of Arizona and holds a Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. Her research interests include technology in L2 teaching and learning, Less Commonly Taught Languages pedagogy, and self-directed learning.
Sojung Chun (M.Ed., University of Manchester) is a Korean instructor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. She has extensive experience teaching Korean at the elementary to high school and university level.
Seungmin Eum (M.Ed., Korea University; M.A., University of Delaware) is a Ph.D. student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. He holds a Korean language teacher certificate (level 2) issued by the Korean government and has worked as a Korean language instructor at several colleges in Korea and in the U.S. since 2008. His research interests are syntax, sentence processing, L2 sentence development, and Korean language education.
Seojin Park (M.A., Sookmyung Women’s University) is a Ph.D. student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. Her research interests are identity (re)construction and second language learning/teaching of socially and culturally minoritized groups of learners/teachers.
Sunyoung Yang (Ph.D., University of Toronto) is a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona, where she has directed the Korean Language Program under the theme of technology-enhanced language learning. Her research and teaching interests concentrate on the influence of new media and digital technologies on society with a focus on youth, labor, and gender issues in Korea and East Asia.