CERCLL Graduate Fellows Program

Isabella Calafate de Barros, PhD Candidate in Hispanic Linguistics

Critical pedagogies in the SHL classroom: Material Design

This project aims to offer Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) instructors pedagogical tools for developing critical language awareness in the SHL classroom. With numbers rising, the United States has one of the largest populations of Spanish speakers in the world. Although there are specific regions of greater concentration, the Latinx community is day after day more present across the country (Beaudrie & Fairclough, 2012). Despite these facts, Spanish, as a minoritized language in the US (Potowski, 2018), suffers from a lack of prestige and is marginalized and evaluated as an inferior language. As a reflection, Spanish speakers are marginalized, and, in many cases, abandon the language and their heritage because they internalize beliefs such as that they speak a poor and inferior Spanish. In an attempt to battle systemic oppression towards heritage language speakers, the field of SHL has been evolving in terms of pedagogical approaches and several scholars have argued for a critical turn in the field. Instead of an approach that intends to replace the students’ dialect or restrict it to specific domains, at the core of critical pedagogies is the need for legitimizing and empowering heritage language learners (Leeman and Serafini, 2016). As pointed out by Martínez (2003), “languages and speakers do not exist in a vacuum; instead, they exist in a well-defined and socially significant linguistic market structure” (p. 8). Therefore, to empower students, it is crucial that they have access to pedagogical practices that shed light on and discuss the fact that languages will have different market values based on power. This is key for them to raise and develop their critical awareness in order to question taken-for-granted and essentialist language assumptions and, therefore, be able to better engage in the quest for social justice. Nevertheless, there is still a gap between theory and practice given that there is a lack of pedagogical materials that can indeed achieve this goal, especially if we think of textbooks. In order to contribute to filling this gap, the main outcome of the current project will be an open source collection of activity sets based on critical pedagogies for the use of SHL instructors across the country.

Jessica Tiegs, PhD Candidate in Hispanic Linguistics

Comparative Romance Development and Variation

The proposed project creates both material for a specific course that compares development of Romance languages and their synchronous patterns, and a course shell to be used for the teaching of any number of comparable languages. At the University of Arizona and at many other universities, Romance languages are taught separately, with little purposeful connection between these very similar languages and their respective departments. This course will bridge the separation between these languages and create a curriculum that presents comparisons and contrasts in a holistic light while including other, lesser-studied Romance languages that are commonly left out of undergraduate curriculum. While Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian are commonly available, little mention, if any, is given to languages that nonetheless are prominent in Romance linguistics literature, such as Catalan, Galician and Romanian. The goal is to teach those majoring in a Romance language the commonalities in the development of these languages so that students can better understand synchronous patterns and similarities among them, as well as make connections between communities of people. As all languages share a history with some others, this course could easily be adapted to the teaching of other sets of related languages. These courses aim at teaching students to think about language in comparative ways, both diachronically and synchronically, allowing them to make connections between languages, broadening their understanding of language use and development in general.

Mariana Centanin Bertho, PhD Candidate in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching

Supporting Oral Production and Comprehension of L2/L3 Portuguese Learners

The current project aims to create materials for the development of oral production and comprehension of students of Portuguese. The learners’ phonological acquisition in an L2 or L3 undergoes the process of evaluation of the sounds of the target language through the sounds of the learners’ L1 or other languages. This process is explained in models of speech acquisition, such as the Speech Learning Model, by Flege (1981), and the Perceptual Magnet Effect, by Kuhl and Iverson (1995), which suggests that sounds that are similar, but not identical, between the L1 and L2 phonological systems, may represent difficulties to the L2 learner. Research on the instruction of pronunciation has suggested that there are benefits in explicit instruction of pronunciation when followed by practice and feedback. Moreover, studies have demonstrated improvement in oral production when students are engaged in meaningful and complex tasks. Enlightened by these theoretical and empirical studies, this project aims to create supporting materials for students of Portuguese as an L2 or L3 to develop their oral production and comprehension. The majority of students of Portuguese at the University of Arizona are Spanish speakers, either as an L2, heritage, or native language. This population of students may encounter specific difficulties when learning Portuguese because of its similarity with Spanish. In order to address these specific demands, we propose to create a variety of activities that balances focus on form and general understanding in meaningful tasks designed to improve students’ oral production and comprehension.

Anna Fomchenko Buchanan, MA Candidate in Russian

Students’ Motivation in a Hybrid Language Class

This project will focus on the problem of students’ motivation in a hybrid language class. Low motivation toward completion of online activities has been found among students who study Russian language in hybrid sections. Ignoring or not paying enough attention to the online portion of the class negatively affects students’ success in learning a second language. Lack of motivation inhibits learners’ desire to study, affects the overall progress, and negatively impacts their decision to enroll in future language courses (Prinzi, 2007). The project will examine the quality of online materials that are used in hybrid Russian sections, as well as the factors that lower the motivation of L2 learners. The author intends to improve online materials and provide various solutions to increase students’ motivation in a hybrid language class. A students’ survey, which was conducted by the author last year, has shown that the online portion of hybrid classes did not appear to be entertaining. However, students tend to pay more attention to the online portion when it helps them complete written homework assignments. Almost half of the respondents admitted that the use of technologies was not easy for them, which suggests that online tutorials should not be too challenging for students to work on their own. The author intends to completely upgrade hybrid Russian course by reshaping the approach of teaching a hybrid section, renewing online tutorials, and designing new activities. Toward the end of the project, the author will provide practical recommendations for foreign language instructors on how to make the online portion of the hybrid class more engaging and valuable for students, which will increase students’ participation in online activities and make their experience in a hybrid class more beneficial.

Alyeh Mehin, PhD Candidate in Middle East and North African Studies, Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, and Anthropology

Teaching Culture in Persian Language Classrooms: Material Design

Through this project, I aim to construct lessons for Persian language classes in three Intermediate sublevels in line with ACTFL standards, to address ‘everyday culture’ in contemporary Iran. I propose materials designed culturally critically to deal with multiplicity of practices of Persian culture. The existing materials that deal with teaching culture are limited: they usually only introduce reflections of ‘high culture’ (Byram, 1994: 27; Brown, 2015: 19) like poetry, fine arts, etc. and ignore the ‘everyday culture’ their beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes. For instance, they choose artistic expressions and literary styles as manifestations of culture, or introduce a location in uptown Tehran as context of an event. Another example is presenting cafe music of the 1980s in Tehran as pop music, preconceiving culture as an unchanging and homogeneous system of rules, as the received view of culture (Atkinson, 1999: 626). Presenting everyday culture with its multiplicities and variations helps develop awareness of what Persian is/isn’t and what Iranians do/do not do in their daily lives. Cultural awareness will influence attitudes underlying motivations in continuing learning (Dörnyei and Ushioda, 2013; Gardner, 2004) of our non-heritage learners of Persian, addressing exoticism, orientalism and othering as well as a ‘peace making’ tool in the international affairs context (Aruni and Sjraydi, 2001). In the three years I taught intermediate Persian with School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona, I have designed materials for project teaching with such themes as sports, lifestyle, food, physiology, the 1979 Revolution, myths and epics, rituals, love and relationships, marriage, etc. depending on needs and interests of the learners. I would like to use the opportunity of this fellowship to streamline these materials into more coherent project-based modules. I aim to develop task-based materials to match ACTFL standards for the three sublevels of the Intermediate with the supervision of the CERCLL team. I propose project teaching in the form of modules, each including lessons with meaningful task-based exercises with authentic materials in a range of themes, with task-based and meaningful use of language. Each module includes lessons which start with presenting a mainstream and official idea of the theme, followed by lessons that engage in alternative ideas and presentations, and tasks that present Iranians’ critiques on the official and alternative practices. At the end of each module, lessons include tasks that call for learners’ ideas about each aspect of the practices and engage them throughout.

Bruna Sommer, Candidate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching

Materials to Develop Genre Awareness in Foreign Language Classes

Supporting genre awareness often encompasses fostering rhetorical flexibility (Johns, 2008, 2015), which promotes the adaptation of genre knowledge to different contexts. Such a support can be built up through rhetorical-consciousness raising tasks guided by discovery-based (Cheng, 2018) and examine-and-report-back (Swales & Feak, 2004) approaches. While providing instructors with high-quality materials designed under these approaches facilitates instruction delivery, the pedagogical practices that support task implementation are not intuitive, thus requiring teacher preparation to understand concepts, methods, and how one affords the other. For this reason, this project aims to review and improve previously developed materials that foster metacognitive genre awareness implemented in the course PORT 425 (Advanced Grammar, Composition and Writing Skills) in the University of Arizona for seven semesters. In order to contribute to the curricular progression improvement in the UA Portuguese program, one additional lesson will be created under the same approach to be part of the PORT 325 course, Intermediate Grammar and Conversation, which comes right before PORT 425 in the curricular sequence. Since PORT 325 is a conversation course planned around the theme of art, this lesson will be designed following both a genre-based approach and principles of the Foreign Languages and the Literary In The Everyday (FLITTE) project. Creating materials for both courses (PORT 325 and 425) contributes to bridge the prevailing language and literature divide in foreign language programming and textbooks. In addition, this lesson can later be added to the number of resources in Portuguese provided by COERLL and CERCLL through FLITTE’s website. Drawing from the dissertation research conducted by the applicant, the project seeks to support the implementation of genre-based tasks by other instructors in the same institution, thus solidifying the approach inside the UA Portuguese program at the same time it also provides materials to inspire programs in other institutions. To do so, this project is three-fold: 1) revise and improve the materials previously implemented in light of the dissertation results, 2) prepare a teacher’s guide to support future instructors’ practice, and 3) create two webinars to explain genre-based teaching principles, and to illustrate how to implement one of the genre-based lessons. Ultimately, at the same time the project seeks to contribute to enhancing the number of pedagogical resources available for less commonly taught languages (LCTLs), in this case, Portuguese, it aims to provide materials as means for professional development. This initiative also works as a supporting measure to tackle the decrease in enrollment in Portuguese in the US (-20%) (Looney & Lusin, 2018) through strengthening research on LCTLs’ materials and instruction delivery.