Announcements

AATSP National Spanish Exam (NSE) LATE Registration Open

Secondary level Spanish teachers who want to enter their students in the national Spanish competition.

Due: February 26

https://nationalspanishexam.org/exams/national-spanish-exam/

CARLA Summer Institute Program 2024 - The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) at the University of Minnesota provides high-quality professional development for language teachers that links research and theory with practical applications for the classroom. In 2024, CARLA will offer ten online (asynchronous and synchronous) institutes and four in-person institutes (held on the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis).

Dr. Bobby Hobgood and Dr. Adrianna Laza Medina of UNC Charlotte announce the publication of their new book, Studying a Foreign Language: An Interactive Guidebook

How the new book, Studying a Foreign Language: An Interactive Guidebook, by Dr. Bobby Hobgood and Dr. Adriana Laza Medina, addresses a curricular challenge


Three years ago, a serendipitous meeting during a search committee gathering led to the writing of a text to support language learners.  Neither my co-author, Dr. Adriana Laza Medina, nor I could have imagined that a single sidebar conversation would result in a three-year collaboration culminating in the publication of this book.  To be specific, the conversation began as an acknowledgement of the often-uttered complaint, “Students struggle with  studying a language.”  The reality:  Have they ever been taught how to study a language? 


The first phase of the writing process, in retrospect, was the planning, development, and delivery of a series of workshops in the newly renovated Language Resource Center to address studying a language.  To be clear, “studying” in this case, refers to what, why, how, when, and where students engage in a second or third language outside of the classroom.  We offered six workshops the first year. Students and faculty members attended. Neither of us had suggested the idea of a book at that point.  One student, who was also a teacher, requested we present the workshop to her high schoolers, so we did. Later, we collapsed the six workshops into a conference proposal. It was following a standing-room only presentation at a national conference where  attendees affirmed their students’ struggle with language study, that we wondered how we might parlay this topic into a book to help more language learners. 


The book is organized as a  guidebook, and is intended for anyone who is studying a language through formal or informal study.  It was written with two underlying premises:

It was written to help language learners achieve several goals:

Three underlying influences support the scope and sequence of the guidebook:

This semester, the book is being used as a book study for graduate level education students who are current K-12 teachers.  Their feedback, coupled with a peer-review, will be used to inform the second edition, scheduled for publication in Fall 2021. 

For more details, see bit.ly/studywl 

Dr. Dudley M. Marchi of North Carolina State University announces the publication of his book on French Heritage of North Carolina