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:
Study is essential to language learning
The responsibility for language study is primarily the learners’.
It was written to help language learners achieve several goals:
Understand what it means to study a language
Develop a mindset and habits for language study
Organize themselves, their environment, and their time for success
Implement study strategies
Capitalize on readily available resources
Become self-directed as a language learner
Develop a Personal Language Study Plan
Three underlying influences support the scope and sequence of the guidebook:
the Communicative Approach to language teaching and learning
the distinction between “learning” and “acquiring” a language
the authors’ conceptual framework, the Language Study H.U.B., that takes a holistic view of language study
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