(Classroom Management, Translanguaging) Webinar Library
Translanguaging Strategies for Teaching a Foreign Language Classroom
In any language classroom, foreign language teachers must be prepared to deal with an ever-growing group of multicultural, multilingual students varying not only in terms of their socio-economic status, but also of their linguistic background. For example, it is not uncommon for a foreign language teacher to have to teach a classroom in which the students greatly vary in terms of their proficiency level in the language being taught, which ends up putting a burden difficult to overcome for the teacher, who need to find a balance in the classroom, reaching many different types of students. However, there are certain strategies that could help both the teacher and the students make a better use of the language learning processing. In this presentation, translanguaging strategies will be discussed, which are those strategies that promote the purposeful use of different languages and/or cultural resources in order to enrich instruction by incorporating students’ own personal perspectives and experiences. The proposed presentation will discuss different strategies (e.g., teachers’ need to value their students’ languages and cultures by including activities that either model different languages or focus on aspects of different cultures and languages) that could be used by both the teachers and the students. The presentation will be practical in nature, by providing concrete, hands-on examples on how such strategies can be applied into a successful foreign-language classroom.
About Maria Teresa Martinez-Garcia
Maria Teresa Martinez-Garcia completed her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Kansas in August 2016. Her research interests focus primarily on experimental linguistics (bilingualism and second language speech perception and production) and pedagogical approaches to the teaching of foreign languages (teaching strategies). Currently, she works as an assistant professor in the Spanish department at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.
