Author: Ivan Stefano

The Buckeye Language Education Resource (BuckLER) Center welcomes Dr. Peter De Costa

Developing Critical Multilingual Language Awareness from Pedagogical Stance to Research-Based Practices: Global Perspectives
Location: University Hall 014
Date: Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Time: 4:30-6:00 pm
Event Speaker: Dr. Peter De Costa

Drawing on the five (cognitive, social, affective, performance, and power) domains identified by Prasad and Lory (2020), and focusing on language learners and their communicative repertoires (García, 2017), I explore how Critical Multilingual Language Awareness (CMLA) can promote a greater consciousness of language and the voicing of students’ multilingual experiences. This is achieved primarily through emphasizing power inequalities inherent in language use and their ideological basis. To illustrate the potential of CMLA within language teacher education, I invoke examples from educational contexts across the world. And in doing so, I demonstrate how we can create opportunities for language teacher educators to help teachers critically engage their students, especially with respect to key topics like gender and pluricentric notions of languages. These pedagogical moves, in turn, enable teachers to enact transformative change in a multilingual and multicultural world.

Peter I. De Costa is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages & Cultures and the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. He is the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly (2018-2026) and the First Vice-President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (2023-2024).

The Buckeye Language Education Resource (BuckLER) Center welcomes Dr. Zhongfeng Tian

Centering Teacher–Researcher Collaboration in Translanguaging Research
Location: Schoenbaum Hall 220
Date: Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Time: 4:30-6:00 pm
Event Speaker: Dr. Zhongfeng Tian

The last decade has witnessed the momentum of “trans-” turn in applied linguistics and language education. Within these conversations, the term translanguaging articulates a paradigmatic shift in how we think about language(s) and how we can serve multilingual learners in ways that are more humanizing and justice-oriented (Tian et al., 2020). However, we have yet to encounter translanguaging as consistent and intentional practices across K-12 educational settings despite its theoretical and pedagogical promises. In this talk, Dr. Tian will suggest one pathway towards advancing and sustaining translanguaging: teacher–researcher collaboration. He will firstly explain the rationale behind it and then introduce a framework, expanding García et al. (2017), which explicitly centers on the power of equitable teacher–researcher partnerships and the embedded dynamic, iterative, complex process: translanguaging co-stance, co-design, and co-shifts (Tian & Shepard-Carey, 2020; Shepard-Carey & Tian, 2023). Based on his past years’ work alongside pre- and in-service teachers in ESL and Mandarin-English dual language bilingual education contexts (e.g., Tian & Lau, 2023; Tian et al., 2022), he will illustrate how this framework could provide a heuristic to unpack, analyze and potentially improve collaborative approaches. He will end with suggestions for both researchers and teachers to reimagine a juntos future to continuously push translanguaging theory forward and make translanguaging pedagogies norms in our classroom spaces.

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The Buckeye Language Education Resource (BuckLER) Center welcomes Dr. Paula Winke

If you self-assess your language proficiency, I will trust your scores! Coming to terms with measurement error in language testing
Location: Schoenbaum Hall 220
Date: Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Time: 4:30-6:00 pm
Event Speaker: Dr. Paula Winke

A language test is often viewed as a measurement event whose scores are hard to refute. Indeed, there is a science and a craft behind language testing, making them seem infallible, but tests also do always have a certain amount of measurement error. Measurement error is normal. In this talk, she will discuss why measurement error is there, and what it looks like. We will take a nice, hard look at different sources of measurement error and divide them between sources we can do something about (to lessen measurement error), and those we cannot do anything about (because the error is inherent in the properties of the assessment event). We also review consequences of measurement error, which, she will showcase, can range from the absurdly humorous, to the tragically morbid. Toward the end of the talk, she will ask language teachers in the room to consider adopting a relatively error-prone language test: a self-assessment of speaking proficiency. We will discuss what the self-assessment can do, and what it cannot do, and weigh the pros and cons of its use. Thus, the overall goal of this talk is for teachers to be able to estimate measurement error in their language tests, and then adjust score uses accordingly.

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The Buckeye Language Education Resource (BuckLER) Center welcomes Dr. Florencia Henshaw!

Connecting Research and Practice in World Language Education
Location: Interfaith Prayer and Reflection Room, Room 3020-C, Ohio Union
Date: Wednesday, April 19, 2023
Time: 4:00-5:30 pm
Event Speaker: Dr. Florencia Henshaw

In her talk, Dr. Henshaw will explore the challenges and opportunities associated with the connection between what we know from research and what we do in practice.  The presenter will start by underscoring the importance of understanding the “why” behind the “what and how,” not only because doing so may improve practice, but also because competence increases confidence​ in educators (when making decisions, participating in professional communities, consuming information, etc.). Then, she will discuss what factors have been shown to limit access to research, such as time constraints, discourse differences, and perceived irrelevance to their own context. The talk will conclude with suggestions of possible steps to take to overcome those barriers and empower language educators in connecting the dots and collecting clues from research findings in a way that goes beyond summaries or including pedagogical implications in journal articles. Continue reading →

The Buckeye Language Education Resource (BuckLER) Center welcomes Dr. Meg Malone to The Ohio State University!

Assessment Literacy in World Language Education
Location: Interfaith Prayer and Reflection Room, Room 3020-C, Ohio Union
Date: Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Time: 4:00-5:30 pm
Event Speaker: Dr. Meg Malone

Based on her work at ACTFL, Georgetown University, and the Center for Applied Linguistics, Dr. Malone (Ph.D., Georgetown University) will review the facets of assessment literacy in pursuit of a framework for world language education, including theoretical elements, practical applications and ethical implications. Theoretical elements will focus on both historical (Taylor, 2009; Fulcher, 2012; Inbar-Lourie, 2008) and recent (Kremmel & Harding, 2020; Coombe, Vafadar, & Mohebbi, 2020; Deygers & Malone, 2019) principles and research for language assessment literacy. Next, the presentation will provide some practical applications of language assessment literacy for different practitioners. Finally, the framework will be discussed vis a vis the ILTA Code of Ethics. Continue reading →

 The Buckeye Language Education Resource (BuckLER) Center welcomes Dr. Kris Knisely!

Gender-Just Language Pedagogies: How Trans Knowledges Reflect and Remake Linguistic Life
Location: Zoom – Register here
Date: Thursday, February 2, 2023
Time: 4:30-6pm EST
Event Speaker: Dr. Kris Knisely

Language education represents a site for identity (re)construction, mediated through experiences of doing language with others and of learning to do language differently. Through acts such as speaking, reading, and writing, learners must linguistically position themselves and be positioned by others. In this way, language education encourages learners’ reflections on their own identities in relation to the broader social world. Although language learning allows students to (re)imagine, (re)invent, and explore new linguistic and cultural identities, there is often limited attention to trans knowledges and linguistic practices in the curriculum, textbooks, research, and pedagogy of language classrooms, leaving many educators to report feeling particularly un- or under-prepared to engage in gender-just language teaching. Continue reading →

Going Beyond Words in Multicultural and Multilingual Settings: From Multimodality to Transmodality
Location: Ramseyer Hall 136
Date: Thursday, March 31, 2022
Time: 4:30 – 5:30 pm
Event Speaker: Professor Brahim Azaoui, Université de Montpellier

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Tracking Foreign Language Proficiency: Great (and not so great) Expectations
Location: Barbie Tootle Room at the Ohio Union
Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2022
Time: 4:00 to 5:30 pm – Reception to follow
Event Speaker: Dr. Susan Gass, University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University

In this talk, Dr. Gass will discuss the results of a federally-funded, large-data project, carried out at three state universities. Over a three-year period of time, she and her team collected speaking, listening, and reading proficiency data from students studying 10 languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. This resulted in a database of more than 9000 tests from students in years 1-4 of foreign language programs. She will report data from some of these languages focusing on the following areas: 1) What does it take to reach advanced proficiency?, 2) What levels of proficiency do language majors reach? and 3) Does the starting point of language study matter?, 4) What about heritage status?, and 5) How can students be incentivized? She will end with a discussion of the public availability of this large database.

The Seal of Biliteracy: A 10-year Retrospective
Location: 3020-C Ohio Union, Interfaith Prayer and Reflection Room, 1739 N. High St., Columbus, Ohio 43210
Date: Thursday, April 14, 2022
Time: 4:30 to 5:30 pm
Event Speaker: Dr. Kristin J. Davin, Associate Professor of World Language Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Registration is required: To attend in-person, register here.  To attend on Zoom, register here.

Last year marked the 10-year anniversary of the adoption of the Seal of Biliteracy in California. The policy, which recognizes students who graduate high school bilingual and biliterate, exists in 45 states and the District of Columbia. However, due to its grassroots origins and lack of federal funding, requirements of the recognition vary from state to state. In her talk, Dr. Davin will examine these variations and show the percentage of graduates earning a Seal of Biliteracy across states, illustrating how distinct policy characteristics relate to these percentages. Based on these findings, Dr. Davin will discuss tradeoffs related to critical policy characteristics and share recommendations.

This free event is co-sponsored by the BuckLER Center, the Department of Teaching and Learning, the Center for Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Anti-colonial and Anti-racist Language Pedagogies: Reimagining Curricular Frameworks
Location: Sullivant Hall 141 and on Zoom
Date: Friday, November 12, 2021
Time: 2:20 to 3:40 p.m.
Event Speaker: Dr. LJ Randolph Jr., UNC Wilmington

Eurocentric and colonial frameworks have traditionally been at the core of language and cultural studies, leading to ideologies that have diminished, devalued, or erased the language varieties, cultures, and experiences of racialized and minoritized communities. This talk will explore ways to challenge such ideologies by applying anti-colonial, anti-racist approaches to various elements of curriculum design, including identification of learning objectives, selection of resources, and assessment of students. We will discuss connections to interdisciplinary research in the field of critical pedagogy, and we will examine specific examples from the classroom.

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