Heidi Byrnes

The Role of Task and Task-Based Assessment in a Content-Oriented Collegiate Foreign Language Curriculum.

This article explores the role of task and task-based assessment in a collegiate foreign language (FL) department that shifted its entire undergraduate curriculum from a form-based normative approach to a language-use and language-meaning orientationfor instruction. It examines how the demands for specificity that characterize task-based assessment contributed significantly to an enhanced knowledge base and a new educational culture on the part of practitioners, faculty and graduate students, primarily in literary cultural studies. Deeper insights were obtained not only in terms of assessment but also with regard to the relationship between (1) curriculum, instruction and learning goals and (2) outcomes in such an adult FL program and, ultimately, with regard to possibilities for an expansive interpretation of the notion of task itself.

Reconsidering Graduate Students' Education as Teachers: It Takes a Department!".

The article argues that prevailing approaches to educating graduate students as teachers need to be broadened conceptually and in practice. In particular, it suggests that preparing graduate students to teach constitutes only one component of a two-fold responsibility of graduate programs: to educate their students both as researchers and as teachers. To establish this linkage, graduate departments require a comprehensive intellectual-academic center that touches upon all practices of its members, faculty, and graduate students, in research and teaching. The paper suggests that a carefully conceptualized, integrated 4-year, content-oriented and task-based curriculum with a literacy focus provides such an intellectual core. By overcoming the traditional split of language and content, it invites a reconsideration of current practices in teaching and in the relationship of teaching and research. The article elaborates these issues through a case study in one graduate department, focusing on the implications of a reconfigured departmental culture for graduate students’ education as teachers and for their socialization into the profession. It concludes with observations about the nature and conditions of change in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dynamic interlanguage : empirical studies in second language variation

1: On Chameleons and Monitors.- 2: A Cognitive View on Interlanguage Variability.- 3: Does the Bioprogram Affect Second-Language Acquisition?.- 4: Assessing an Interaction-Based Paradigm: How Accommodative Should We Be?.- 5: Incorporated Repairs in Nonnative Discourse.- 6: Interlinguistic Variation and Similarity in Foreigner Talk: Illustrated with Respect to English-Speaking and German-Speaking Contexts.- 7: The Effect of Cultural Empathy on Second-Language Phonological Production.- 8: Variation and Convergence in Nonnative Institutionalized Englishes.- 9: Different Paths to Writing Proficiency in a Second Language? A Preliminary Investigation of ESL Writers of Short-Term and Long-Term Residence in the United States.- 10: Variation and Transfer in English Creole-Standard English Language Learning.- 11: Dialect Variation and Second-Language Intelligibility.- 12: Systematic Variability in Second-Language Tense Marking.- 13: Sociolinguistic Variation in Face-Threatening Speech Acts: Chastisement and Disagreement.- 14: The Social Dynamics of Native and Nonnative Variation in Complimenting Behavior.- 15: That Reminds Me of a Story: The Use of Language to Express Emotion by Second-Language Learners and Native Speakers.- 16: Classroom Foreign Language Learning and Language Variation: The Notion of Pedagogical Norms.- 17: Discourse Conditioned Tense Variation: Teacher Implications.- 18: The Colloquial Preterit: Language Variation and the ESL Classroom.

Articulating a foreign language sequence through content: A look at the culture standards

Curricular articulation and the integration of cultural knowledge with language development over extended sequences are among the most persistent challenges for contemporary language teaching and learning. The paper examines the nature of those challenges in light of theories of language and culture while using as the site of investigation the culture standards that have been developed within the framework of the Standards for Foreign Language Learning , a key document for L2 education in the United States, particularly at the K-12 level. Taking four perspectives, it suggests ways in which simultaneous content and language teaching might be tackled through a genre-based way of constructing extended curricula and by using genre-based tasks for informing pedagogical decisions. In this fashion, learners might be able to progress toward a competent cultural literacy that is language-based.

Shaping the Discourse of a Practice: The Role of Linguistics and Psychology in Language Teaching and Learning

This article treats the Modern Language Journal (MLJ) as a site for observing how a particular community, foreign language teachers, over an 85-year period shaped its practices discursively, gradually developing a particular kind of professional identity. Instead of treating the current situation as the result of a straight-line sequence of rational choices, this article points to various dynamics external and internal to the field whose influence was by no means preordained nor even necessarily beneficial. Focusing on the relationship between language teaching and disciplinary inquiry in linguistics and psychology, it identifies (a) a period in which the Journal and its readership circumscribed their interest in teaching modern, as opposed to classical languages; (b) a period in which both linguistics and psychology offered important insights, with linguistics, ultimately, dominating practice; (c) the rise of psycholinguistic models that, alongside existing understandings, led to enormously varied beliefs and approaches; and (d) a time for renegotiating our professional identity in light of a multiplicity of voices, interests, and models of research and practice. It concludes that the advantages of professionalization through disciplinary inquiry and the power it conveys to certain voices need to be balanced against the gains made possible with a kind of professional multilingualism.

Intelligent Automated Strategies of Teaching Foreign Language in Context

Trends in foreign language teaching for instructional settings are fundamentally motivated by our understanding of the essence of language, characteristics of human learning, and a human’s capacity to learn a language other than the native language. Following from our understanding in those areas, we have developed a prototype intelligent, automated, foreign language tutoring system, based on principles of contextualized, communicative language teaching. Our system emphasizes the exclusive or near exclusive use of the foreign language in meaningful situations, interactive instructional sequences, highly sensitive computer responses to the inputs of individual students, including the use of a natural language processing system to evaluate free text inputs, and the use of a variety of different types of practice exercises and media. We are building a system for developing lessons that function like a gifted teacher, and at the same time, are useful as research testbeds.

Language Understanding: Current Issues

Introduction How to use this guide PART I Language and Knowledge Judith Greene Introduction The Lexicon Syntactic structures Semantic representation Representations of Discourse Some conclusions PART II Language Processes and Models Judith Greene Introduction Lexical processing and semantic processing Syntactic processing and semantic processing Discourse processing and general knowledge Concluding issues PART III Anaphoric References Mark Coulson Introduction Types of anaphor Processing anaphors Placing anaphors in context The Bonding process Conclusions OVERVIEW Judith Greene Answers to SAQs References Index of Authors Index of Concepts.

The Dialogism of Meaning, The Discursive Embeddedness of Knowledge, The Colloquy of Being

While the field of linguistics is far from an undifferentiated whole,1 much linguistic theorizing over the centuries is unified by an understanding of linguistic patterns as being separate from individual and cultural knowledge. With the end of the Cold War, however, that conceptualization is seen as severely hindering our ability to address pressing problems on all levels of society. Among these are the concurrent demands for sophisticated levels of multiliteracies in the multicultural environment of the global information age, even as countries must deal with the consequences of dramatic migrations of entire ethnic groups and momentous country-internal demographic and economic shifts. All of these involve the ability to use languages competently in order for individuals and groups to participate in and contribute to the knowledge of societies, indeed in order to enable the existence of a viable multicultural civil society.

Affirming the context of instructed SLA: The potential of curricular thinking

Offered as a conceptual and programmatic piece, this article suggests that, due to its explicit educational orientation, the domain of instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) is challenged to align theoretical choices, research preferences, and educational practices in the interest of improving instructed L2 learning. It addresses the current disjuncture by proposing the constructs of ‘development’ along with ‘curricular thinking’, particularly when they are informed by complexity theory, in order to accomplish three interrelated goals: first, to specify a given educational context in a manner that allows for principled inquiry into how instructed L2 learning evolves in that setting; second, to affirm and operationalize its longitudinal trajectory in a traceable and actionable manner; and, third, to embed the situated and contingent forms of ‘doing teaching’ and ‘doing learning’ within a framework that gives them meaning, value, and significance for long-term development. The article discusses core issues arising from such an approach and briefly exemplifies it with curriculum development in a collegiate foreign language (FL) department. It concludes with a consideration of benefits for ISLA.

Forthcoming in The Modern Language Journal

An introduction is presented which discusses the journals format for 2016, including its special issue (100-S), the centennial anniversary of the journal and the colloquium presentations at the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference in Austin, Texas on January 9, 2016.