Teaching to the Multilingual Subject in the Foreign Language Classroom

Discover different ways of learning this Saturday, February 15 at the Anatol Center. Sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities and Department of Romance, German, Russian Languages & Literatures, this event will be hosted by Dr. Claire Kramsch (UC Berkeley), an internationally recognized scholar on foreign language teaching, pedagogy, and SLA. Below is her abstract for her French/Italian for Spanish Speakers Seminar.

Teaching to the multilingual subject in the foreign language classroom
If, instead of orienting foreign language instruction to the monolingual language learner,  we orient our teaching to the multilingual subject, who is learning to make meaning through different codes, modes, and modalities, and to construct for him/herself a multilingual sensibility, then the foreign language classroom becomes the site of a joint exploration of different social semiotic universes and different cultural and political realities. This paper will discuss what such an exploration might look like, based on concrete examples from the classroom.