Second Language Teaching

In this course, students will become familiar with current trends in second language teaching that conceive learning as an active process of meaning-making and that respond to the new digital contexts and educational challenges of the 21st Century. Through personal and group reflections and discussions, students will connect their own experience as language learners and language teachers with the concepts and ideas encountered in the readings to elaborate their own practice –theory-in-use– for the teaching of Spanish to diverse populations and in different settings. Additionally, we will discuss the importance of literacy development and the use of literary and multimodal resources in the second language classroom. This will be done in order to promote learners’ ability to read, view, communicate, think and write critically about a variety of digital texts across disparate emerging new media forms. By the end of the course, students will be able to critically evaluate existing teaching practices and further their knowledge and skills to guide reading and the creation of meaning as a dynamic process of transformation in second language teaching.