Webinar: Designing authentic thematic units in the language classroom

The interconnectedness of the world and the access to online media have opened innovative possibilities for accessing and using authentic cultural input in the language classroom.

Yet oftentimes teachers need fresh ideas about how to weave culturally authentic texts and tasks into their curriculum and use them to create reliable and valid assessments to measure their students’ language proficiency.

This presentation will show how authentic cultural input can be used as a springboard to develop engaging interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational performance tasks, illustrating how to use performance-based rubrics alongside such tasks to assess students’ developing proficiency and intercultural communicative competence.

By the end of the presentation, participants will know how to use authentic cultural materials to design performance tasks and summative assessments that can supplement or replace their traditional grammar-and-vocabulary tests.

Exposes:

Dr. Jesse Gleason:

• Associate Professor of Spanish and Applied Linguistics in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Southern Connecticut State University, where she teaches across multiple programs, including undergraduate courses in Spanish as a world language.
• Graduate courses in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and targeted courses for pre-service teachers on how to work with English Language Learners (ELLs) in P-12 contexts.
• Jesse received her PhD in Applied Linguistics & Technology from Iowa State University and formerly served as the Director of the Lower-Division Language Program for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Florida.
• Her primary research interests include blended/online language learning, language teaching methods, and classroom discourse.
• In addition to her peer reviewed research publications and conference presentations, she is co-editor of a Special Issue of the CALICO Journal (2020 with Ruslan Suvorov: Promoting Social Justice with CALL) and recipient of the 2019 NASFLA Promising Scholar Award.