Events - 2018

The UW German Society invites you to a Board Game Night.

What exactly is a native speaker? What beliefs and assumptions underlie the educational aim of native speaker competence? And are native speakers better language teachers? To what extent can alternative notions such as the “intercultural speaker” (Byram), “symbolic competence” (Kramsch), or “transcultural and translingual competence” (MLA) help address the problem of native-speakerism? And what implications do these discussions have for classroom language teaching?

These and other questions will be discussed at the Native Speaker Colloquium.

Prof. Dr. Konstanze Marx, Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Mannheim, will be visiting the University of Waterloo to give a lecture on cyberbullying.

The monolingual disposition (Gogolin, 1994) of our societies and school systems is a big obstacle on the way to innovation in language education. In particular, it constitutes a filter that prevents appreciation of linguistic and cultural diversity and fails to acknowledge learners’ resources and funds of knowledge. However, a movement away from a linear vision of language education into a more dynamic and flexible one capable of dealing with multilingual classes and plurilingual individuals is in place.