Events

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.

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.

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.

Join Deborah Britzman's (Research Chair in Pedagogy and Psycho-Social Transformation and a Distinguished Research Professorship at York University) talk on psychoanalysis and the classroom. Please see the poster for further details.

Film Screening: Denial

Legends and Dreams: Reinhard Kleist’s Graphic Narrative - Poster Exhibition

WCGS and GSS invite one and all to browse the halls of the Modern Languages building for an exclusive look at a poster exhibition of Reinhard Kleist's graphic novel Berliner Mythen.

The Social Media Aesthetics of Mobility: Reinhard Kleist’s The Olympic Dream and Comics on Refugee Experience