Events

The Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies is pleased to present a guest lecture by visiting professor Michael Schart of Keio University, Tokyo/Yokohama. Entitled "Zwischen Übungssprechen und dialogischem Lernen: Kommunikative Didaktik im 'Sprachnotstandsgebiet A,'" Prof. Schart's lecture describes the advantages and disadvantages of the communicative language learning model developed since the 1980s. Please note that this lecture will be held in German.

The Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies is pleased to present a talk by historian Blanka Matkovic, PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, focusing on Croatian war veterans and their role in Croatian society after the Homeland War. Please see the poster for further details.

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