Event Date
Location: Olson 53A
Time: 2:00 PM
Description: We live in a complex and changing world in which academic, professional, and everyday life activities increasingly illustrate the need for sophisticated communicative and analytic abilities in intercultural and plurilingual contexts. These late modern ‘superdiverse’ conditions articulate closely with a primary goal of world languages education – to gain the capacity to contribute to dynamic processes of meaning making with an understanding of the divergent cultural practices, values, and ideologies that are involved. This presentation will describe pedagogical innovations that are adaptive to emergent communicative conditions, open to a diversity of genres and potentially mixed language communicative dynamics, and that offer experientially and linguistically rich opportunities for engagement. In conclusion, it is suggested that the future of instructed language education would benefit from adaptive alignment to rapidly changing global conditions and prolific linguistic change, and perhaps more ambitiously, I will present evidence supporting the position that language study should play an increasingly central position within the broader intellectual life and goals of contemporary universities.
Steve Thorne (Ph.D., UC Berkeley) holds faculty appointments in the Department of World Languages & Literatures at Portland State University (USA) and the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). His interests include formative interventions in language education contexts, intercultural communication, indigenous language revitalization, communication across new media and mobile technologies, and research that draws upon contextual traditions of language analysis and usage-based and distributed approaches to language development.