Education Commons^™

Maximizing Communicative Competency In A Classroom, Yinshun Wang

Faculty Publications & Research

Developing students’ communicative competence is a primary goal of many language classrooms. This session will present various strategies to encourage learner agency. The presenter will introduce strategies to execute fast-paced communicative learning activities that bypass mechanical activities and task-based student assessments to measure students’ proficiency in interpretive, interpersonal and presentational modes of communication. Examples of lesson plans and student work from a high school Chinese classroom will be provided.

Teaching Tolkien: Language, Scholarship, And Creativity, Adam Kotlarczyk

Faculty Publications & Research

Why Tolkien?

Let us start with the obvious—if cynical—question, almost certain to come from a skeptical administrator or colleague: why would any serious, self-respecting English teacher want to teach an author whose work is about dragons, fairies, and the fantastic? With all the increased attention to standardized testing and with the demand for rigor in read- ings in the average English curriculum, choosing a popular text might raise eyebrows among critics. The question that an English teacher may be asked (or indeed, may ask him- or herself) is: doesn't teaching Tolkien as "serious" literature just fan those flames?