CELT 2021 Presenter Information
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Thor Sawin
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Thor teaches linguistics and intercultural multilingual communication at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, CA, as well as German at the Middlebury Language Schools. He primarily trains future language teachers, but also works with future development workers and with Christian field language learners through the triennial International Congress on Language Learning.
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Session 5 on Saturday, March 6, from 3:30-4:00 (PT)
Teaching Teachers Linguistics Skills Through a Hospitality Lens
Teaching Teachers Linguistics Skills Through a Hospitality Lens
I reframed the linguistics for language teachers course at a secular graduate school through David I. Smith's lens of hospitality – the love of the stranger. Teacher trainees in my program often express feeling daunted as they develop linguistic skills for analyzing the four levels of language structure - pronunciation/phonology, vocabulary/lexicon, grammar/(morpho)syntax, and discourse - and struggle to connect to such skills to their imagined classroom selves. As action research, I redesigned the course to frame linguistics as hospitality, contrasting the xenophilia my globetrotting students already demonstrate (love of the novel, strange, unique) with philoxenia (loving the stranger) embodying a Christian worldview. Each of the four levels gets analyzed through the lens of teacher hospitality. This intervention built investment in the hard work required in the class by re-framing the ends. Students proved adept at reframing pre-existing social justice concerns and often-dry analytical skills as love for the stranger.
Resources:
| PowerPoint Slides |