November 18th, 2021 (15:00 - 16:30 Boston | 21:00 - 22:30 Madrid)
The commercial teaching materials used in beginner-level Spanish courses in the United States are not always aligned with advances in Applied Linguistics, nor do they explore in-depth cultural content relevant to the Hispanic world. In this session, which is part of the Lecture Series within RLL’s Initiative on Teaching Spanish as a Heritage Language (coordinated by Harvard University’s Romance Languages and Literatures professor María Luisa Parra and co-sponsored by the Observatorio), Jorge Méndez will present the curriculum of a first-year Spanish course developed at Harvard University to demonstrate how content-based courses can be created even at the early levels of language learning. The course’s aim is to develop communicative and sociocultural skills as students explore topics of environmental, cultural, and social sustainability that affect Hispanic communities.
Jorge Méndez Seijas is Preceptor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He has taught Spanish at Princeton University, Georgetown University, and the University of Rhode Island, institutions in which he has developed several curriculum design projects for students of Spanish as a second or heritage language. His areas of specialization are Spanish second-language acquisition, Hispanic Linguistics, curriculum design, and Phonetics and Phonology.
Online via Zoom | RSVP: https://bit.ly/RSVP-Observatorio o info-observatory@fas.harvard.edu
Language: Spanish