Language Resource Center Speaker Series - Eduardo Viana da Silva

"Developing an Open and Inclusionary Language Textbook for Portuguese"
Eduardo Viana da Silva
Associate Teaching Professor of Portuguese, University of Washington 

This presentation describes the development of an e-textbook for first-year Portuguese classes. This pedagogical initiative strives to provide an inclusionary and open textbook for Portuguese, including the collaboration and feedback from Portuguese speakers of several economic and cultural backgrounds. In this context, "openness" means listening to the language of a given community and the commitment to reproduce it in a textbook format. Inclusion of minority groups in the textbook is perceived not as "curiosities," but as an integral part of the cultures being represented so that a wider range of communities and language registers (from formal to informal) is portrayed. While the example presented here is in Portuguese, the process of developing open and inclusionary language materials applies to all languages.

Bio: Eduardo Viana da Silva (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara) is Associate Teaching Professor of Portuguese and Portuguese Program Coordinator at the University of Washington. Before joining the University of Washington in 2015, Eduardo taught language courses, Luso-Brazilian literature, and topics on Brazilian culture at UCSB, BYU, University of Utah, and the Salt Lake Community College. His main areas of interest are Applied Linguistics, Luso-Brazilian literature and culture, curriculum development with a focus on culture and task-based language teaching (TBLT), and Global Citizenship. Eduardo is currently working on a textbook for Portuguese - Bate-Papo: An Introduction to Portuguese - as an Open Educational Resource (OER). 

Co-sponsored by the Language Resource Center and Latin American Studies Program.

Join us live on Zoom.