Language Resource Center Speaker Series - Kate Paesani

"Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Teacher Professional Development: From Research to Practice"
Kate Paesani
Director of the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA), University of Minnesota

Recent scholarship foregrounds multiliteracies pedagogy as a viable approach for developing students' language literacies, yet few resources exist to assist teachers in implementing this approach. Following a brief overview of multiliteracies pedagogy, I summarize research findings related to teachers' understandings and applications of multiliteracies pedagogy in postsecondary language programs. This research base then serves as a point of departure for identifying teachers' professional development needs. Based on these needs, I present two tools for teachers that were developed for CARLA's Foreign Language Literacies project: an infographic featuring multiliteracies and other meaning-based approaches and a lesson analysis checklist. Both tools bring together research and practice by helping teachers explain multiliteracies concepts, distinguish multiliteracies from other approaches, and scaffold multiliteracies lesson plans.

Bio: Kate Paesani (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Director of the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) and affiliate Associate Professor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on literacy-based curriculum and instruction and world language teacher development, couched within the frameworks of multiliteracies pedagogy and sociocultural theory. Her work has appeared in journals such as Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Foreign Language Annals, L2 Journal, Language, Culture, and Curriculum, Language Teaching Research, and Reading in a Foreign Language. She is co-author of the book A Multiliteracies Framework for Collegiate Foreign Language Teaching (Pearson, 2016), and is co-editor of Second Language Research & Practice (slrpjournal.org), the open-access journal of the American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators (AAUSC).  

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