Taking Steps toward Global Citizenship: Linking Linguistics, Language Teaching and Learning, and the Goals of Undergraduate Education

Heidi Byrnes

Tuesday, 20 Apr 2010 at 8:30 pm – Gallery, Memorial Union

Heidi Byrnes is the George M. Roth Distinguished Professor of German at Georgetown University. Her work focuses on the acquisition of academic literacy in a second language by adult, instructed learners and draws on curricular, pedagogical, and assessment perspectives. Brynes has edited and coedited a number of publications, including Advanced Foreign Language Learning: A Challenge to College Programs and Educating for Advanced Foreign Language Capacities, and she recently served as guest editor of a special issue of Linguistics and Education that explores the contributions of systemic-functional linguistics to foreign language teaching and learning. She is also an associate editor of the Modern Language Journal. Brynes earned her MA at Kansas State and PhD at Georgetown University. The Quentin Johnson Lecture in Linguistics.

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Abstract
As institutions of higher education aim to prepare their students to “become knowledgeable, contributing citizens in a world of diverse cultures,” students’ sophisticated awareness about the pivotal role of language and culture in ways of knowing and ways of being in a globalized world become central learning goals. In this lecture Dr. Brynes will explore how the interests and concerns of scholars in the fields of linguistics, language teaching and learning, and of colleagues across the disciplinary spectrum of undergraduate education are in fact shared. Indeed, these learning goals can only be fulfilled if they are pursued across the curriculum. For institutions of higher education, the stated concern with fostering the kinds of communicative abilities, the kinds of reasoning abilities, and the kinds of ethical and affective abilities that are at the heart of informed and responsible action in a globalized world is, at its core, a concern with uncovering the relationship between knowing, social action, and languaging. Dr. Brynes will initially make this case by proposing that we reconsider the nature of foreign language curricula in a way that enables the development of the kind of advanced levels of second language abilities that are so crucial for societies. She will then expand this argument by showing how the same dynamic that can support intellectually rigorous world languages education throughout the span of undergraduate education applies as well to any meaning-making across the disciplines, inasmuch as language plays a crucial role in the creation, transmission, and use of knowledge in all human endeavors.

Cosponsored By:

• Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)