Title: Harnessing the power of technology and tasks in world language education
Presenter: Lourdes Ortega
Location: Zoom, Password: iwl

Abstract: 
Task-based language teaching (TBLT) focuses on asking students to do meaningful things in the target language so as to invite authentic language use into classroom learning while addressing real-world, learner-centered needs for the target language. Ever since the advent 25 years ago of the hyperlinked Web, multimodal social media, and app-rich mobile media, world language teachers have also experimented with achieving a close integration of technology in the classroom. In this talk, I propose that optimal blends of tasks and new technologies can provide an ideal programmatic framework for language instruction, or what I have called technology-mediated TBLT (Ortega & González-Lloret, 2015). I discuss principled ways of achieving these optimal blends, and point at key benefits when integrating tasks and technology in 21st-century world-language education. I also examine some challenges to consider. My goal is to encourage world language educators to think critically and creatively about how to harness the power of technology and language tasks in their classrooms.

Bio: 
Lourdes Ortega is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the convener of the Initiative for Multilingual Studies(link is external) at Georgetown University. She investigates how adults learn new languages, particularly in higher education settings. She is best known for an award-winning meta-analysis of second language instruction published in 2000, a best-seller graduate-level textbook Understanding Second Language Acquisition (Routledge 2009, translated into Mandarin in 2016), and since 2010 for championing a bilingual and social justice turn in her field of second language acquisition. Her latest book is The Handbook of Bilingualism with Cambridge University Press (co-edited in 2019 with child bilingualism researcher Annick De Houwer). Lourdes was born, raised, and college-educated in southern Spain, spent a year abroad at the University of Munich in the early 1980s, worked as a teacher of Spanish for almost a decade in Greece, and obtained her doctorate in the United States, the country where she has lived for over 25 years now. These choices have afforded her a different dominant language at different periods in her life (so far): Spanish, German, Modern Greek, and English. This trajectory has shaped her professional identities as an educator and a researcher. She is committed to investigating what it means to become bilingual or multilingual later in life and across elite and marginalized contexts for language learning. In her work she seeks to encourage connections between research and teaching and to support harmonious bilingualism and the well-being of all multilinguals.