This summer Professor Chantelle Warner of the German Studies Department has been invited to lead a two-day workshop for the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy. The workshop, Becoming Multilingual: Fostering Symbolic Awareness in the Language Classroom, will focus on awareness raising, activities that can help students to develop as independent interpreters of meaning. A growing number of practitioners and scholars in fields of second language acquisition and teaching have argued that symbolic awareness is central to advanced language proficiency; however, it is sometimes difficult to see how subjective, stylistic, affective, and historical dimensions of meaning-making can be incorporated into the foreign language classroom. Through practical activities, Professor Warner will demonstrate some ways in which educators can integrate the symbolic dimensions of language into their work with texts in the language classroom.

Dr. Chantelle Warner is Assistant Professor of German and a faculty member of the Interdisciplinary Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where she specialized in 20th-century and contemporary German literature and applied linguistics. She has also studied in Münster and Frankfurt. Dr. Warner’s teaching and research interests cross the fields of literary and linguistic study. Her scholarly work focuses on language, and in particular literary language, as a site of struggle for social power and the investigation of how meanings and access to certain practices are regulated and controlled. These common theoretical issues drive her approach to literary texts as linguistic practices and her work on foreign language literacy and language/literature pedagogy.

More information about this and various other professional workshops can be found here: http://cercll.arizona.edu/doku.php/development/workshops/2012