My Philosophy
My pedagogical practice is informed by the principle of learning as social action, which happens as constructed meaning through intensive dialogue and negotiation. This perspective shapes my classroom as engaging students as active participants of the learning process as well as myself as teacher and researcher. This can be achieved in either online of face-to-face classes using a variety of strategies grounded in creating interactive spaces.
In this spirit, three main principles are driving forces of my pedagogy: 1) encourage dialogue and collaborative work to create a sense of community; 2) utilize scaffolded materials for inductive analysis of authentic texts to expose students to different discourses and ideologies, and 3) implement hands-on tasks to enable application of knowledge across contexts, i.e., beyond the classroom.
Courses Taught
I currently teach graduate-level classes: Literacy in a Foreign Language (FLT 841), Culture in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT 815), Language Concepts (FLT 845), Foreign Language Teaching Methods (FLT 807), and Experiential Modules in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT 885), in which students produce their Master’s capstone projects. Syllabi for the current semester can be accessed in the MAFLT official website under FLT Content Courses: https://maflt.cal.msu.edu/courses/.
Pedagogical Materials
One of my research projects is on the development of data-driven learning materials for language students using learner corpora. Below you find materials created for an advanced writing course of L2 Portuguese taught at the University of Arizona informed by texts from the MACAWS corpus.
Sommer-Farias, B. (2018). Learner Corpus as Source for Materials Design: Lexical Bundles in a Genre-based Composition Course [Supplementary Material]. American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference, Chicago, IL. Available online through the link.
Webinars
Genre pedagogy
My research is also centered around genre theory and pedagogy with special attention to tasks that leverage multilingual students’ linguistic backgrounds to optimize learning how to write in additional languages.
This webinar goes over practical genre analysis strategies to design genre awareness tasks for multilingual students. The pedagogical practices are informed by my research with Spanish-English bilingual students of Portuguese.
Corpus-informed pedagogy
I am part of the research group who developed the Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments – Writing and Speech (Staples, Novikov, Picoral & Sommer-Farias, 2019-). Materials created for Portuguese language classes are shared in the MACAWS blog, where you also find materials for Russian classes. To conduct your own searches, click on the link below:
https://macaws.corporaproject.org/
Watch the webinars below facilitated by the Center for Educational Resources in Culture Language and Literacy (University of Arizona) if you’re interested in creating materials using similar principles for your language classes.