L2TReC Research Assistant Presents on Portuguese L2 Immersion at 2024 SWCOLT
Title: Portuguese L2 Immersion: Learner Corpora & Pedagogical Material Development
Speaker: Amanda Hoffmann
Date: February 29 – March 2, 2024
Proposal: By examining learner corpora, educators can identify patterns and trends in how students use the target language, enabling teachers to design teaching materials that align with students' needs (Granger, 2009). This study aims to analyze a learner corpus to identify recurring errors among Portuguese learners when employing the verbs SER/ESTAR in writing and activities ideas that can help instructors in their second language classes. The data for this study comes from the Portuguese section of the corpus of Utah dual language immersion (CUDLI; Rubio & Schnur, 2019). The corpus data reveals that students demonstrate challenges using the verbs SER and ESTAR. By the end of this presentation, the participants will be able to observe authentic examples extracted from CUDLI, analyze how L2 Portuguese immersion students use the verbs SER/ESTAR, and observe activities developed to help the learners enhance the use of these verbs.
Amanda Discusses her experience at the conference:
Presenting my research findings from the Second Language Teaching and Research Center (L2TReC) at SWCOLT Conference was an enriching experience and a valuable opportunity. Engaging with other language teachers allowed for fruitful discussions and sharing of experiences. Undoubtedly, I left the conference feeling even more inspired and motivated. I am grateful to the entire L2TReC team at the University of Utah for enabling me to attend the event through the L2TReC Student Research Grants Program. This support not only facilitated my participation and presentation of the research but also fostered meaningful interactions within the second language teaching community.
Southwest Conference on Language Teaching (SWCOLT)
The Southwest Conference on Language Teaching is a regional world language teachers'
organization that hosts an annual conference in partnership with state world language
teacher associations. The participating states in SWCOLT are Arizona, California,
Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah.
