Friday, March 12
Noon	Welcome Luba Iskold, NEALLT President, Muhlenberg College Mary Toulouse, Conference Host, Lafayette College
SESSION 1: 12:30-1:15
Breakout 1	A tour of the new MLRC and what we did to make it possible Marc Siskin Carnegie Mellon University The MLRC at Carnegie Mellon University recently moved to a new building on campus.  We will give you a virtual tour of the new facility and discuss the process from design to opening and discuss the challenges of communicating between the various groups involved in the creation of the Center.
Breakout 2	Department Chairs panel Michelle Geoffrion-Vinci (Lafayette College), Erika M. Sutherland (Muhlenberg College), Kiri Lee (Lehigh University). The Chairs of the Lafayette College, Lehigh University, and the  Muhlenberg College Language Departments will discuss (1) the Lehigh Valley College consortium and the pandemic, (2) the 2018 MLA Report and the future of language programs in our colleges, (3) the pooling of local resources to meet global demands
SESSION 2: 1:20-1:50
Breakout 1	Ofrenda de día de Muertos: A Campus–wide Community Building Cultural Competency Activity  Adrian Espinoza Staines Lafayette College The Ofrenda de día de Muertos assignment was planned and carried out in conjunction with the Office for Intercultural Development, the Hispanic Society of Lafayette student organization and the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures’ Resource Center. As a large scope multidepartment activity one of the projected goals of this exercise was to foster diversity, inclusivity and cultural competency in the Lafayette community by having students create a Day of the Dead Ofrenda at Farinon College Center, and plan out activities related to the festivity for other students to engage with the festivity.
Breakout 2	Multicultural Immersion: Exploring your world in Virtual Reality Stephan Caspar (Carnegie Mellon University)  Exploring language and culture through the use of immersive technologies, using easily accessible and code-free tools and platforms that educators and learners can adopt for digital storytelling projects. Presented by Stephan Caspar, Director of the Askwith Kenner Global Languages & Cultures Room, Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University.
Breakout 3	Contextualized Language Learning through Multimodal Projects  Angela Lee-Smith (Yale University)  This presentation demonstrates how language learners at all levels can learn the language and culture by doing — designing and performing meaning-making —through various multimodal projects. Language practitioners can implement such projects in both remote and F2F learning environments.
SESSION 3: 1:55-2:25
Breakout 1	Designing Online Activities to Teach Top-down and Bottom-up Listening Skills Mushi Li University of Pennsylvania Targeting second language listening, this presentation discusses how instructors may design and integrate bottom-up and top-down listening exercises in their online classes to better assist students’ learning.
Breakout 2	Creating a multimodal memoir: literature, visual art and podcasts for the intermediate levels.  Rosamaría León Yale University Podcasts have emerged as one of the most vital and popular ways of communication. For second language acquisition, podcasts are extremely useful tools for learning.  During my first semester teaching remotely, I devoted the core of my intermediate course to introduce, teach and practice a variety of multimodal literacies, such as how to read visual art, how to create podcasts, and how to analyze and interpret literary works. As an exit assessment for the course, I designed a podcast project in which students, along with reading and discussing a short fictional memoir in a target language, created their own memoir in a podcast format. In this presentation, I will explain how this project utilized podcasts, art and literature. I will also suggest a variety of activities using podcasts, and I will detail the steps and the easily accessible tools available to create them.
Breakout 3	Pedagogical strategies for remote teaching to enhance student production and engagement Natalie Hiratsuka Marley Drexel University This presentation will give you a window to a few examples of tasks and pedagogical strategies designed to enhance student productions of the target language in classes held remotely.  Examples of the types of questions asked, the progression of the questions, and how students verbally participate in class will be discussed.  There will also be examples of asynchronous online tasks, such as the use of Voicethread for verbal drills, designing explanation videos and online quizzes, and creating partner conversation projects.
	Break. 2:30 - 2:45
SESSION 4: 2:45 – 3:15
Breakout 1	Harmonizing the Discord: Using Team Chat Servers in the Second Language Classroom Cory Duclos Colgate University This presentation will focus on the pedagogical basis for using team chat applications. It will explore how these platforms can lower the affective filter, encourage creative language use, and promote learning outside of the classroom. We will also discuss on setting up a team chat and designing successful activities.
Breakout 2	Transformations: Reflecting on the Present in Creative Open Assignments Dennis Johannssen Lafayette College This contribution discusses a creative assignment entitled “Transformations” that allows students to freely engage with a self-selected aspect of the course materials while sharing their work with broader communities on campus and beyond. The assignment invites students to produce creative work that transforms one passage, scene, concept, or media element from the course material into another genre, form, or context. As part of the assignment, students are encouraged to reflect on how the passage or element translates into their present social and cultural circumstances. In previous years, students drew and subtitled sketches based on short stories, turned music into poems, made short films about labor conditions and migration, and created 3D prints in the college lab. We discussed and workshopped the projects, eventually collecting them on a WordPress site. To share the projects with broader audiences, and to archive them for future reference, we created a digital flier with a QR code that facilitates mobile access in a remote and in-person environment. My presentation will walk participants through the stages of the assignment based on selected examples from classes on Advanced Conversation and Composition, German Romanticism, Post-War German Cinema, and Transnational German-Speaking Culture.
Breakout 3	Strategies for Effective Online Assessment Ninghui Liang Yale University Online teaching has brought many challenges for assessment: How to ensure the fairness and effectiveness while taking student anxiety and tension into consideration? How to use online assessment tools to enhance student learning? Attend for practical answers to these and other questions.
Breakout 4	Self-regulated learning and the role of ePortfolio in Japanese language class Megumu Tamura University of Pennsylvania This presentation will examine practicality of ePortfolio as a tool to support self-regulated learning (SRL) in a language course. The learning processes and outcomes will be analyzed through learners’ ePortfolio entries and survey responses. The ePortfolio’s influence on learners’ motivation and its future application in designing courses will also be discussed.
SESSION 5: 3:20 – 3:50
Breakout 1	Project-based Learning and Making Podcasts in Chinese Classroom Dongdong Chen Seton Hall University This paper examines Project-based learning (PBL) through a student-generated podcasting project in Chinese classroom. In addressing three research questions concerning the creation of podcasts by college learners of Chinese, the presenter demonstrates how PBL can contribute to the teaching of foreign language in general and the Chinese language in particular.
Breakout 2	Authentic (inter)action & student agency at the center of the online first-semester language classroom Isabel Choinowski Cornell University Following the CEFR and action-oriented approach, my presentation stresses the importance of promoting student agency and authentic interaction. I present two-part tasks, implemented in an online first-semester German classroom, that raise awareness of what constitutes authentic interaction, while also equipping students with phrases and communicative strategies needed to interact effectively.
Breakout 3	“Picard, his eyes open: Getting students to lose the Universal Translator and embrace the realia Kathryn A Dettmer (UPenn, Drexel U., Widener U.), J. Michael Boglovits (UPenn) In the episode “Darmok” of Star Trek, the Next Generation (STNG) (S5, ep. 2), the crew of the Enterprise is shocked when their universal translator, on which they depend for understanding other races, does not work, not because it isn’t translating, but because it is and the words do not make sense together.  The language being spoken by the Tamarians is metaphoric, allegorical, absolutely idiomatically tied to their history and their culture. Language and culture are tied and tools like Google Translate are not capable of nuance and understanding. This presentation will explore different ways of using the internet and learning platforms to encourage students to explore the target culture and to understand how that target culture creates meaning in the same way that words do, that there are things that cannot be translated, just understood. We will present different methods of teaching students how to find realia on line and how to work their discoveries into in-class activities and assignments.
Saturday, March 13
9:00 - 9:30	Opening Remarks Luba Iskold, NEALLT President, Muhlenberg College Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, Lafayette College
9:30 - 10:30	Conference Keynote Post-communicative methods: Social pedagogies and the role of technology  Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl, Director, Center for Language Study Yale University Language pedagogy currently finds itself in the “post-methods era” (cf. Magnan, 2008; Richards & Rogers, 2014) which is marked by a critical re-examination of communicative language teaching (CLT). Among the main criticisms of CLT are its primary focus on transactional and largely oral language production and its lack of emphasis on culture (Kramsch, 2006). The widely-cited 2007 MLA Report pointed to the growing divide between language and content and called for new approaches to language education that would better integrate disciplinary perspectives and enhance the intellectual focus of language instruction through a greater emphasis on texts and with an increased focus on authentic content. At the same time, globalization has changed the broader context for language learning significantly over the past two decades and has contributed to a more plurilingual and pluricultural classroom environment (Kramsch, 2014). This has led to new methodologies and social pedagogies that engage the learners in more collaborative activities that go beyond the language classroom and promote meaningful interactions in their local communities (Charitos & Van Deusen-Scholl, 2017; Van Deusen-Scholl & Charitos, 2021). In this presentation, I will explore what we mean by post-communicative methodologies and provide some examples of current projects at Yale and Columbia that have incorporated project-, community-, and place-based learning activities. I will particularly also look at the role that technology can play in connecting learners with each other and with their surrounding communities.
SESSION 1 10:35-11:20
Breakout 1	Panel 1 - Learning Spaces Michael Jones (Swarthmore College), Tom Sciarrino (Muhlenberg College), Stephane Charitos and Chris Kaiser (Columbia University) This panel to talk about physical (and virtual?) spaces that we modified for use during the pivot to remote and hybrid teaching and learning. What did we do? What did we learn?  What do we keep?
Breakout 2	Panel 2 - Virtual collaboration across institutions with Project-Based Learning Hanh Nguyen (University of Pennsylvania), Thuy Anh Nguyen (University of Michigan), Chung Nguyen (Columbia University)  This project is done by students under the instructor's close observation and scaffolding. Students initiate their own driving questions, collect materials and create products over a set time frame as part of the language curriculum. Instructors meet frequently prior, during and after the project to ensure the desired progress, resolve issues and confirm experiences for the future projects.
SESSION 2 11:25 - 11:55
Breakout 1	Class Communication by Flipgrid in Japanese Class Naoko Ikegami Lafayette College In this presentation I will introduce the students’ video clips in which they speak about various topics in Japanese. The students utilize a video recording tool, “Flipgrid,” to express their opinions and comment on other student-projects. In this talk I will share Flipgrid’s advantages and explain how well it worked in online classes last semester.
Breakout 2	Supplementing a Beginning Spanish Content-Based Course with Digital Games Jeremy A. Robinson Gustavus Adolphus College This presentation will give an overview of a content-based beginning Spanish course, and how short digital games are being used to supplement the material. The development of these games will be discussed, some of the games will be played together, and tools and additional resources will be shared.
Breakout 3	A multimedia platform for an advanced Italian through film course: experience from the classroom Elisa Dossena Princeton University This presentation showcases an online multimedia platform used in a course of advanced Italian through contemporary film. A digital platform is the perfect learning environment for this approach. On the platform, students were engaged with clips and entire films along with exercises, grammar, vocabulary applications, interactive readings, and digital discussion boards. The platform made students interact with the films and each other through exercises and activities built within film sequences.
11:55 - 12:15	BREAK (optional networking in the Main Room)
SESSION 3 12:15-12:45
Breakout 1	Creating a Dynamic Learning Environment Through a Contest Project Meejeong Song Cornell University When student productions were used for a practical purpose, their engagement increased. My Advanced Korean class dynamics have greatly changed during students’ group project of “Lingua Mater Competition”. I believe that the practicality of submitting a video to an actual contest made a huge difference in their learning environment.
Breakout 2	Assessing the Spanish Major  Katherine Stafford (Lafayette College)  This presentation explores the question of how to effectively assess the Spanish major: How do we assess and honor our majors in a way that is inclusive, reflective, meaningful? How do we make a degree in Spanish "mean something" and accurately reflect all that we do in the classroom? How do we evaluate the major in a way that prepares our students for the future and reflects intercultural competence, linguistic proficiency, and critical thinking?  My work with E-portfolios led me to create a final capstone E-portfolio project as a requirement for the Spanish major that includes an application for an i-world badge, an interactive E-portfolio, and a final capstone presentation.
Breakout 3	The E-portfolio in Chinese Classes Yingying Huang (Lafayette College) This is a presentation on the preliminary outcomes of using the e-portfolio, an online archive to collect student work and keep track of their learning progress, in elementary and intermediate Chinese classes. Using the e-portfolio at the lower language levels has many challenges due to students' limited writing capacity, but a well-designed format to balance composition, videos and readings, reflection on culture, and interaction with peers promises to cope with the challenges and at the same time contribute to community building during remote learning.
Breakout 4	DOUBLE SESSION - part 1 ConTextos: Navigating Function, Language and Style through Total Mapping Gorka Bilbao-Terreros (Princeton University (Lecturer)), Iria González-Becerra (Princeton University (Lecturer)), Ben Johnston (Princeton University (Senior Educational Technologist)) This presentation will address the conceptualization, design and development of ConTextos, an online platform for language learning currently used in advanced levels of the undergraduate language program at Princeton University. This platform provides integrated, function-focused, linguistic instruction through interactive mapped texts in a flipped-classroom model. ConTextos uses exploration and discovery tools in order to facilitate learners’ engagement in analytical reading in the target language, fostering a holistic approach to textual sources through interconnected layers of analysis (structure-function-grammar). This session will present the rationale behind the development of the platform from both an educational and technical perspective, and will share some of the pedagogical outcomes it has enabled. Participants will also have the opportunity to navigate ConTextos to explore the concept of total mapping and function-based instruction from an end-user perspective.
SESSION 4 12:50 - 1:20
Breakout 1	Five Years of Chinese-American Telecollaboration: Practice, Pedagogy and Research Han Luo Lafayette College Despite the rapid development and increasing popularity of telecollaboration in foreign language education in the past twenty years, telecollaborative exchanges involving Chinese as the target language have not received sufficient attention both at the practice and at the research level. To fill the gaps, the Chinese language program at Lafayette College initiated the Chinese-American Telecollaborative Learning Program connecting Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) students of at Lafayette with Chinese-speaking English majors at a large university in Shanghai, China through WeChat, a popular Chinese mobile social media platform, in spring 2020. In the past five years, various telecollaborative exchange projects have been established to facilitate language and culture learning through Cultura-inspired tasks and activities, the use of songs, the learning of idioms, the discussion of sensitive topics, and so on. This presentation will provide a summary report of different practical models of Chinese-American telecollaborative exchanges with a focus on the challenges, benefits, and pedagogical implications. In addition, this presentation also discusses how research can be conducted with data gained from such pedagogical activities.
Breakout 2	Talking about the Internet on the Internet in a Foreign Language Grit Matthias Phelps Cornell University Even though life is currently happening mostly online, we need to critically exam the digital familiarity. I would like to show how we fostered critical thinking skills by facilitating discussions between students at Cornell University and a University in Germany. All the discussion topics revolved around Internet-relevant subjects.
Breakout 3	The teacher’s review of teaching online Marília Gabriela de Almeida (FLTA at Yale)  This presentation addresses the professors’ experiences in the distant setting from their perspectives. Data was collected by interviews carried out with ten professors from the Spanish and Portuguese Department at Yale. The results outline impacts in practices and identities, both in the present and in the future.
Breakout 4	DOUBLE SESSION - part 2 ConTextos: Navigating Function, Language and Style through Total Mapping Gorka Bilbao-Terreros (Princeton University (Lecturer)), Iria González-Becerra (Princeton University (Lecturer)), Ben Johnston (Princeton University (Senior Educational Technologist)) This presentation will address the conceptualization, design and development of ConTextos, an online platform for language learning currently used in advanced levels of the undergraduate language program at Princeton University. This platform provides integrated, function-focused, linguistic instruction through interactive mapped texts in a flipped-classroom model. ConTextos uses exploration and discovery tools in order to facilitate learners’ engagement in analytical reading in the target language, fostering a holistic approach to textual sources through interconnected layers of analysis (structure-function-grammar). This session will present the rationale behind the development of the platform from both an educational and technical perspective, and will share some of the pedagogical outcomes it has enabled. Participants will also have the opportunity to navigate ConTextos to explore the concept of total mapping and function-based instruction from an end-user perspective.
SESSION 5 1:25 - 1:55
	Your Turn ... and Closing Remarks Question and discussion period