Date of Award

5-2018

Degree Type

Creative Project

Degree Name

Master of Second Language Teaching (MSLT)

Department

World Languages and Cultures

Committee Chair(s)

Sarah Gordon

Committee

Sarah Gordon

Committee

Elena Shvidko

Committee

Jim Rogers

Abstract

This portfolio highlights what the author believes are important facets and implementations of second language teaching and second language learning. This portfolio is grounded in two elements: second language acquisition theory and the author’s first-hand observations as a student in the Master of Second Language Teaching (MSLT) program. The target languages focused in this portfolio are English and French.

This portfolio is divided into three main sections. The first section contains the author’s teaching philosophy statement with focuses on student and teacher roles, tasks in the classroom, and the author’s experiences teaching English. After the teaching philosophy statement, there are three research perspective papers with a focus on language, literacy, and culture. The language paper addresses classroom environment(s) and student motivation, the literacy paper concerns the use of creative writing in the second language classroom, and the culture paper explores the second person pronouns—tu and vous—in French. The final section of the portfolio is a collection of annotated bibliographies on key topics related to second language learning and second language teaching. The topics of the annotated bibliographies include first language use in the second language classroom, foreign language anxiety, and student creativity in the classroom. Each annotated bibliography presents different aspects of language learning from a student’s perspective.

This portfolio establishes itself in different theories both in language teaching and in education. This portfolio delves into sociocultural linguistics for learning and communicative approaches to languages; namely sociocultural theory, communicative language teaching, the Zone of Proximal Development, and the Output Hypothesis. There is also focus on second language motivation, and second language theories in regards to social cognition and constructivism perspectives.

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