Penn Language Center offers professional development opportunities for language educators throughout the year in the form of pedagogy and technology workshops, featured speaker events, and the Language Educator Symposium.
Pedagogy and Technology Workshops are designed to facilitate the ongoing development of skills related to advances in language education pedagogy as well as the technical skills relevant to the 21st Century classroom. Workshops have an average run time of about 90 minutes, in which attendees will participate in hands-on activities, have the opportunity to network and collaborate with colleagues, as well as walk away with classroom materials that can be readily applied in their teaching context.
Past Topics
- Screencasting in Panopto
- Introduction to Universal Design for Learning and Language Learning
- Designing for Mobile
- “Post” Pandemic Teaching
- The Focus on Canvas Series - An 8-part series focusing on developing instructors’ strengths in Canvas and course development. You can access the following content through an asynchronous Canvas course:
- Homepage Design in Canvas
- Discussions in Canvas, Part I
- Grading in Canvas, Part I
- Assignments in Canvas, Part I
- Modules in Canvas
- Discussions in Canvas, Part II
- Grading in Canvas, Part II
- Assignments in Canvas, Part II
2024-2025 Workshops
For the 2024-2025 academic year, PLC will host two workshop series. All workshops will take place on Friday mornings at 10am in Williams Hall, Room 440, and online through Zoom. Please continue reading for full workshop descriptions and to register*.
*Register for all workshops here: PLC 2024-2025 Workshop Registration
LCTL Focus: Task-Based Language Teaching for World Language Education in Fall 2024
Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) for World Language Education is a two-part professional development series intended for new instructors of Less Commonly Taught Languages, Fulbright FLTAs, instructors who are new to classroom instruction, and anyone who is interested in learning more about TBLT. Participants will learn the foundations of Task-Based Language Teaching through task-based experiences designed to highlight the affordances of the approach as well as to develop a critical eye for how and when Task-Based Language Teaching can be integrated into an existing teaching practice. The workshops will take place in the fall of 2024 with a focus on the research that has influenced TBLT as well as designing tasks for Novice Level learners.
- Workshop 1, Task-Based Language Teaching Foundations, will address the TBLT foundations in Second Language Development and Communicative Language Teaching. Participants will learn how the TBLT approach can complement an existing practice while inspiring new communicative activities. In this session, there will be a particular focus on grammar instruction to demonstrate that TBLT is applicable to the development of all four skills.
Date: September 13th, 2024
- Workshop 2, Thinking about Beginners: A common critique of Task-Based Language Teaching is its incompatibility with beginner or low-level students. In this workshop, participants will apply the foundations from Workshop 1 to an ACTFL novice-level imaged learner. Participants are encouraged to bring an existing exercise with them to practice “translating” non-task-based exercises into task-based exercises. Instructors of Less Commonly Taught Languages may find this session valuable due to the grounding in realia and the emphasis on task creation for the first-year student.
Date: October 11th, 2024
Mastering the Scales of AI Literacy
Mastering the Scales of AI Literacy is a three-part professional workshop development series for all language educators, especially those interested in teaching with AI. As AI continues to develop at a rapid place, so do expectations for the use of AI in the world language classroom. AI literacy, defined as “a set of competencies that enables individuals to critically evaluate AI technologies; communicate and collaborate effectively with AI; and use AI as a tool online, at home, and in the workplace (Long & Magerko, 2020, p. 2), is of increasing importance for students and teachers alike. This AI-focused professional development series uses the structure of the AI Literacy Framework (A Framework for AI Literacy, n.d.) scales: Understand AI; Use and Apply AI; Analyze and Evaluate AI; Create AI as the basis for the skills developed in the workshop. All workshops were designed to assist instructors with developing their own classroom policies and practices for using AI.
- Workshop 1, The State of Machine Translation
Machine translation tools have proliferated for almost 15 years, and their uses and our attitudes towards them are evolving. What does machine translation look like in the language that you teach? How has the integration of AI into online translators and dictionaries? How do students use these technologies, and what influences their decision-making? How do you know if students have used machine translation technologies? In this workshop, we will share literature that describes when and how students use machine translation as well as instructors’ varying success in detecting the use of such a tool. At the end, participants will develop a policy for the use of machine translation in their world language classroom.
AI Literacy Scales: Understand AI; Use and Apply AI
Date: November 15th, 2024
Workshop 2: Prompt Engineering and Intercultural Communication
Awareness of, and skills related to, working with generative AI are steadily becoming an essential item in the language teacher’s toolkit. Current research shows that “prompt engineering” is a necessary skill for eliciting the most robust output from platforms such as ChatGPT, and as a result, language teachers must be familiar with that skill in order to use ChatGPT or other platforms for lesson planning or lesson activities. This professional development workshop seeks to assist participants in developing a critical orientation to using AI and its output in the target language.
AI Literacy Scales: Use and Apply AI; Analyze and Evaluate
Date: February 14th, 2025- Workshop 3: Task-based use of AI in the World Language Writing Classroom
In many articles that are supportive of the integration of generative AI into the world language classroom, authors especially tout the benefits of generative AI in the writing process. This workshop seeks to address these claims while also proposing that a task-based approach is an especially effective complement to world language writing. Using the TBLT task sequence, participants will design a lesson for their students based on a multi-step drafting process while integrating generative AI into the process.
AI Literacy Scales: Analyze and Evaluate AI; Create AI
Date: March 21st, 2025
*Register for all workshops here: PLC 2024-2025 Workshop Registration