Speaker: Professor Heidi Byrnes (Georgetown University)

Topic: Buildinga Four-Year Integrated College-Level Foreign Language Curriculum

Time: 2:30-4:10, Dec. 6 (Tuesday), 2016

Venue: Room 607, College of ForeignStudies, South China Agricultural University

Chair: Professor HuangGuowen

Bio statement:

Heidi Byrnes is George M. Roth Distinguished Professorof German Emerita at Georgetown University. Her research, scholarship, andteaching have focused on adult instructed second language learners,specifically the development of advanced levels of literacy. Those interestshave been shaped by Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics as aparticularly felicitous theory of language because of its concern withmeaning-making in oral and written texts that are embedded in contexts ofculture and contexts of situation and that are realized in culture-specificgenres. Other influences are sociocultural theory, the work of Vygotsky andBakhtin, and insights obtained in task-based teaching and learning. Together,these approaches provided a unique, educationally ‘appliable’ framework for the integratedand articulated four-year genre-oriented and task-based curriculum in theGerman Department at Georgetown University. Shehas edited and coedited books and special journal issues on the development ofadvanced literacy and the link between languaging and thinking, particularly inwriting. She is a member of several editorial boards, is a past president ofthe American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) and is the recipient ofnumerous professional association awards, including AAAL’s DistinguishedScholarship and Service Award and Georgetown University’s lifetime researchachievement award. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of the ModernLanguage Journal.