Speaker: Professor Heidi Byrnes (Georgetown University)

Topic: Building a Four-Year Integrated College-Level Foreign Language Curriculum

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

Venue: Room 607, College of Foreign Studies, South China Agricultural University

Chair: Professor Huang Guowen

Bio statement:

Heidi Byrnes is George M. Roth Distinguished Professor of German Emerita at Georgetown University. Her research, scholarship, and teaching have focused on adult instructed second language learners, specifically the development of advanced levels of literacy. Those interests have been shaped by Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics as a particularly felicitous theory of language because of its concern with meaning-making in oral and written texts that are embedded in contexts of culture and contexts of situation and that are realized in culture-specific genres. Other influences are sociocultural theory, the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin, and insights obtained in task-based teaching and learning. Together, these approaches provided a unique, educationally ‘appliable’ framework for the integrated and articulated four-year genre-oriented and task-based curriculum in the German Department at Georgetown University. She has edited and coedited books and special journal issues on the development of advanced literacy and the link between languaging and thinking, particularly in writing. She is a member of several editorial boards, is a past president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) and is the recipient of numerous professional association awards, including AAAL’s Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award and Georgetown University’s lifetime research achievement award. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Modern Language Journal.