Dr. Andrew Cohen, Emeritus Professor at the University of Minnesota, will give a lecture titled “Enhancing the Role of Pragmatics in Teacher Education” on Monday, November 16 from 4:00-5:15 pm in ED 1215 on the UC Santa Barbara campus. The event, sponsored by the Gevirtz School’s Department of Education and UCSB’s Applied Linguistics emphasis, is free and open to the public.
The talk starts with the premise that for many learners, second-language learning means the memorization of lots of vocabulary and lots of grammar rules, possibly without the knowledge of how to make use of this information in actual communicative situations. The talk will consider some teachable but often neglected areas in second-language pragmatics, issues involved in actually providing instruction in these areas, the assessment of the pragmatics that is taught, and strategies for students in the learning and performance of pragmatics.
Cohen is a professor in the Second Language Studies Program, which is affiliated with the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota. He has worked on projects involving Spanish immersion education and German, French, Russian, Norwegian, and Japanese language learning and teaching. He has worked to develop a program for styles- and strategies-based instruction (SSBI) for language instruction, and taught courses on implementing these strategies. Additionally, Cohen has worked enhancing students’ study abroad, pragmatics, Spanish grammar strategies websites, and more.