Romance Studies at ACTFL
Paula Hennessey, Liliane Duséwoir and Mary Beth Raycraft will be representing the Department of Romance Studies in important presentations at the upcoming conference of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in San Diego, Nov. 20-22, 2015.
Paula and Liliane will do a presentation on writing strategies using the Antidote software, which highlights, “through a system of filters—spelling errors, syntactic breaks or awkward sentences, repetitions, connectors, weak verbs, or style patterns. Presenters will explain strategies to implement the use of these software along with several websites in order to allow students to enrich their vocabulary and revisit grammatical concepts autonomously, self-correct their papers, and maintain a list of their frequent errors.”
In another session, Hennessey, Dusewoir and Kheireddine Bekkai will tackle the subject of stimulating curiosity and interest in reading through the use of graphic novels: “Group will brainstorm ideas for planning a unit or a course on a BD; examine visual compositions of an authentic BD and explore links with poetry or cinema; discuss how to generate and moderate a meaningful debate based on samples of controversial drawings; and investigate several examples of creative-writing assignments.”
Mary Beth Raycraft will team up with a former Vanderbilt colleague, Natalie Dieu-Porter, to offer “Developing Communicative and Global Competence: French for the Professions.”
Here is the complete program—with a strong showing by the Department of Romance Studies and the participation, also, of Gisela Hoecherl-Alden, Assistant Dean and Director of Language Instruction, College of Arts & Sciences.