The Conference
APPLIED LINGUISTICS WINTER CONFERENCE (ALWC), sponsored by NYS TESOL Applied Linguistics SIG, is one of the largest and most well respected New York City based conferences in the field of Applied Linguistics.
​
This year's 39th edition has over 60 presenters, including researchers and teachers from all over the United States, Japan, Russia, Brazil, India, Korea, and China. Speakers, presenters, and workshop leaders will be informing and training conference participants about ways to engage students in means that help them develop agency (and motivation). Participants will learn about creative lesson plans, current research on language acquisition, and strategies for enriching the classroom community.
It will be hosted by the Teachers College at Columbia University, at the Cowin Center Horace Mann Building in Upper Manhattan, New York City, on April 21st 2018 from 8:30AM to 6:30PM.
​
The ALWC 2018 opens its attendance to everyone including students, academics, educators, teachers and researchers.
Follow our Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and the blog to stay informed about the the conference news.
Teachers College at Columbia University.
Cowin Auditorium.
The Theme
The theme for this year’s conference is:
“Culturally Relevant Pedagogy”
In the current multilingual and multicultural world, classrooms around the globe are continually becoming more and more diverse and complex. Now is the appropriate time to connect culturally relevant pedagogy with applied linguistics in order to achieve social justice. Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1994), Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (Gay, 2000), Funds of Knowledge (Moll, 1990), and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris, 2012) were all developed in order to promote improved academic achievement and positive identity construction for linguistically and culturally diverse students in the US school settings. These pedagogies have a 50-year track record, and have demonstrated their ability to improve academic achievement of culturally, linguistically diverse students. Instead of pointing out what students do not have and cannot do, CRP uses, prioritizes, and legitimates what students do have and can do, i.e., the linguistic and cultural resources that students bring to the classrooms, based on the tenet that everyone is competent to learn if provided the right context for learning.
Humans are socio-cultural-historical beings. It is impossible to teach language and for students to learn language without valuing the social and cultural contexts in which language teaching and learning occur. Learning another language is not merely the acquisition of linguistic codes for communication, but is also the construction of personal identities. Let’s escape from the deficit views about English as a second or foreign language learners and move forward to the views of resources about our linguistically culturally diverse students in language teaching, learning, research, planning, and policy.
We hope that 2018-ALWC can provide an empowering space for all linguistically and culturally diverse students, and their teachers and researchers on this planet.
​
​