Innovation in Language Learning

Foreign language pedagogy in the U.S. is facing a paradigm shift, i.e. from communicative language teaching to the emerging Transformative Language Learning and Teaching (TLLT) in response to significant social and political changes. TLLT has the potential to address issues that are important to the field of language education today as it “causes the learner to change in some way – thinking, behavior, acceptance of the other, values, mindset, and/or emotion”[1] through their FL learning experiences. In other words, this theory posits that learners who are getting new information are also evaluating their past ideas and understanding and are shifting their very worldview through critical reflection. Presently, there are limited scholarly discussions about the implementation and pedagogical implications of this emerging theory. This presentation reports case studies of how TLLT principles and key practices can be incorporated into existing courses in Chinese and Italian language programs at a university in the U.S. Specifically, issues of social justice were incorporated in Chinese and Italian language courses through purposeful content selection and pedagogical approaches, and the courses aimed to foster a learning environment that enables critical engagement with real world issues in the target language. We argue that TLLT has the potential of transforming language learners into linguistically and biculturally competent global citizens who value diverse perspectives and respect people of different cultural backgrounds.