The Language Centre will be visited by an English language specialist from America in 2023!
On Friday 28 October, two staff members from the Language Centre (LC), Dr Arné Binneman and Dr Rose Richards had the privilege of meeting members of the American Embassy’s Regional English Language Office (RELO) and giving them a tour of our beautiful campus. We were visited by Dr Bradley Horn, Francinah Magoro and Dr Alice King.
The reason for the visit was to plan for an English language specialist to join the LC via the Regional English Language Office for a period in 2023. The United States Embassy’s Regional English Language Office’s English Language Specialist Program recruits United States specialists in the areas of English language teaching and applied linguistics for short-term assignments abroad. These assignments may include curriculum projects, teacher training seminars, textbook development, English for Specific Purposes and program evaluation.
The specialist will be involved in the LC’s part of the university-wide assessment project, ‘Assessment matters: Re-imagining assessment culture and practices for a transformative student experience’. The project was mooted against the background of the challenges that Covid-19 created for student assessment across all sectors of education and the resultant need for new ways of assessment to be investigated. The project is run through the Division for Learning and Teaching Enhancement, of which the LC forms part.
The LC’s part of the project involves developing an equivalent post-instruction test for the LC elementary short courses in English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa. The project will also involve using data from LC Writing Centre consultations to develop faculty-specific tests of academic literacies across the faculties of AgriSciences, Economic and Management Sciences, and Engineering. In both these cases, research will be carried out on the definition of the language constructs to be measured and the usefulness of these tests once they have been piloted. We’re looking forward to hosting the specialist in 2023.
Pictured from left to right: Dr Alice King (EducationUSA Adviser and Outreach Specialist), Dr Arné Binneman (lecturer and coordinator, Stellenbosch University Language Centre), Francinah Magoro and Dr Bradley Horn (Director, American Embassy’s Regional Language Office).
This post is also available in: English
