In this workshop, Dr. Elena Sheldon (UTS Australia) will focus on the SFL genre-based approach for teaching elementary plus (A2) and intermediate (B1 and B2) Spanish as a foreign language levels. This innovation is highly connected to literacy development in Spanish (Sheldon, 2022, 2024) and enriches the competitiveness of Australian international education through collaborative engagement with the universities in Latin America and Spain.
Examples of historical recount, exposition, and argumentation will be presented at this workshop and explain how L2 learners can use these genres effectively. This pedagogical intervention supports students’ writing development which is known as the interactive Teaching Learning Cycle (TLC) developed within SFL (Rose & Martin 2012). TLC scaffolds literacy development through three main stages, Deconstruction, Joint Construction, and Independent Construction, in written and spoken discourse. TLC makes apparent the semiotic features of the texts that students need to produce, thus increasing their ability to produce language that extends beyond the clause to the whole text.
This event is part of the Applied Pedagogy Workshop Series and organized by Prof. Juan Pablo Jiménez Caicedo, Senior Lecturer in Spanish.
About the facilitator:
Dr. Elena Sheldon is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Studies and Education at the University of Technology Sydney. She completed her Masters in Applied Linguistics, majoring in Second Language Teaching, at the University of Sydney. She subsequently completed an MA in Research at UNSW. In her thesis, she contrasted text structures of discussion genre in English and Spanish at the university level. She completed her PhD at UNSW which examined research articles (RAs) in English and Spanish as well as RAs written in English by Spanish background speakers in the fields of Applied Linguistics.
Dr. Sheldon has extensive experience in teaching Spanish as a second language focusing on advancing literacy at the university level using genre based-pedagogy. She also implemented an International Teaching and Learning module to reinforce intercultural learning by pairing L2 students with background university students from Autonomous University in Madrid and Pontifical Catholic University in Chile. She is well known for her research which includes applied linguistics, English for Academic Purposes and second language literacy development. For the past several years, she has been investigating academic writing for publication.
