WTL - Episode 139

In this episode, Stacey interviews Matthew Griffin, an applied linguist and instructor of Spanish who recently published a paper analyzing textbooks for how they present “voseo” to novice learners. “Vos” is a pronoun used widely in Latin America, and not used in European varieties of Spanish. Matthew goes on to talk about the concept of linguistic variation, as well as how and why we should point out and celebrate different varieties of the languages we teach. For those interested in teaching voseo, this interview and the accompanying open-access article provide a practical and research-based exploration of this topic.

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about the podcast

We Teach Languages is a podcast series produced by Stacey Johnson (Vanderbilt University) in partnership with PEARLL. Through interviews and conversations teachers explore the question, “What does excellent language teaching look like?” Supported by a team of volunteers, We Teach Languages, in addition to new episodes, produces a newsletter, episode guides and other professional learning resources. Through the PEARLL partnership every episode is transcribed with transcripts. Future work will include aligning episode content to indicators of the Teacher Effectiveness for Language Learning (TELL) Framework.