The Ginger Marcus Foreign Language Learning Speaker Series: Workshop

From Projects to Proficiency: Engaging Students through Real-World Language Use

Friday, October 31, 2025, at 11:00 AM
Eads 116

In this hands-on workshop, Dr. Maria Carreira introduces Project-Based Learning (PBL) as a proficiency-driven approach that fosters real-world language use, learner engagement, and differentiated, student-centered instruction. She presents the core principles of PBL and a step-by-step implementation framework, with special attention to strategies that make PBL effective and inclusive for all proficiency levels. Participants will actively explore each phase of the project-creation process and leave with practical tools for designing and adapting PBL units to their own classrooms. The session concludes by examining how PBL supports diverse and mixed-level classes, as well as experiential formats like internships, service learning, and language for specific purposes courses.

Sponsored by:
Department of Comparative Literature and Thought, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures; the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies; the Applied Linguistics Program; the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.