Online lecture about linguistic mediation and pluricultural competence

On 8th June, at 17:00 CEST, Arqus organizes the online lecture “Linguistic mediation and pluricultural competence: a match made in heaven for foreign language learning” by Adolfo Sánchez Cuadrado, from the University of Granada.

The aim of this lecture is to help participants to become familiar and to broaden their knowledge about linguistic mediation in relation to foreign language learning. What does this new mode of communication – as defined by the Council of Europe 2001 , 2020 – entail and how does it relate to language learning? How can such a complex construct be tailored for specific learning and assessment scenarios? In which contexts and how is it being accommodated into language teaching practices? What implications may it have for foreign language pedagogy and pluricultural competence? All these issues will be addressed in this lecture in an attempt to explore the great potential and the main challenges that mediation activities imply for both learning and teaching. From the teachers’ perspective, as a tool to widen the scope of existing teaching practices and to include some frequently-forgotten issues such as the students’ L1, increased multimodality or task-based approaches to teaching. From the students’ angle, as a new set of learning opportunities to use the foreign language in a purposeful way and to acquire the abilities needed for communicating in today’s world.

Adolfo Sánchez Cuadrado holds a BA in Translation and Interpreting (ES, EN, DE) from the University of Granada, an MA in Foreign Language Pedagogy from the University of Delaware and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Granada. He is a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Granada, and he has previously taught at the University of Delaware, the Modern Language Centre of the University of Granada, and University College London. His research interests lie within the fields of pedagogical translation, linguistic mediation, cross-linguistic cognitive grammar, and language teacher training. Among his publications are chapters in Methodological Developments in Teaching Spanish as a Second and Foreign Language (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), in Lingüística cognitiva y ELE (Routledge, 2019) and in Discurso y comunicación en el aula (UDIMA-EnclaveEle, forthcoming). His doctoral thesis on pedagogical translation received the 2016 Thesis Award by the International Association of Spanish as a Foreign Language (ASELE).

This is the sixth of a series of guest lectures (“Seven months, seven universities”) to be offered in the framework of the Action Line 4 of Arqus, Multilingual and Multicultural University (sub-line 4.8). These lectures focus on specific topics related to language and culture, and target mainly graduate and post-graduate students as well as early-stage researchers interested in those topics.

The webinar will take place on 8th June at 17:00 pm CEST. It will be broadcast live on the Arqus YouTube channel.