On August 1–2, 2025, Duke University hosted the XIV Encontro Mundial sobre o Ensino de Português (14th World Meeting on Portuguese Teaching), bringing together educators, researchers, and scholars dedicated to the advancement of Portuguese language instruction worldwide.
As part of the event, Dr. Bruna Sommer-Farias organized and chaired a roundtable titled “Práticas e aplicações pedagógicas de corpus em aulas de Português como Língua Adicional” (Corpus-Based Pedagogical Practices and Applications in Portuguese as an Additional Language Classes). This session explored how corpus linguistics can inform and enrich language pedagogy, particularly in contexts where Portuguese is taught as an additional language. The pedagogical materials showcased in the roundtable were based on the MACAWS learner corpus, which contains written and spoken data from Portuguese and Russian classroom assignments.
Dr. Sommer-Farias’s presentation, titled “Uma abordagem asset-oriented para desenvolver a consciência linguística e de gêneros do discurso através de corpus de textos de aprendizes” (An Asset-Oriented Approach to Developing Linguistic and Genre Awareness through Learner Text Corpora), focused on strategies for promoting linguistic and metalinguistic awareness through real student writing and demonstrated how an asset-oriented perspective can validate and build upon learners’ existing linguistic resources. Dr. Mariana Centanin-Bertho (Yale University) described the creation of tasks with spoken data and shared examples from the MACAWS corpus, while Caroline Neves (University of Arizona) had prepared a presentation on critical approaches using corpora in university settings.
The presentations drew from the core ideas in their latest open-access publication in L2 Journal:
Staples, S., Gorlova, A., Sommer-Farias, B., Vinokurova, V., Centanin-Bertho, M., & Novikov, A. (2025). Asset-oriented approaches to learner corpus data. L2 Journal, 17(1), 1–9.
Read the article here
MAFLT students have the opportunity to learn how to use corpus tools and discuss the importance of linguistic and metalinguistic awareness when they enroll for the course FLT 845 Language Concepts in Foreign Language Teaching, offered every Fall.
Most of the activities showcased are openly available at: https://www.macawsproject.org/activities.
