When I decided to pursue a degree in Linguistics several years ago, one of the hot topics of research was contrastive analysis, a linguistic instructional tool that compares and contrasts two language systems.

Even though comparisons of language features and language interference became part of my literature review and lexicon, instructional strategies to support language and content development became my passion.

My fascination with teaching language undoubtedly began at school when I was an elementary student in an English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom in Chile, my home country. But it was not until my experience teaching K-12 English learners and adult college courses that my interest in pedagogical and theoretical linguistics shifted almost entirely to applied linguistics and its implications for teaching and learning content in two languages. Since then, my focus in providing professional development has always kept the instructional empowerment of ESL, bilingual, and dual language teachers at its heart while pulling from pedagogical tools such as contrastive analysis.

by Dr. Patricia Morales

Read the entire article here