Janet Sedlar specializes in Spanish and French sociolinguistics, pragmatics, foreign language pedagogy and second language acquisition. Her doctoral dissertation examined the construction of humor in Spanish, Argentine and French comic strips from a sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspective. She was a contributing author to the 3rd edition of the elementary Spanish textbook Con brío,published in 2013. Her most recent project – a work in progress – has been to revamp the Spanish program by incorporating many more authentic models of contemporary oral and written discourse into the curriculum. The objective is to reflect a wider range of speech acts encountered in everyday discourse than found in most textbooks, in order to better prepare students to function – both linguistically and culturally – once they find themselves immersed in a Spanish-speaking environment.
Education
- PhD in Romance Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, 2008
- MA in French Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, 2001
- Advanced Certificate in Teaching Foreign Language, New York University, 1999
- Diploma of Education in Teaching French & English (Second Language), McGill University, 1993
- BA in Linguistics, Université de Montréal, 1992
Recent Courses in RLL
- RLLT 38800 Foreign Language Acquisition, Research and Teaching (Autumn 2017)
- SPAN 10100 Beginning Elementary Spanish I (Autumn 2016)
- SPAN 10200 Beginning Elementary Spanish II (Autumn 2017, Autumn 2019)
- SPAN 10300 Beginning Elementary Spanish III (Winter 2019)
- SPAN 12002 Intensive Spanish II (Winter 2020)
- SPAN 20100 Language, History, and Culture I (Autumn 2016, Spring 2019)
- SPAN 20200 Language, History, and Culture II (Winter 2017)
- SPAN 20300 Language, History, and Culture III (Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Autumn 2019)
- SPAN 20400 Composición y conversación avanzada I (Autumn 2018)
- SPAN 20500 Composición y conversación avanzada II (Spring 2020)