Invited Speakers

Plenary Speaker: Julio C. Rodriguez, University of Hawaii at Manoa (Thursday, June 24)

JULIO C. RODRIGUEZ is director of the Center for Language & Technology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and two sponsored programs: the Hawai‘i National Foreign Language Resource Center (U.S. Department of Education) and the Language Flagship Technology Innovation Center (Defense Language & National Security Education Office, U.S. Department of Defense). He has over 25 years of experience in instructional design and technology integration into teaching and learning. Within the broad area of instructional technology, he is primarily focused on faculty development programs, project-based learning, materials development, and online course design. Dr. Rodriguez has led and participated in over 20 grant-funded projects to develop online materials including an award-winning online course. He is currently leading the implementation of professional learning programs for language instructors, such as a national project to create professional development for online foreign language teachers, the creation of interactive materials for student and faculty orientation to online instruction, the implementation of quality improvement activities for online courses, as well as the incorporation of electronic instructional tools that enable project-based learning into online learning and faculty development contexts. He has published and presented extensively on instructional technology. Prior to his position at the University of Hawai‘i, Dr. Rodriguez was curriculum development director for online courses at Iowa State University, where he supervised a team of instructional and graphic designers and was responsible for a portfolio of over 100 online courses, including a TESL Certificate Program.

Keynote Speaker: Lourdes Ortega, Georgetown University (Friday, June 25)

LOURDES ORTEGA is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is best known for an award-winning meta-analysis of second language instruction published in 2000, a best-seller graduate-level textbook Understanding Second Language Acquisition (Routledge 2009, translated into Mandarin in 2016), and since 2010 for championing a bilingual and social justice turn in her field of second language acquisition. Recent articles have appeared in CALICO Journal (2017), World Englishes (2018), Modern Language Journal (2019), and Language Learning (2020). Her latest book is The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism (co-edited in 2019 with Annick De Houwer). She is the General Editor of Language Learning. Originally from southern Spain, Lourdes lived and worked as a language teacher in Greece for most of her 20s. She has lived in the United States since 1993 and has mentored teachers and researchers in Hawai‘i, Arizona, Georgia, and currently in Washington DC.