Post prepared by Emma Synder, current LTS student

It’s Spring in Oregon and that means the sun and hail are taking turns ushering in a new term at UO! Congratulations to our students in LTS on another term finished. We’re ready for another great term to come!

This month’s student spotlight is Madi Collins. Welcome, Madi! Please, tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m a student in the 15-month LTS program, and I’m set to graduate in August this year! I’ve lived most of my life in Oregon and found my love for language and language learning in high school when I started taking Japanese classes. Since then, I’ve been expanding my own language knowledge by continuing my study of Japanese while also adding some Ichishkíin and Korean to my linguistic repertoire. My main interests outside of working on growing my own understanding of languages and teaching lie in language revitalization, language change and pragmatics. 

That is quite an impressive repertoire of languages! Have you always been interested in language learning, then? What brought you to the LTS program? To UO?

Originally, I started at the UO in 2018 and graduated in 2022 with my BA in Linguistics. My experiences in the linguistics department at the UO eventually led me to the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) where my passion for curriculum development and effective language pedagogy started to grow. This was also paired with the opportunity that I had to take Ichishkíin classes at the UO which helped me to gain more perspectives into language experiences in our society and further intensified my passion for language pedagogy and creating accessible learning spaces and materials for learners of all languages. The LTS program has provided me with opportunities to dig into these passions and uncover further questions and answers to my ideas and has helped me grow even more in my understanding of pedagogy and appropriate, effective approaches to material development. 

It sounds like you have had some incredible experiences at UO so far! Have you had many past experiences with language teaching? Do you have any especially fond memories?

I honestly don’t have much experience with language teaching, and my first experience happened in the fall term of this program in LT 537! This class was a conversations class that was collaboratively led by LTS and UO undergraduate students at the American English Institute (AEI). Collaborating with my peers on lesson plans and working with all 40 of the students really confirmed my pursuit of language teaching and reassured me that I wanted to continue teaching and engaging with students. We would create conversation topics and games for students to play with the language during class, and these class sessions were really fun for both me as an instructor and participant and the students. This class was overall a very positive experience for both myself and the AEI students, and I think of it very fondly as one of my first teaching experiences. 

LT 537 has certainly been a crowd favorite with our cohort, for sure! What have been some other highlights of the program for you?

I think that a highlight of my time within the program so far has been the supportive community within the LTS program. My peers continue to amaze and impress me with the work that we create inside and outside of class, and I really value all of the feedback that I’m able to get from them about my own projects and ideas! So I would say that working with my peers has definitely been a highlight in the program, and it’s so fun watching all of us grow!

The cohort community has certainly been wonderful. Now that you are moving toward the end of your time in the LTS program, what are your plans for the future? How do you hope to work in the teaching field?

Based on my past experiences and experiences within the program, I hope to be able to create accessible language curriculum and materials for learners of any languages, but I am especially interested in creating accessible materials for LCTLs (less commonly taught languages). Online spaces are only continuing to grow in their potential for language learning, and I think that using this space to deliver language resources in culturally appropriate ways would greatly help to support learners of LCTLs and other disadvantaged languages. I hope to be able to use my skills in language teaching, linguistics, and pedagogical theory as a tool of support to communities looking to use online spaces for language learning. 

Outside of language learning, I enjoy caring for my houseplants! I started growing a ZZ plant, an umbrella tree and a rhaphidophora tetrasperma in 2020, and while some of these plants have gone to different homes or not made it through the winter, my tetrasperma is now as tall as me! I love taking some time each week to check in on, prune and water my plants, and I love having my plants in my living space! When I find a more permanent place to live I plan on building a greenhouse for even more plants and hopefully some vegetables!