The Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program and Department of Government at Cornell University, will host this year’s virtual REPAL Annual Conference from July 15 to 17th, 2021-REPAL (Red para el Estudio de la Economía Politíca de América Latina). Speakers are scheduled for the three-day conference from 10am to 4pm each of the days.

2021 Conference format: 30-minute individual sessions (12-minute presentations with 15 minutes of discussion) in four parallel tracks. Papers will be posted in a website accessible only to conference participants. Participants are expected to read the papers in advance to enrich the discussion at the conference. We encourage the attendance and participation of non-presenters as well as presenters.

Registration for Repal 2021 is now open! Please register here. (Registration payments for those who previously registered for the cancelled 2020 conference will carry over to this conference.) If you are facing economic hardships due to Covid, the registration fee can be waived; please contact repalconference@gmail.com.

The final panel is free and open virtually to the public and is at 3pm on 7/17 entitled Covid-19 and Latin America, details can be found at: https://events.cornell.edu/event/covid-19_in_latin_america_politics_eco…

The Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program and Department of Government at Cornell University, will host this year’s virtual REPAL Annual Conference from July 15 to 17th, 2021-REPAL (Red para el Estudio de la Economía Politíca de América Latina). Speakers are scheduled for the three-day conference from 10am to 4pm each of the days.

2021 Conference format: 30-minute individual sessions (12-minute presentations with 15 minutes of discussion) in four parallel tracks. Papers will be posted in a website accessible only to conference participants. Participants are expected to read the papers in advance to enrich the discussion at the conference. We encourage the attendance and participation of non-presenters as well as presenters.

Registration for Repal 2021 is now open! Please register here. (Registration payments for those who previously registered for the cancelled 2020 conference will carry over to this conference.) If you are facing economic hardships due to Covid, the registration fee can be waived; please contact repalconference@gmail.com.

The Saturday, 7/17 final Keynote Panel "Covid-19 and Latin America” is free webinar and virtually open to the public on the last day of the conference beginning at 3:00pm. It can be attended registering (for free) at the link: https://bit.ly/2V9PkoH “

Register at: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DmadXQe4QsidxC_MITCu3g

This plenary panel will discuss the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic in the region. It features scholars working on issues like variation in policies to face the pandemic, the impact of the former and latter on economic inequality, poverty, unemployment, the gender gap, access to vaccines, among others.

Chair: Wendy Hunter, University of Texas at Austin
Merike Blofield, German Institute for Global and Area Studies
Magdalena Gil, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Nora Lustig, Tulane University
Ken Shadlen, London School of Economics

The final Keynote Panel of the 7th Annual REPAL (Red para el Estudio de la Economía Política de América Latina), held virtually at Cornell University 7/15-17/2021.

The Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program and Department of Government at Cornell University, will host this year’s virtual REPAL Annual Conference from July 15 to 17th, 2021-REPAL (Red para el Estudio de la Economía Politíca de América Latina). Speakers are scheduled for the three-day conference from 10am to 4pm each of the days.

2021 Conference format: 30-minute individual sessions (12-minute presentations with 15 minutes of discussion) in four parallel tracks. Papers will be posted in a website accessible only to conference participants. Participants are expected to read the papers in advance to enrich the discussion at the conference. We encourage the attendance and participation of non-presenters as well as presenters.

Registration for Repal 2021 is now open! Please register here. (Registration payments for those who previously registered for the cancelled 2020 conference will carry over to this conference.) If you are facing economic hardships due to Covid, the registration fee can be waived; please contact repalconference@gmail.com.

In this eCornell Keynotes event, Nicole Salgado '98, an advocate for environmental conservation and migrants’ rights based in Querétaro, México, and journalist Nathaniel Hoffman '99 will discuss their chronicle of a highly underreported aspect of our country’s punitive immigration system: the often insurmountable process faced by couples of mixed immigration status.

Their 2013 book, Amor and Exile: True Stories of Love Across America’s Borders, documents the experiences of three couples, including Ms. Salgado’s first-person account of life in the U.S. with her husband while he was undocumented, her tortured decision to leave the country with him, and their seven years of exile and starting over together in Mexico.

Mr. Hoffman and Ms. Salgado will examine how little has changed policywise in the years since their book’s publication. They will also highlight current proposals for legislative reform that could provide relief to millions of U.S. citizen partners and families of undocumented immigrants who are languishing in legal limbo, driven underground, exiled abroad, and/or separated.

This event is co-sponsored by eCornell and the Migrations initiative.

"Designing (Indigenous) Language Classes Rooted in ACTFL Standards to Promote Spoken Proficiency"
Elvia Andía Grágeda
Lecturer, The Ohio State University

Unlike commonly taught languages, most Indigenous ones share a particular characteristic: The lack of material for language instruction and the challenge of identifying abundant sources of input for their classes. In many cases, it is necessary to adapt existing materials from other languages to achieve language learning goals, but in doing so, we usually find materials lacking the cultural knowledge of Indigenous people. In addition, many major languages have established proficiency standards (e.g., CEFR and ACTFL). Are these standards applicable to Indigenous languages?

While Indigenous language courses may be similarly designed to those of major languages in their application of real-world language use and content organization, differences arise when defining levels of proficiency which must be culturally appropriate. As such, the active participation of a culturally competent language instructor in the course design process is imperative for the development of effective and relevant proficiency standards unique to the language.

This talk will discuss best practices in designing Indigenous language classes rooted in ACTFL standards to promote oral proficiency. While examples will be drawn from Quechua, the topic is applicable to all languages.

Bio: Elvia Andía is a linguist specializing in the study and instruction of Bolivian Quechua and Spanish. She holds a Master's degree in Linguistic Policy of Indigenous Languages in Higher Education. Her research investigates the role of Quechua in such policies, particularly in the Quechua Public Indigenous University in Bolivia. She has worked as the Departmental Coordinator in the Ministry of Education for the country of Bolivia in Intra- and Intercultural Multilingual Education. Andía joined Ohio State in 2016 and coordinates the Quechua program for both undergraduate and graduate students across six institutions.
She is the world's first certified OPI tester for Quechua and has published on teaching methods and Indigenous stories. In 2019, she won the Premio Guamán Poma de Ayala in Indigenous Language, a national literature prize in Bolivia, for her novel written in Quechua.

Co-sponsored by the Language Resource Center and Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.

This event will be streamed live over Zoom.

"Acquisition vs. Learning in 2021"
Karen Lichtman
Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Director of Educator Licensure in the Department of World Languages & Cultures, Northern Illinois University

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stephen Krashen put forward a model of language learning distinguishing between language acquisition (acquiring a language by listening or reading and understanding) and language learning (conscious, effortful study and practice of language). Today, many people look at Krashen’s monitor model as just a "method from the past." However, most of these ideas are still very much present in contemporary research — just under different names, such as implicit vs. explicit language teaching and learning.

This talk will share three of my studies using the acquisition/learning, or implicit/explicit, framework: one on elementary students learning Spanish, another with children and adults who were taught an artificial mini-language in the laboratory, and finally, a study currently in progress comparing two different teaching methods in beginning classes. Each study has different implications for teaching: (1) grammar instruction can be delayed to the end of years of input-based language study, (2) grammar instruction may have a negative effect on learners' speaking fluency, and (3) a "narrow and deep" curriculum using high-frequency structures in context could be more effective than a traditional grammar-based curriculum... but since this last study is still in progress, attend the talk to find out if this is really the case!

Bio: Dr. Lichtman is Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Director of Educator Licensure in the Department of World Languages & Cultures at Northern Illinois University. Her research focuses on instructed second language acquisition. Specifically, she studies implicit and explicit language learning in children and adults, questioning the conventional wisdom that children learn languages implicitly whereas adults need explicit grammar instruction. She recently wrote Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS): An Input-Based Approach to Second Language Instruction. Dr. Lichtman teaches methods courses for pre-service teachers and upper-level Spanish Linguistics courses.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom. Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events, which include wearing masks while indoors and providing proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test.