In this segment of Teacher Real Talk, Dr. ⁠Maria-Lourdes Lira-Gonzales ⁠and Farnaz have a conversation about how teachers' experiences as language learners can shape the way they teach. Drawing on Maria’s own journey across languages and cultures, they talk about accents, confidence, identity, and the ways other people’s responses can influence how comfortable learners might feel using a language. From there, they turn to corrective feedback and consider how teachers can support learning without turning mistakes into a source of anxiety or self-doubt. They also get into AI, mindfulness, and the role of the teacher in creating classrooms where students feel both challenged and supported.

Dr. Maria-Lourdes Lira-Gonzales is a professor and the chair of the TESL program at Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue. She is a member of ⁠Concordia University⁠’s Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance, a collaborator with the McGill Mindfulness Research Lab, and the vice president of the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics. Her research interests focus on instructed L2 acquisition, with an emphasis on corrective feedback. Her recent work includes a project examining how mindfulness meditation practice mediates language anxiety and behavioral engagement with written corrective feedback among ESL students. She is also investigating the role of ChatGPT in facilitating the provision of written corrective feedback in French as a second and foreign language settings.

Maria's Publications: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maria-Lourdes-Lira-Gonzales

https://marialiragonzales.wixsite.com/main

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Email: ⁠learningoffthesyllabus@gmail.com⁠

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