Hello, and welcome to my Language Teaching Studies portfolio! 

This portfolio was created to demonstrate my competence in 6 key areas; these can be found on the home page, as well as the side-bar menu. 

Feel free to explore the 6 areas in any order. 

Each page features a reflection about each competency area as a whole, and is followed by links to each artifact for that section. I also have included references at the bottom of each page, as well as a references page for easy access to my key sources for further reading!

Thank you, and I hope you enjoy your time here!

Hi! My name is Madi Collins, and I graduated with a bachelor's in Linguistics from the University of Oregon in 2022 before starting the LTS program the following summer! During my time as an undergraduate, I was able to expand my areas of language and linguistic interest, and it was with newfound passions in language revitalization, sociolinguistics, and cultural literacy that I found myself interested in language education and materials development. To this day, I continue to pursue areas of language revitalization for North American languages, as well as materials development with sociocultural aspects in mind. 

Throughout the program, I've been able to expand upon these ideas that I started to develop as an undergraduate, and these have flourished into lessons and materials with communicative language teaching, cultural literacy, and interaction at their core. I have also had the opportunity to develop lesson plans with these guiding principles for English, Japanese, and Ichishkíin. 

I have also been developing some of these newfound skills during my time working at the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS), one of sixteen National Language Resource Centers. During my time at CASLS I developed a curiosity for, and interest in developing online learning materials, as well as game-based and assisted learning. As an educator, I am excited to include aspects and parts of what I have learned at CASLS and through several of my courses in LTS in the future, as technology continues to rapidly develop. 

These 15 months have been a whirlwind, but they have culminated in an extremely powerful experience for me as I continue to learn about myself as an educator, the best methods to serve my students, and about my students themselves. I continue to push myself to realize the best ways to apply theory in effective ways for my students, and I aim to create a less-stressful, more interactive world of language teaching and learning. This portfolio represents only the beginning of my future in the realm of education, but it is a strong stepping-off point for what I aim to accomplish in the realm of language teaching.