Ana Flavia Boeing Marcelino

My most recent position at the University of Chicago as a Visiting Research Associate and a Brazilian Leitora combined teaching and promoting the Portuguese language and Brazilian culture with research in the fields of program development, material design, and task-based language teaching. As a language teacher and classroom researcher, I value the connection between theory and practice, in which language learning takes place meaningfully. Thus, organizing and hosting extracurricular language- and culture-related activities are always present throughout my practice. 

My Research Project at UChicago involved a team of 6 professors of different world languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, German, French and ESL), who conducted a Domain Analysis for Global Business Communication. Our goal is to map the Knowledges, Skills and Abilities (KSAs) needed for Econ and Business Econ undergraduates to effectively and competitively perform in a global language in the business world, from entry-level to mid-career positions. Ultimately leading to the design of language tests and courses that better fit the needs of that domain.

I have been a Portuguese and English teacher in Brazil since 2014 and have experience with research on the teaching and learning of both languages, in addition to Spanish. I hold an M.A. in English Linguistic and Literary Studies from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil), in which I conducted classroom research on the teaching of Portuguese as a Host Language to forcibly displaced immigrants (“TBLT and Portuguese as a Host language: analyzing learners' oral performance in terms of Outcome Achievement and investigating the task implementation process through the learners' and the teacher's perspectives”). 
Before relocating to the U.S., I was a Portuguese/English teacher for Brazilians at a Federal Institution for Vocational-Technical Education in Santa Catarina (Instituto Federal Catarinense - IFC) and Coordinated the IFC Language Center at the Fraiburgo campus. From 2021-2022 I worked as the Outreach and Social Media Coordinator for the TBLT Language Learning Task Bank, an online database that provides access to peer-reviewed tasks ready to be downloaded and applied in language lessons, a project financed by the International Association of Task-Based Language Teaching. 

During my undergraduate and graduate years at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, I have been a member of the Portuguese Research and Education Center (NUPLE), at which I taught beginners to advanced classes and, from 2017 to 2019, participated as a licensed evaluator of the Certificate of Proficiency in Brazilian Portuguese (CELPE-BRAS). From 2016 to 2021, I also volunteered as a pedagogical coordinator, teacher, and material designer for the Portuguese as a Host Language Project for immigrants and refugees (PLAM) at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. I am a member of the AQUILES research group, which studies theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological issues of language acquisition.