A. L. Horton Elementary schoolchildren at the U of A (8 April 2019)
The Ukrainian Language Education Centre (ULEC) team, with Dr. Alla Nedashkivska as acting director, Dr. Olenka Bilash as senior advisor, and Dr. Olena Sivachenko as research associate, continues to contribute to Ukrainian language education while engaging with professional and academic communities.
During the reporting period ULEC organized and gave presentations on its multifaceted research program, including on L2 acquisition and language pedagogy (Nedashkivska and Sivachenko), L2 education, bilingual education, and multilingualism (Bilash), and "Teachers as Performers-Models of Language and Language Use," the latter as a ULEC-sponsored workshop led by Dr. Bilash at the ASEEES convention in Boston (December 2018). In addition, ULEC research was published in the areas of student engagement in language learning (Nedashkivska) and recruitment at the elementary school level (Bilash).
Both Nedashkivska and Bilash were invited to the National Ukrainian Teachers Conference in Winnipeg in May 2019, at which they were honoured to lead the culminating general session, titled "Global connections and local opportunities today and tomorrow: Ukrainian education in the digital age." They also presented at the Canadian Association of Slavists convention at the Univ. of British Columbia (1-3 June).
ULEC's professional development workshops for educators benefited teachers in Edmonton and Vegreville through two CEFR sessions on "Local students and fluent newcomers: How can Ukrainian bilingual educators assess Ukrainian language progress equitably?" conducted by N. Prokopchuk, as well as a series of workshops on "Teaching Ukrainian at the Post-secondary Level via OER Resources," led by Sivachenko.
On the international front, ULEC continued to be a hub for the Ukraine-based International Ukrainian Language Exam (seventeen Alberta students wrote it in the fall of 2018). Beginning in June 2019, an intern from Ukraine, sponsored by the Canadian non-profit organization Mitacs, was assigned to catalogue its library. Locally, the centre remains committed to community engagement and in particular supporting Ukrainian language education in the community. Together with the U of A's Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, in April 2019 ULEC organized a successful visit of grade 6 students from the Ukrainian Bilingual Program at A. L. Horton Elementary School in Vegreville, and their teacher, Murray Howell. The pupils attended a Ukrainian-language class at the university and gave a performance for students and staff that included "Ripka" and "Malanka" skits, songs, poetry, music, and dance.