Pedagogical Linguistics in Romance

Linguists tend to underestimate their educational and societal role, but linguistics matters. Therefore, this article is a plea for linguists to act accordingly and to fulfill their important role boldly and creatively. By dealing with pedagogical aspects of Romance linguistics, an area which I call Romance Pedagogical Linguistics (RPL), I highlight the crucial role of linguistics in various pedagogical contexts of Romance languages and how all involved parties benefit from a strong, confident, and open-minded linguistic component. I assume a wide definition of RPL, thus including not only foreign and heritage language learning and teaching, but also teaching of linguistics in higher education. I demonstrate how Romance Pedagogical Linguistics could look in practice with five examples. In order to illustrate how language pedagogy can benefit from linguistics and what the task of linguistics is in this regard, I discuss subjunctives as well as intonation in Spanish and French foreign language acquisition, and I refer to work on Spanish as a heritage language. Subsequently, I will exemplify two concrete implementations of RPL in higher education by using the method of research-led learning in advanced courses of linguistics dealing with intonation as well as by presenting the Hourglass-Portfolio-Method.