Julia Hegarty

Background

About Julia Hegarty

I am a dynamic, creative and engaging Christian language teacher, with a passion for foreign languages and 15 years teaching experience. Born in Germany, I moved to the UK for my university studies and graduated with a First Class BA Hons degree in French, Italian and Business Studies, having spent one year of the degree studying and doing work placements in France. I then went on to work in a London based financial communications agency, travelling around the world in the course of equity capital offerings for German and French clients before meeting my husband and deciding to re-train as a teacher after settling in Australia 17 years ago. I am fluent in German, English and French and I am currently (re)learning Spanish; I also have a basic knowledge of Italian.I love a new challenge and am resourceful and adaptable. As a believer that skills of learning are, indeed, learnable and that every student can develop as a learner, I have a passion for thinking up ways to engage students and to assist them in acquiring life skills that will go beyond their school years. I also enjoy enriching pedagogical repertoires in practical ways that are backed by research. I believe that there is a gap to be filled between academic research and classroom practices. Teachers love concrete methods and blueprints for pedagogy that work; but they are also notoriously time poor and there is little incentive for them to investigate current and emerging theories that are underpinning certain approaches. I enjoy being at the forefront of educational research and finding ways to apply what I learn to support and cultivate individual and collective teacher and student growth. A few years ago, I came across Dr Gianfranco Conti’s approach of Extensive Processing Instruction and I started to change my programming across our 7-12 classes to incorporate the principled framework which Dr Conti calls MARS EARS, based on skill-acquisition theory, and is designed to convert input into fluent output. Observational evidence shows that implementing this method has improved our numbers in students taking up a language as an elective in Years 9-12. I am currently in my fifth year of a part-time EdD at UNE, undertaking research as to whether changing the way we teach languages/the concrete pedagogy that underpins our programming can enhance learners’ beliefs in their abilities and capabilities