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Alyssa Villarreal is the President of Advance Learning and World Language Coordinator for Shelby County Schools in Memphis, Tennessee. In addition to her district duties, she has worked as the Foreign Language methods instructor for the University of Memphis. She is currently serving as President of the National Association of District Supervisors of Foreign Languages (NADSFL) and was named the 2012 NADSFL Supervisor of the Year.

As language educators we can all agree on our mission, we want to develop culturally appropriate communicators in languages other than English. Each day we take steps toward this outcome. We lead students through activities that help develop the modes of communication. In these activities, we ultimately guide student language development with two main concepts. One, we must be focused on learning functional language and second language used has to be perceived as meaningful to the learner.

Functional Language is essential to learning a second language. The brain must perceive new information as important in order for uptake, i.e. storage, to occur. Learning functional chunks of language make retention incrementally more likely to be stored in the brain. Several years ago in Shelby County Schools we decided to repurpose vocabulary lists from individual words to sentence frames. How classes chose to fill in the frame was up to the class to decide. Almost immediately we saw changes in student performances. Students were able to use the language they were learning more quickly and with greater fluency. Functions, like asking and answering questions or stating needs were occurring earlier than we’d ever seen it before. Students trying to create with the language was also occurring earlier. The improved quality of student performances earlier in the year would mean that meeting/exceeding our proficiency targets could also happen earlier. Using functions to guide instruction has bought about many meaningful improvements to the learning process. The biggest of these changes has been in student motivation.

Students are engaging in the language learning process more willingly because the functional chunks of language are meaningful. We still provide the context within which students produce language; the functions however make it easier to convey meaningful information. Meaningfulness is not only important to the students but also to the brain.  Each day we learn things that either reinforce or create a new connection in the brain. At night however, the brain goes through a pruning process where it deletes the connections that are not perceived as meaningful. Meaningfulness is critical to learning. If what we teach is not seen as meaningful then we will find ourselves re-teaching the same information over and over again because there was not sufficient context. Context helps build meaningfulness by providing a real world reason for using the language being learned. Involve your students in creating the context that would be meaningful to them. Only when students are engaged in such a manner will they create long lasting connections.