View Content #18725

By the Staff of the National Foreign Language Resource Center (nflrc@hawaii.edu)

A project for intermediate/advanced level language learners

Adapted from http://www.hightechhigh.org/unboxed/issue3/cards/8.php

The backbone of a project consists of a series of articulated activities leading to the creation of authentic products that are presented to a real audience (see this week's Topic of the Week article). After the project is launched, the role of the teacher is to guide learners through the project by helping them identify and learn what they need to know in order to successfully complete the project. With the end in mind, the teacher also facilitates the process by adapting activities or designing new ones and by scaffolding several aspects of the project, including the project process, content, language and the final product. Language learning activities suggested in previous CASLS InterCom issues are a valuable resource to help you structure a project such as the one we describe here.

“As beginning learners, how can we create stories that will impress and engage Spanish-speaking children?” That is the driving question in the Cuentos Infantiles (Children's Stories) project. US children learning Spanish write and publish a book of children’s stories (authentic product) in Spanish and share it with Spanish-speaking students (real audience) at a partner school in Mexico. Learners from the partner school read the book (stories) and create videos based on those stories, which are then shared with the learners of Spanish.

CASLS InterCom has a rich catalogue of existing activities. Click here for examples of how a teacher might compile InterCom activities and sequence them to support a project such as the one we described above.