| Body | By Julie Sykes, CASLS Director
Summer is close and you see some time on the horizon to recharge, reflect, and refresh. In doing so, you start to ponder ways you might refresh the language course you have now taught many, many times without spending the whole summer rewriting activities, assignments, and rubrics. This week, we explore ways in which you can refresh your course without reinventing the wheel or starting over.
- Add a few pragmatic tidbits to each lesson. For example, in week 1, when teaching greetings and leave takings, you might also include a small pragmatic component that asks learns to identify and produce pre-closings (i.e., intentions to end the conversation like Well, I probably should get to class) before they say goodbye; or when talking about future plans, you could teach a few ways to show interest through hedging (e.g. using words like maybe, possibly, and could, to soften the directness of language) and overlap (i.e., types of appropriate or inappropriate interruption). Adding these small pieces enables you to continue working with material and activities you find successful, but also refocus some of the curricular effort on new content. Since pragmatics can be infused throughout, you will not have to restructure the entire course to include the information and practice.
- Have learners experience something. Adding real world experience to a language class enables connections to people, places, and things. While some experiential learning can be extremely time consuming to administer, experiences can also be facilitated to allow learners to explore on their own. For example, for each chapter, you could add a thinking routine (e.g., I see…, I think…, I wonder…). As part of this experience, learners have to first take or find an image relevant to the topics in the chapter. They then are asked to journal about what they see, what they think about what they see, and what they still wonder. This takes their lesson to the world and brings the world to their own classroom as well.
- Switch out the readings. While it can seem like a simple fix, switching out reading passages to content you find both interesting and relevant to the world, can add a new element to your course. Using digital content or alternative genres can add depth to the course and engage students in a variety of reading contexts.
Regardless of the approach you take, making small changes can have a big impact on your course experience and that of your students.
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