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Title: Reading Non-fiction Text in Spanish 4
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From https://kplacido.com
Here is a series of activities intended to help students read non-fiction texts more effectively: https://kplacido.com/2016/05/31/reading-non-fiction-text-in-spanish-4/
Source: Kristy Placido
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Title: Activities for Daily Routine from Zambombazo
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Here is a collection of resources having to do with daily routine from the Zambombazo website: http://zachary-jones.com/zambombazo/daily-routine/
Source: Zambombazo
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Title: End of School Year Resources for Elementary Spanish
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From http://funforspanishteachers.blogspot.com
Carolina Gómez shares some resources and ideas for your young Spanish learners at the end of the school year in this blog post: http://funforspanishteachers.blogspot.com/2016/05/end-of-school-year-resources-for.html
Source: Fun for Spanish Teachers
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Title: Making ESL Class an Entryway for Community Involvement
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Nathan Hall writes, “A bulk of our training to become ELL specialists involves the nuances of linguistics and how to adapt curriculum, but it’s not until we’re in the classroom for a year that we begin to see how the education is only a sliver of our students’ lives. We learn how they may have jobs that leave them with no time for homework, how they move so often they barely know their own addresses, or how hard it can be to get their parents to attend IEP meetings or other school functions. There are two ways we can handle this realization: We can focus on our jobs as teachers and stick to our activities and tests, or we can try to help our students to gain the skills they truly need to succeed in society.”
If you prefer the second choice, read on for ideas for being involved in improving the lives of your students and their families: http://blog.tesol.org/making-esl-class-an-entryway-for-community-involvement/
Source: TESOL Blog
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Content Type: 1
Title: #Langchat Summary: How and When Do We Integrate Students’ Input in the Assessment Process?
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Every Thursday a group of committed language teachers participates in a moderated Twitter exchange. Recently the topic dealt with student choice in the assessment process. You can read a summary of the exchange at http://calicospanish.com/how-and-when-do-we-integrate-students-input-in-the-assessment-process/
Source: Calico Spanish
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Content Type: 1
Title: Langfocus Channel for Language Exploration
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Langfocus is language enthusiast Paul Jorgensen’s YouTube channel where he talks about many, many different languages. This could be an excellent resource for exploratory language classes.
Langfocus is available at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNhX3WQEkraW3VHPyup8jkQ
Source: YouTube
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Content Type: 5
Title: Teaching Fun with German
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When asked about his favorite part of the internship program Teaching Fun with German, supervisor and senior instructor in the German and Scandinavian department at the University of Oregon Matthias Vogel replies, “My favorite part of the experience is to see our interns blossom as they come into their own in front of the class and to witness the joy the kids are displaying when learning German with our interns."
The Teaching Fun with German internship program provides the opportunity for eight undergraduate German majors to gain practical experience as teachers by teaching German language to local elementary students. These undergraduate students first take a seminar with Vogel in which they learn strategies for teaching a second language, such as Total Physical Response (TPR). Through the class and the internship component, they learn about second language teaching and begin to develop an understanding of the needs of a language learner who is learning German for the first time, as well as make connections with the elementary school students. Two of the interns were presented with a poster sized thank you card from their students at the end of year [pictured below].
Source: CASLS Spotlight
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Content Type: 5
Title: Farewell to Oregon International Interns
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On June 3 CASLS celebrated the success of the Spring 2016 Oregon International Internship Program interns as they get ready to complete their 5-month internship on June 17.
OIIP sponsors students from universities in China, Japan, and Taiwan to come to the Eugene-Springfield area and gain valuable classroom experience by shadowing a mentor elementary school teacher for five days a week. This full-time internship is complemented by two courses at the University of Oregon on English pragmatics and teaching pedagogy. Students also live with an American family and gain valuable conversational and cultural knowledge to take back with them.
At the farewell party [photo below] CASLS honored the interns’ hard work and expressed gratitude to the mentor teachers and homestay families for all their support. Please join us in wishing the OIIP cohort well where ever their journeys may take them next!
For more information about OIIP, how to become a homestay family, or how an OIIP intern can join your classroom, please visit the website.
Source: CASLS Spotlight
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Content Type: 3
Title: Project Based Learning in the World Language Classroom
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By Stephanie Knight, CASLS Language Technology Specialist
The popularity of the Buck Institute’s Project Based Learning (PBL) is attributable to its potential to positively impact student learning. It is a rigorous approach to solving real-world problems and questions that, when done correctly, allows learners to become amateur practitioners of the subjects that they are studying. In the world language class, Project Based Learning is a step beyond Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT) in that the authentic language tasks that learners engage in during PBL are sustained within a conceptual and practical framework designed to intentionally incorporate 21st century skills.
As is the case with any approach to backwards design, the content and conceptual knowledge that learners should gain are defined by educators (or collaboratively with students) before beginning a unit of study. Additionally, the skills (critical thinking, collaboration, etc.) needed to acquire that knowledge and to use it are identified. The treatment of this knowledge and skill set is intentionally considered as educators plan, carefully considering the eight essential project design elements that are at play in PBL. These elements and their explanations (listed below) are adapted from “Gold Standard PBL: Essential Project Design Elements”, a blog post written for and by members of the Buck Institute. Additionally, I have included an example of PBL in practice from my Spanish IV Honors course to give an idea of what the essential elements look like in practice.
|
Essential Element |
Explanation |
Element in Practice |
|
Challenging Problem or Question |
The problem or question lets learners understand the “why” of their learning. It provides the context needed for learners to recognize the meaning behind their learning. |
In our unit, we explored immigration to the United States and tried to come up with a solution to preserve the histories and traditions that are potentially lost in immigrant families when subsequent generations become more assimilated in the culture of the host country. |
|
Sustained Inquiry |
Learning should beget more in-depth and refined learning. Inquiry happens throughout the project and inspires research. |
We studied the history of Mexican immigration to the United States and the effects of policy changes on immigration flows. This led the students to consider current hardships faced by immigrants and sparked their curiosity regarding why individuals would willingly endure the hardships of moving to a new country in lieu of remaining in their home countries. |
|
Authenticity |
Authenticity in PBL is achieved through various means including context (real-world problems are solved), process (professional tools are used to create and research), impact (the local community is impacted), and establishing personal relevance (content speaks to the personal concerns and interests of learners). |
Our project was authentic in context (we looked to solve the aforementioned problem), process (learners learned histories by conducting interviews), and impact (learners created a mural to preserve the stories that they collected in for the school community). Though student reflections revealed the project to be personally relevant to most learners, making it so was not a part of our intentional design. |
|
Student Voice and Choice |
Learners have input and some degree of control in the project. |
In our project, learners were taught how to create leveled questions to elicit both simple and complex answers during interviews. They used that knowledge to create their own questions. They then synthesized the interviews to decide what themes were the most common and compelling. These themes were passed along to a group of art students (some of which were in our class) so that they could capture them within a mural. |
|
Reflection |
Like inquiry, reflection is a perpetual component of PBL. Learners must consistently reflect on “what they’re learning, how they’re learning, and why they’re learning” (Larmer and Mergendoller, 2015). |
Reflection occurred in multiple ways; we had classroom debates regarding how policy changes impacted immigration, engaged in group evaluation of work, and used exit tickets as our most common reflection tools. |
|
Critique & Revision |
In order for learners to produce high-quality work, they must learn how to reflect on that work. This process involves teacher input and peer review and feedback. |
In our class, learners engaged in group review of the interview questions that they created. They also critiqued their paragraph overviews of the work that inspired the murals. |
|
Public Project |
Learners are motivated to produce work of high quality when they know that their audience is not limited to their classmates. Additionally, displaying student work publically allows the work that the students create to become part of the public dialog. A happy side effect of this characteristic is that it puts high-quality student work in the public eye, dispelling any narrative regarding the poor state of education within the community. |
For our project, learners created a mural that was going to be unveiled at a ceremony at a local university in which we discussed the various immigrant stories that we collected. However, due to some logistical issues that arose, our school became the location in which we displayed the mural. It was placed in a high-traffic area (the main office), thereby making it accessible to more members of the outside community than another location in the school would allow for. |
In closing, it is pertinent to remind educators that though PBL can seem overwhelming given all of the factors that one has to consider, it is a worthwhile endeavor. As we experienced with our original plan to unveil our mural, issues can certainly arise that cause a well-intentioned plan to change. Regardless, if educators commit to implementing their projects with as much fidelity as possible, the learners will certainly benefit and grow, not only as students, but as individuals.
Reference
Larmer, J. & Mergendoller, J. (2015). Gold Standard PBL: Essential Project Design Elements. Retrieved from: http://bie.org/blog/gold_standard_pbl_essential_project_design_elements.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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Title: Book: Second Language Acquisition of Turkish
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From https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/lald.59/main
Second Language Acquisition of Turkish
Edited by Ayşe Gürel
Published by the John Benjamins Publishing Company
This book brings together the findings of current studies on the second language (L2) acquisition of Turkish, an Altaic language with more than 140 million native speakers around the world. There is now a growing interest in learning and teaching Turkish as an L2, both in and outside Turkey. Coordinated efforts to produce theoretical and empirical work on the acquisition and teaching of L2 Turkish are therefore an urgent need. The compilation in this volume offers eleven L2 studies that explore the representation and/or processing of various linguistic properties in different domains of grammar (phonology, morpho-syntax, pragmatics) and their interfaces. All studies involve adult L2 Turkish learners with various first-language backgrounds at different proficiency levels. With extensive discussions on theoretical and pedagogical issues, this title will appeal to an international readership that includes L2 Turkish researchers, materials designers, and teachers.
Visit the publisher’s website at https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/lald.59/main
Source: John Benjamins Publishing Company
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