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Content Type: 1
Title: Improve Language Skill with Music Videos on Vagalume
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Vagalume is a Brazilian website where language learners can sharpen their skills using music videos, doing cloze exercises and translations along with the music. You can use the website to practice Portuguese, English, Spanish, German, or French.
Vagalume is available at http://aprenda.vagalume.com.br/ingles/
Source: Vagalume
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Title: Reflection on The Keys to Planning for Learning
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Last week (http://caslsintercom.uoregon.edu/content/21474) we let you know about #langbook, a professional development opportunity in which you can read The Keys to Planning for Learning: Effective Curriculum, Unit, and Lesson Design by Donna Clementi and Laura Terrill and discuss it with your fellow language educators. Read one teacher’s reflections about what she has read so far here: http://madameshepard.com/?p=1195
Read the same teacher’s ideas and resources for her unit about food for intermediate low French students here: http://madameshepard.com/?p=1193
Source: Madame's Musings
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Title: Host an International High School Exchange Student Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State
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From the ILR-INFO listserv:
Would you like to have a cross-cultural experience in your community while contributing to improved relations between the United States and other countries?
If so, consider hosting an exchange student sponsored by the U.S. Department of State in your home or school. Each year, almost 2,000 high school students representing over 50 countries are awarded highly competitive merit-based State Department scholarships to study in the United States for an academic year. These promising young leaders live with American host families across the country, attend high school, and participate in extracurricular and community service activities. When they return to their home countries, they engage in alumni activities to share what they learned, put their new skills in practice, and maintain their links to the United States as they become leaders in their communities.
The benefits of hosting Department of State-sponsored exchange student go beyond simply welcoming someone new into your family or school and sharing American culture, values, and traditions -- when you host an exchange student you welcome a new culture and language, and all the richness that comes with it into your community, help a young person learn and grow, and create long-lasting relationships and memories. Learn more and fill out an interest form at hosting.state.gov or email us at youthprograms@state.gov. It is recommended that you complete an inquiry form by August 19th if you are interested in the possibility of hosting a student arriving this fall. Inquiries received after that date will also be considered for fall students.
Radomski, C. [ILR-INFO] Host an International High School Exchange Student. ILR-INFO listserv (ILR-INFO@fsilist2.fsi.state.gov, 14 Jul 2016).
Source: ILR-INFO
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Content Type: 1
Title: Google Arts and Culture
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Google Arts & Culture is a Google website that allows visitors to explore great works of art as well as virtual tours of culturally significant places. Tour ancient Kyoto, the Teatro Degollado in Guadalajara, Mexico, or ancient Roman temples. Explore the website at https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/u/0/
Source: Google
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Title: New State Department “Students Abroad” Website
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From http://www.naylornetwork.com/iie-studyAbroad/articles/index-v3.asp?aid=386458&issueID=46436
The U.S. State Department has launched a new website and mobile friendly resource that provides a range of vital information related to study abroad. Through clear and useful search options, students, study abroad professionals and parents can locate pertinent information, including webpages dedicated to searching for study abroad country destinations, country-specific visa information, scholarship opportunities, featured study abroad news articles, travel alerts and warnings, as well as links for students who are already abroad.
Visit the new website at https://travel.state.gov/content/studentsabroad/en.html
Source: IIE
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Title: Teachers’ Reflections on 90% Target Language Use
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Practicing teachers have been reflecting on ACTFL’s recommendation to use at least 90% target language in her language classroom (if you’re unfamiliar with this position statement, you can read it here: http://www.actfl.org/news/position-statements/use-the-target-language-the-classroom).
In a recent provocative blog post, teacher Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell examines the origin and implementation of this specific number and explores issues of the quality/comprehensibility of the input in the process of developing her own position statement. Read her reasoning and resulting position statement here: http://musicuentos.com/2016/07/apprehend/
Read teacher Justin Slocum-Bailey’s own position statement (in part a reflection after reading the above post) here: http://indwellinglanguage.com/position-statement-tl-use/
Read teacher Amy Lenord’s suggestions for how to make the most use of the 10% non-target language classroom time here: http://www.amylenord.net/blog/making-the-most-of-the-10-bts-prep
Source: Various
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Title: Advice for Transitioning to Project-Based Learning
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From http://www.pblinthetl.com
Teacher Laura Sexton shares five of the “mistakes” she made when transitioning to a proficiency-based classroom that uses project-based learning. Whether you are a veteran of PBL or just thinking about trying it out, her reflection has some solid guidelines for practice. You can read it here: http://www.pblinthetl.com/2016/07/proficiency-pbl-my-top-5-transition.html
Source: PBL in the TL
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Content Type: 1
Title: Using Songs in a Language Classroom
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From http://www.teachthemenglish.com/
Here is a presentation with suggestions for using any song in a language classroom: http://www.teachthemenglish.com/2016/07/11/how-to-use-any-song-in-an-elt-classroom/
Source: Teach them English
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Title: Lightning Language Vlog: Get Ideas and Support
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From http://www.lightninglanguagevlog.com/
Lightning Language Vlog is a new website featuring short video clips of Spanish teacher Angela Gardner sharing ideas for other teachers. Topics range from advice on finding and being active in professional organizations to a specific presentational speaking project that fosters student engagement (and there’s a link to the handout you can use if you’re teaching Spanish).
Explore the vlog at http://www.lightninglanguagevlog.com/
Source: Lightning Language Vlog
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Content Type: 4
Title: Choose-your-own Weekly Listening Activity
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The Individual Motivating Factors (IMF) Framework is a motivational framework developed by Kathryn Carpenter at University of Oregon that focuses on learners’ dynamic, personal impetuses and reasons for learning language. IMFs describe why they’re in the language classroom and what factors are keeping them putting in the effort to learn a language. The following activity gives an example of differentiated instruction based on IMFs and shows a way that teachers can take advantage of their students’ motivating factors. In this activity, the out-of-class activity is differentiated in that students pick out products and content based on their IMFs, within some guidelines. The activity described below should not take up a full class; rather, it should be incorporated into one class weekly. The first in-class part should only take about 5 minutes, and the second should take about 15.
Choose-your-own Weekly Listening Activity by Kathryn Carpenter
This will be a weekly assignment with ongoing goals of each specific weekly assignment. The overall goal is for students to increase ability to talk about things that are relevant to them with the goal of giving them skills to talk about things that they are ‘experts’ on. They will also be expected, routinely, to contribute to the class discussions with what they have prepared for this weekly assignment. This activity is for intermediate-high to advanced-low students. Again, the activity below does not take up a full class, though the content or language that students gain from each listening activity can be incorporated into other activities.
Objectives: The objectives for this will change with every week, as will the focus. For this week: Learners will be able to:
- Find and demonstrate understanding of some content that they can learn something from.
- Connect their reasons for learning language with the content that they have listened to.
- Reflect on the process of finding the audio/video, listening and understanding it, and relaying information through a recording, and define what is most difficult through an in-class discussion.
- Help decide on the theme/focus of the next audio or video that they view.
Materials: audio/video that students find, Vocaroo (an online recording/submitting software, vocaroo.com.) If you use LinguaFolio Online in your class, students can submit their recordings there as evidence instead.
Instructions given at the end of class:
- As homework, students are instructed to find an audio or video in the target language. They should be instructed to explore different things to listen to over the course of this weekly assignment. The teacher can suggest a podcast (NPR has some good ones), a TV show, a YouTube tutorial or news, a TED talk, or a song. For this week, students can choose the format and the content of what they will be listening to or talking about—however, they have to learn (how to do) something from the content. The teacher should remind students to pay attention to their reasons for learning the target language (if this is the first time that students have done this, the teacher can facilitate it by asking how they are going to use the language in the future, why they like this language, what made them take this class, etc.), and help guide them towards the most appropriate content based on either the format of the audio/video itself or the content.
- Students are instructed to listen to the audio text that they chose and then give a summary of what they learned from it, what happened, or give a brief explanation of the content, through Vocaroo. This should be within 2-3 minutes. Students should refer to the rubric to make sure that they are meeting the requirements.
At home: Students find their content, and listen to it. They then log onto Vocaroo and record their recording, and send it to the teacher.
In class
- Students come to class. They should have turned in the above the night before. Teacher starts the discussion by getting a show of hands and asking students what they watched. What was the most-listened to product? Any trends?
- Teacher asks students to get in a think-pair-share format and discuss what they learned from what they listened to. This will probably be a recap of what was in their recording. Then, as a group, students can share the most interesting things that they learned.
- Students get in small groups and talk about the hardest thing about this assignment. They should make a list (or a spectrum/hardest to easiest line) of what was easy and what was hard. The teacher can help start this off by giving a few examples: summarizing a lot of information, finding the content, understanding the content, learning the thing, knowing which formality to use, pronunciation, using Vocaroo, using past tense, knowing enough vocabulary, relaying information from another source, closing and openings, relating it to my life; and asking students to place them in the easy or hard side. At the end of the class, the students can vote on which things are easy and which are hard for them.
- The things that the class voted on as being difficult are either things that the class can choose to change, or can choose to work more on, either in a mini-lesson or in their next video/audio. For example, if the class thinks that knowing which formality to use was difficult, then the teacher (or the students who didn’t think that this was difficult) can lead a mini-lesson on the pragmatics of this type of speech, or if vocabulary was hard, then in the next video, students should challenge themselves to use 5 new vocabulary words relating to the theme. However, if students think that using Vocaroo was too hard, then another platform can be chosen.
- Then, the next audio/video for the next week can be chosen. The general theme of these audio/videos can match what is being done in the units of the class, but other than that, they should be relatively open, and should allow students to explore different sources, content, and different interests that relate to their IMFs. These assignments should be facilitative in three ways:
- They allow learners to practice whatever theme, grammar, vocabulary, and pragmatic or cultural aspect is being worked with in class.
- They allow learners to learn and interact with something outside of class that they can then bring in and contribute to the class.
- They allow learners to tap into their reasons for learning and explore new content and formats outside of class, while still connecting with the content.
- In further weeks, students will have more restrictions on what they need to listen to or watch—for example, the content might have to have a more specific theme (during a unit about global conservationism, they can find testimonials from park rangers, listen to a talk about climate change or a political speech, or watch an advice column on reducing carbon footprint), they may need to have more of an explicit focus for their reflections (incorporating aspects from a pronunciation or grammar lesson, answering more specific questions from the audio/video, adding their own opinions), or they might have to listen to and use a certain type of language (watching a formal speech and giving a commentary, using new slang, etc.).
Download a rubric for the weekly Vocaroo recording here.
Possible variations that students may choose based on IMFs (many, many more are possible!):
- A heritage learner, one of whose IMFs is related to feeling more like their community, watches a cooking class, and learns how to cook a certain food. This learner then brings this expertise to class and is able to tell others who to cook a food from their country/culture of heritage.
- A learner who has an IMF of studying abroad in a country where this language is spoken watches a tutorial of someone using the subway in the country, and is able to learn about it and bring that knowledge to the class, and describe how they are going to use that knowledge in the future.
- A learner who needs to learn this language for potential future employment opportunities listens to a video advice column on how to negotiate with clients in the target language. They are then able to share that information with the class.
- Other ways to differentiate future weekly out-of-class listening activities: students have to focus on different aspects of language in their reflections, students can pick the type of product as long as it contains the same content or vice versa, students have to find content with certain characteristics, or students have to turn in different products (rather than just vocal recordings).
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
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