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Content Type: 1
Title: Teaching Empathy to Children Through Storytelling: Focus on English Learners
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Judie Haynes writes, “As English learners enter school this year, one of our most important jobs as teachers is to help them adjust to the American classroom. It is important to make our ELs feel welcome and accepted. With all of the anti-immigrant and refugee rhetoric that children are hearing in the news, teachers have a genuine opportunity to address the issue around immigration and build empathy. One way to do this is to design lessons around students’ stories about their cultural heritage. These lessons should not only be told by immigrants and refugees but for all of the students in the classroom. Here are a few ideas of how students can share their stories, and a few lesson ideas that are inclusive of all students.”
Read the ideas here: http://blog.tesol.org/teaching-empathy-to-children-through-storytelling/
Source: TESOL Blog
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Title: New Resource: Newsela Library
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We’ve noted Newsela as a leveled news reading resource for English learners (http://caslsintercom.uoregon.edu/content/17199). Newsela has recently launched a new resource, Newsela Library, which contains a variety of primary source material adapted to different reading levels.
Explore the new Newsela Library at https://newsela.com/articles/#/rule/latest-library
Read reviews of this resource at https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/22/newsela-rolls-out-library-to-help-students-read-beyond-the-news/?ncid=rss and at http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2016/08/22/newsela-unveils-exceptional-library-of-primary-sources-edited-for-different-levels/
Source: Newsela
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Content Type: 1
Title: EFL Classroom 2.0: Resources Now Free
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From http://community.eflclassroom.com/profiles/blogs/efl-classroom-now-totally-free
The EFL Classroom 2.0 website is full of resources for English language teachers, including an extensive resource library, a monthly newsletter, a weekly magazine, and online communities. It has recently become completely free, as explained here: http://community.eflclassroom.com/profiles/blogs/efl-classroom-now-totally-free.
Explore this resource at http://community.eflclassroom.com/
Source: EFL Classroom 2.0
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Title: Video and Lesson Plan: The Boy Who Learned to Fly
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Here is an English lesson based on a 7-minute film about Usain Bolt: http://film-english.com/2016/08/23/the-boy-who-learned-to-fly/
If you have trouble finding the video itself, it is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b03jWW70kc
Source: Film English
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Title: Interactive Websites as Authentic Resources
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Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell wraps up her AuthRes August series with a blog post about how target-culture and target-language interactive websites can be used as authentic resources for language classes: http://musicuentos.com/2016/08/interactive-sites/
Source: Musicuentos
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Title: post: Contemporary Art around the Globe
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post is The Museum of Modern Art’s online resource devoted to art and the history of modernism in a global context. With a primary focus on modern and contemporary art outside North America and Western Europe, the website invites contributions by individuals and institutions from around the world and makes behind-the-scenes research at MoMA available to a broader public.
post is available at http://post.at.moma.org/
Source: MoMA
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Title: Asia Society Center for Global Education
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From http://asiasociety.org/new-york/events/introducing-asia-society-center-global-education
Asia Society is proud to announce the launch of their Center for Global Education (ASCGE). The center aims to transform education by bringing together the most influential educators, businesses, and government officials, commissioning research, publishing insights, and partnering with schools and education systems to change policy and practice.
Learn more at http://asiasociety.org/new-york/events/introducing-asia-society-center-global-education
Source: Asia Society
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Title: Authentic Texts as Windows: Products and Perspectives
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From http://www.pblinthetl.com
In this excellent blog post, Laura K. Sexton describes how she selects and uses authentic texts for novice language learners in a way that gets them thinking about products, practices, and perspectives of the target culture: http://www.pblinthetl.com/2016/08/authentic-texts-as-windows-products-and.html
Source: PBL in the TL
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Content Type: 2
Title: September Theme: Literacy and Cross-Curricular Connections
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Our September theme for InterCom is literacy and cross-curricular connections. Those who teach a language as an elective course isolated from “core” subjects may wonder how cross-curricular connections could apply to them; in next week’s Topic of the Week article we will explore how exploring engaging concepts can frame curriculum design in language learning. Those whose students are requesting activities that build “real-life” interpersonal speaking skills may wonder what place literacy has in their students’ learning; in this week’s InterCom guest contributor Kate Paesani frames interpersonal speaking around authentic texts from a literacy perspective. In both weeks we present you with Activities of the Week that use Pokémon Go! as an authentic resource to explore engaging concepts such as aesthetics, change, and communities. In the later part of the month we will consider cross-curricular connections from an immersion perspective and examine visual literacy. We hope you enjoy this month’s series!
Source: CASLS
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Title: Cross-Curricular Learning, Multiliteracies, and Commercial Games
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by Stephanie Knight, CASLS Language Technology Specialist
“A concept is a big idea—a principle or conception that is enduring, the significance of which goes beyond aspects such as particular origins, subject matter or place in time” (Wiggins and McTighe (1998) as quoted in MYP: From principles into practice).
Concept-based learning is foundational to promoting cross-curricular connections in the world language classroom. As Wiggins and McTighe (1998) emphasize, concepts are beneficial to 1) underscoring the meaning, importance, and relevance of a subject matter and 2) connecting a given subject area to other fields of inquiry. Balance is a beneficial concept to consider when contemplating these cross-curricular connections. Learners balance equations in their mathematics classrooms, they examine balance within functioning ecosystems in their environmental sciences laboratories, they explicate relationships that are upset by changing balance in various pieces of literature, and they explore balance as revealed through power dynamics in world language courses via the consideration of the various registers of language.
Literature regarding multiliteracies indicates a synergistic connection between multimodal communication (supporting written text with spoken text, for example) and the inspection of concepts in the world language classroom. Pellet (2012) embodies this synergy by discussing learner teams collaborating in the L2 to make wikis in another content area. The wikis were found to bring authenticity through learning and helping learners to use computer-mediated communication (CMC) for “developing meaningful interaction skills beyond the sentence level” (p. 240). Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly when considering concepts as they relate to the world-language classroom, using the L2 to connect with a variety of content areas allowed learners to be integral cogs in the creation of knowledge rather than simple receivers of knowledge (as they would be in a top-down pedagogical approach). As such, a teacher-centered classroom does not adequately serve or fully benefit from a cross-curricular, concept-based approach.
Undoubtedly, the situation may arise in which learners struggle to serve as creators of knowledge in the world language classroom when they are exploring a concept with which they struggle to make concrete personal and cross-curricular connections. If such a situation, one should help learners to experience said concepts through the exploration of media including data sets (see gapminder.org for a useful tool), infographics, literature, and particularly commercial video games. These games are wonderful because they allow learners from disparate backgrounds in the classroom to share an experience that frames a target concept. For example, playing Pokémon Go will allow learners to observe the systems (transportation, religious networks, parks and recreation) that exist within their communities. Follow-up classroom discussions can lead learners to consider how those systems contribute to or detour from the concept of development, and learners can express those reflections through the composition of blog entries or video productions in the L2 that serve to highlight important community areas. This work may be supported by a scientific investigation in their biology classes in which learners explore sustainability issues associated with community development or historical investigations in which learners examine primary sources to understand what community characteristics (human rights, access to resources) people groups have identified as essential to development overtime. Essentially, by allowing for meaningful gameplay, teachers fertilize their classrooms for meaningful learner engagement and communication.
For more ideas regarding how games may be used in the world language classroom, please check out Games2Teach, the CASLS site devoted to applying game-informed learning in the world language context. There, you will find a blog about current issues related to games, education research about games, and classroom activities that exemplify how games might be used in the world language classroom.
Sources:
International Baccalaureate. (2014). MYP: Principles into practice. Retrieved from http://docplayer.net/17134933-Myp-from-principles-into-practice-for-use-from-september-2014-january-2015.html.
Pellet, S. (2012). Wikis for building content knowledge in the world language classroom. CALICO Journal. 29 (2). 224-248.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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