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Content Type: 1
Title: Fostering a Deeper Understanding of Current Immigration Issues Using Infographics and Photographs
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From http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com
Middle school teacher Rachelle Lamoureux has shared an activity she has done with her seventh graders on the New York Times’s Learning Network. Students explore and discuss infographics and arrive at complex conclusions about immigration that demonstrate the ability to consider the issue from multiple perspectives.
Read about the activity at http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/reader-idea-fostering-a-deeper-understanding-of-current-immigration-issues-using-infographics-and-photographs/
Source: The Learning Network
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Title: “Daily Driving Questions” for Guiding Students from Input to Output
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Our focus for September is cross-curricular connections; in today’s Topic of the Week article Stephanie Knight discusses how concepts can drive curriculum and engage students. Meanwhile, teacher Amy Lenord has written an excellent blog post about her use of “Daily Driving Questions” such as “What is culture?” In her words, “My hopes are that through these driving questions I am taking the communicative elements of my unit and framing them in a way that seems less artificial, less canned, and not like elementary school. I want our language learning to feel like we are learning the same types of things students learn in History, English, Humanities, etc., but just doing it in Spanish.”
Read Ms. Lenord’s excellent blog post at http://www.amylenord.net/blog/from-input-to-output-the-daily-driving-question
Source: Language Coaching
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Title: Some Resources for the Paralympic Games
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The 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio run September 7-18. Here are some resources for following the games:
The Paralympic Movement’s website of the games includes feature articles and videos, schedules of events and results, live streams, and more. Available at https://www.paralympic.org/rio-2016. The Paralympic Movement’s home page is available at https://www.paralympic.org/home
Brazil’s Paralympic site is available in Portuguese, English, Spanish, and French: https://www.rio2016.com/en/paralympics/sports
The Guardian is covering the games; follow stories at https://www.theguardian.com/sport/paralympics-2016, see results at http://www.theguardian.com/sport/ng-interactive/2016/sep/08/paralympics-2016-the-full-medal-table, and see photos of the opening ceremonies at https://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2016/sep/08/paralympics-opening-ceremony-in-pictures
Follow Team USA here: http://www.teamusa.org/us-paralympics/paralympic-games/rio-2016
Find out how to watch the Paralympic Games in the United States here: http://www.cbssports.com/olympics/news/start-of-the-2016-paralympics-schedule-how-to-watch-live-stream/
Source: Various
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Title: Picture Prompts and Ideas for Using Them
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From http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com
The New York Times will be presenting what they’re calling “Picture Prompts” throughout the 2016-2017 academic year. Access what they’ve compiled so far along with numerous ideas for using the prompts in classrooms here: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/09/07/how-to-teach-with-our-picture-prompts-and-other-times-images/?_r=1
Source: New York Times
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Title: Pokémon Go!, Motivation, and Language Learning
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From http://www.pblinthetl.com
Teacher Laura K. Sexton has written another excellent, thought-provoking blog post - this time discussing components of what motivates her to play a game like Pokémon Go! and how those components apply to language learning.
Read her blog post here: http://www.pblinthetl.com/2016/09/gaming-language-novice-pbl-unit.html
You can also access her Pokémon Go! unit here: http://www.pblinthetl.com/2016/07/pokemon-vamos-pokemon-go-for-spanish.html
The components Ms. Sexton identifies are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Here at CASLS, we’ve all read Language at Play: Digital Games in Second and Foreign Language Teaching and Learning by our directory Julie Sykes and Jonathon Reinhardt (available here: https://www.pearsonhighered.com/program/Sykes-Language-at-Play-Digital-Games-in-Second-and-Foreign-Language-Teaching-and-Learning/PGM280956.html). This book explores in-depth possible connections between good game design and language teaching and learning; findings from the book along with more resources are available on CASLS’ Games2Teach website at https://games2teach.uoregon.edu/. Comparing and contrasting Ms. Sexton’s components with those in Sykes and Reinhardt’s book is fascinating, and examining her Spanish unit along with last week’s and this week’s Activities of the Week (http://caslsintercom.uoregon.edu/content/21734 and http://caslsintercom.uoregon.edu/content/21735) is inspiring us to find more ways to use digital games as part of language learning.
Source: PBL in the TL
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Title: September 15 is Global Collaboration Day
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From http://www.globalcollaborationday.org/
Students, teachers, and organizations will celebrate global collaboration on September 15, 2016. On this day (and beyond), experienced global educators and professionals will host connective projects and events and invite public participation. The primary goals of this whole day event are to demonstrate the power of global connectivity in classrooms, schools, institutions of informal learning and universities around the world, and to introduce others to the tools, resources and projects that are available to educators today.
Learn more about hosting an event and participating in existing activities at http://www.globalcollaborationday.org/home.html
Source: Global Collaboration Day
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Title: Resources for Teaching Diverse Learners
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The specialeducationalneeds.com website is dedicated to the promotion of inclusion, languages and the appropriate use of technology in education. It includes a page with links to many helpful resources, including curriculum that is designed to include students with special educational needs, references and documentation of use to foreign language teachers seeking to build their students' cross-curricular skills and to meet their additional needs, and a series of case studies of foreign language learners who are gifted and talented, or for whom English is an additional language, or who have special educational needs.
Access these resources at http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/home/languages
Source: specialeducationalneeds.com
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Title: Facilitative Approach to Developing an Immersion Program
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By Julie Sykes, CASLS Director
For two decades, Portland Public Schools (PPS) (Portland, Oregon) has offered a Mandarin Dual Language Immersion Program with preschool and kindergarten entry points. In the last decade, PPS has partnered with the University of Oregon to build a well-articulated K–16 Mandarin immersion and world language program.
Our ethnographic study, funded by The Language Flagship, examines the historical development of the PPS program, sets forth key components of the PPS model that other districts may replicate, and examines catalysts and disruptors to the language immersion model.
Research identified twelve essential elements for an immersion program.
- Foster community support through clear, consistent communication with parents
- Facilitate communication among parents and teachers, specifically addressing differences in language, culture, and socioeconomic status
- Garner district support for staffing, curriculum, enrollment, student management, and financial investments
- Create unity between the immersion and neighborhood programs housed within the same school
- Develop institutional partnerships to create places for students to continue their learning as they progress from elementary to middle to high school and beyond
- Maintain high elementary enrollments that can sustain attrition and retain viable student numbers for middle and high school programs
- Maintain middle school and high school student interest and motivation in language study through innovation and opportunity
- Employ backwards design to first identify program goals and then establish practices to accomplish those goals
- Hire committed administrative staff whose tasks pertain solely to the immersion program
- Provide qualified teachers with ongoing professional development through professional learning communities that work toward aligning curriculum horizontally across disciplines and vertically across grade levels
- Track student outcomes with standardized assessments and use assessment data to drive curriculum changes
- Consistently acquire curriculum resources in the target language
The Executive Summary and complete study can be found at: https://casls.uoregon.edu/research/chinese-immersion-research/
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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Content Type: 3
Title: Seven Tips for Implementing Cross-Curricular Units in the World Language Classroom
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by Stephanie Knight, CASLS Language Technology Specialist
I, like many of my language teaching brethren, went into teaching Spanish because I loved Spanish. I loved studying the etymology of words and was so excited by grammar that I practically squealed when talking about it. In many ways, I was fascinated by Spanish because I found it fascinating. Unfortunately, that circularity of reasoning was not always embraced by my students. They needed something else to see the relevance of learning a world language. This need was particularly evident with my students who had no intention of ever living or working outside of their current neighborhoods.
Luckily, I was placed in a middle school that was seeking approval to be an International Baccalaureate World School my first year of teaching. Concurrency of learning is demanded by the International Baccalaureate, and after attending my first training, I began to realize all of the many ways that using a cross-curricular lens to think about my language teaching would positively impact my learners. I engaged in the intentional planning of units with cross-curricular links, and reflecting on this experience has led me to articulate seven tips for educators seeking to imbed cross-curricular connections into the classroom.
- Begin planning by thinking of a concept that allows students to make interdisciplinary connections.
Concept-based learning is enduring and helps learners to make connections outside of the classroom. The concept of identity serves as a great example. While I found most of my high school freshman to be less than enthusiastic about learning adjectives in Spanish, I found them all to find relevance in using adjectives to explore perceptions and how perceptions impact one’s identity. That the learners were studying genetic traits in biology further compounded the relevance of using descriptive language.
- If you are unsure of how to pick a concept or about how subjects connect, work with a team of educators from other disciplines.
The best planning session I ever did for cross-curricular units unintentionally involved a math teacher and a science teacher. I was working in the school library and struggled to articulate how my content related to any concepts. I wondered out loud about the connections, and they asked me to share what content we were covering and why that content was important to know beyond its alignment to state standards. Immediately, they began to see connections to their own subject areas and helped me to articulate mine.
- Design an end of unit assessment that is authentic and allows learners to explore the concept that they created.
To allow learners to fully consider a concept and draw cross-curricular connections, educators must design authentic assessments that allow for functional language use and proficiency building. Multiple choice tests and form-focused assessments do not adequately allow the learner to make the enduring connections that are indicative of long-term learning.
- Identify the various learning targets incorporated within an assessment and use those to engage in backwards design.
The first time that I tried to embed concepts and cross-curricular learning into my course, I helped learners to explore them with intention for a week or so and eventually reverted back to my older practices. Thus, even though my learners were engaging in functional language use, the importance and validity of that use began to be less clear. In order to avoid such a situation, one must articulate the learning targets that are related to the targeted concept in the final unit assessment and engage in intentional backwards design so that learners practice those targets in the appropriate context throughout the course. Just as with selecting concepts, when selecting these targets, it is beneficial to work with educators from other subject areas to understand how the targets relate to the content of their courses.
- Provide for a class-wide experience in which learners can develop a connection with the concept or concepts at play so that they may begin to make connections to other subject areas.
Concepts allow learners to create personal and cross-curricular connections with classroom content. However, all concepts were not created equal in this respect. You may find that some learners are not as well-connected with a concept as you would like them to be at the unit’s inception. In order to prime these learners for thinking regarding cross-curricular connections, create some sort of shared experience for your entire class that can serve as a springboard for subsequent classroom tasks. This experience could be playing a digital game together, reviewing data sets, or the review of a source text that has the potential to spark cognitive dissonance and inquiry within learners.
- Use the L1 to empower the L2.
Learners need to observe, evaluate, and practice the L2 in realistic contexts in order to build their language proficiencies. However, particularly for novice learners, setting aside intentional class time to explore the concepts and cross-curricular connections in the L1 is recommended. The time lost working in the L2 is well worth the increased understanding and motivation that arises in learners after giving them time to process in the language that most adequately allows for that processing to occur.
- Give yourself time to think and to plan.
Clearly, a great deal of thinking goes into planning cross-curricular units. Educators must be intentional in protecting this thinking time. This time may occur during regularly-scheduled planning time, over the weekends, or during school breaks. I personally found the summer to be the best time to engage in most of this thinking time and set aside two days a week to think and plan. Other colleagues have found success by engaging in the time at specified points throughout the school year.
Good luck to all wonderful educators working hard to implement cross-curricular learning in the classroom. Your efforts are well worth it!
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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Content Type: 4
Title: Safari Tales for Elementary Cross-Curricular Learning
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By Stephanie Knight, Kathryn Carpenter, and Ben Pearson
The purpose of this activity is to engage intermediate learners in elementary schools in cross-curricular learning. In the activity, learners engage in language creation to summarize events that have already happened. In order to meet this objective, learners will learn, appropriate, and produce vocabulary associated with animals and their habitats.
Objectives
Learners will be able to:
- Understand and produce vocabulary associated with animals and their habitats
- Compose a narrative about the major events that happened in a story
- Summarize events with an appropriate amount of supporting details
- Format and write a news article
Modes: Interpretive Reading, Presentational Writing
Resources: Intermediate Activity 2 Learner Planning and Composition Sheet, wildlife article in the target language, Safari Tales app
Procedure
- Give learners tips on how to discern unknown vocabulary. These tips include identifying cognates, looking for linguistic patterns, and using context to predict the possible meaning of unknown words. You may need to provide direct instruction regarding linguistic patterns at this time.
- Allow the learners to play Safari Tales for roughly twenty minutes. As they play and read the final digital storybook created by gameplay (if they don’t finish the assigned quest, they can access the associated storybook by hitting the home icon in the top left corner), they should generate their own vocabulary list using the tips provided to them in Step 1.They should document this list on their own sheets of paper.
- After generating these lists, learners will share what they have come up with in groups of four. These groups should clarify any uncertainties regarding the interpretation of new words.
- Learners will reread the story that they created and take notes regarding three to five major events on the Intermediate Activity 2 Learner Planning and Composition Sheet.
- Next, provide learners with a short article in the target language written by a wildlife reporter. Great examples can be found at https://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines.aspx. Project the article so that the class may read it together. Mark the text to highlight the formatting requirements of a news article for learners. Make sure to also mark the events and supporting details within the article in order to help learners understand how to include appropriate amounts and types of details in their writing. To wrap up this step of the activity, discuss the register employed by the example article and any other considerations that the learners should take into account when they write their own texts.
- Finally, learners will write a news article on the Intermediate Activity 2 Learner Planning and Composition Sheet. This article will be inspired by the storybook that learners created during gameplay. In this news article, learners will summarize the major events that occurred in the storybook and provide appropriate types and quantities of supporting details. While learners should draw inspiration from the story, the language that they create should be their own. Allow them to add details and color as they see fit.
Notes:
Safari Tales is available in English and in Spanish.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
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