Contents
Content Type: 4
Title: Evaluating Print Advertisements
Body:
This activity has students evaluating a print advertisement, paying attention to the language, register and structures used.
Objectives: Students will be able to read about an upcoming event and decide if they want to attend based on the details.
Modes: Interpretive Reading
Materials needed: Handout
Procedure:
- Introduce the topic of a print advertisements, perhaps by examining some in class. Imagine you are looking for a summer weekend trip or summer vacation trip, so you are looking at advertisements about those topics, trying to decide which ones seem most interesting to you.
- Distribute the handout to students. Instruct them to evaluate the ads they are reading on the handout. They should pay special attention to the language, register and structures and answer the questions on the handout.
- Review the answers to the questions, drawing their attention to conventions of a print advertisement in the target language. Were the ads successful? Do you want to participate? Why or why not?
Possible extension activity: Students could then make their own print advertisement.
Notes: The level can vary based on what types of ads you choose, and how much of the activity you choose to do in target language versus L1.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
Inputdate: 2017-03-30 10:55:26
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Content Type: 4
Title: So you wanna be a filmmaker? Listening Assessment
Body:
This activity has students listen to a video and pick out key information. Then students will self-evaluate and reflect on how they did.
Learning objectives:
- Students will be able to identify key information during a listening activity.
- Students will be able to reflect and evaluate how well they were able to accomplish the task.
Modes: Interpretive Listening
Materials needed: Handout & Answer Key
Procedure:
- Introduce the situation: you are interested in becoming a filmmaker, so to get some experience you want to volunteer at a film center. You need to decide where to volunteer so you look around. You find a video about the NW Film Center.
- Give students the handout and explain the instructions. Students should make a list of reasons to volunteer with the NW Film Center and organize the information into the chart on the handout to help them decide if they should volunteer there or not.
- After students have completed the listening activity, handout the answer key. Instruct students to check their answers and re-listen to the clip. They should then follow the reflection questions on the handout to self-assess how they did and where they could improve.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
Inputdate: 2017-03-30 12:13:39
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Content Type: 4
Title: What Do You Want to Do This Weekend?
Body:
This activity comes from the leisure unit of an online course created for advanced secondary learners. This unit topic was one of five selected by students in a pre-course survey. The concepts explored in this unit are time and community, and the thinking question for the unit is, "What does what I like say about me?" Specifically, this activity is designed to get students to consider the information that must be shared to meet the needs (logistical information) and preferences (information regarding likes and dislikes) of their fellow interlocutor when engaging in a discussion about which leisure activities to participate in.
Learning objectives:
- Students will be able to talk about their likes and dislikes and ask about their partner’s likes and dislikes.
- Students will be able to come to an agreement on a leisure activity to do together over the weekend, based on the outcome of their discussion.
Modes: Interpersonal Communication
Materials needed: Handout
Procedure:
- Introduce the topic of making new friends. How do you get to know someone new? Do you do activities with them? What kind of activities? How do you decide what to do?
- Have students pair up with someone they don’t know well yet, or, if everyone knows each other, have them pretend that they are meeting someone they don’t know well yet.
- Students discuss with their partner what they should do over the weekend. They need to record this conversation and email it to the teacher. They should follow the guidelines on the handout and reflect on their process afterwards.
- After listening to student videos, you can make note of any areas that need work and address them globally to the class or individually to the students, or both.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
Inputdate: 2017-03-30 13:51:13
Lastmodifieddate: 2018-01-08 03:52:27
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Publishdate: 2018-01-08 02:15:01
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Content Type: 4
Title: Predicting Vocabulary Meaning in Context
Body:
This activity has students first sorting various relevant vocabulary that they will soon listen to into categories, and then students watch two videos and revise any of their vocabulary sorting choices if they think they need to. They will also explain any contextual clues they found in the videos that helped them to understand the vocabulary.
Learning objectives:
- Students will be able to make predictions on vocabulary meanings by sorting leisure activity words into categories.
- Students will be able to listen to two video clips about leisure activities and then make adjustments to their categorized vocabulary based on the context clues in the videos.
- Students will be able to verbalize the context clues they picked up while listening to the video to help them sort the vocabulary.
Modes: Interpretive Listening
Materials needed: Video link 1: Portland 36 Hour Travel Video by the New York Times, Video link 2: Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts, Predictogram handout
Procedure:
- Introduce the topic of leisure activities, perhaps by talking about leisure activities you enjoy.
- Handout the Predictogram handout to all students.
- Have students look over the vocabulary and begin to sort the words into categories. If they are not sure, they will have to make a guess.
- Now have students watch the two leisure activity videos, video 1 and video 2. They should take notes and revise any of the predictions they made in the sorting activity.
- Students explain what contextual clues helped them to understand the new vocabulary.
Notes: The videos, vocabulary words and categories can be adjusted for level and language.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
Inputdate: 2017-03-30 14:02:17
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Content Type: 3
Title: Accountability Is Not Assessment
Body:
By Lindsay Marean, CASLS InterCom Editor
When I was a beginning high school Spanish teacher I did not care about assessment. I wanted my students to learn, and I believed that quality learning experiences and student engagement were the keys to learning. Grades keep students accountable for staying on task, I thought, and then I stopped thinking about it.
As it turns out, people who do care about assessment have the same concern that I did: student learning. In our first Topic of the Week article this year, CASLS director Julie Sykes wrote, “Assessment is fundamentally about learning and improvement. Reflection and feedback are at the core of the assessment process” (Sykes 2017). Deborah Blaz writes, “Assessment may be defined as ‘any method used to better understand the current knowledge that student possesses’” (Blaz 2001:2).
By backgrounding assessment, I deprived my students of the opportunity to connect their classroom experiences with their progress in proficiency, and I deprived myself of a powerful tool for designing learning experiences. Let’s take a critical look at one of my favorite activities back then: Mixer Bingo. In its most structured form, I prepared cards ahead of time with different potential facts about a person, as described here (icebreakers.ws 2017). Often I simplified the prep by telling students to circulate and have short conversations about something topical, such as “What did you do over the weekend?” Upon finishing a conversation, students sign each other’s cards and move on to the next person.
I knew that I had to make students accountable to keep them engaged, so I circulated around the room and listened in or participated in conversations myself. As a follow-up, I called out student names at random and gave prizes to students who could make a Bingo. Students participated willingly in the task and interacted in Spanish. I held students accountable, and they were engaged, but assessment of student learning was missing from the picture.
What did students learn? They practiced asking about and telling where they went and what they did (prototypical Novice Mid Interpersonal indicators on the NCSSFL-ACTFL Global Can-Benchmarks (ACTFL 2015)), but how did they do? Did they all give the same 2-3 answers, or did they collectively use a wide range of vocabulary? Were their conversations cursory, or did they truly listen and respond to each other? Were their questions well-formed and easy to understand? In the future I can discuss components of a good conversation ahead of time, and then as a follow-up have students reflect on how well they did with each component. Ideally students could record one of their interactions on a mobile device, and then upload the recording along with their reflection to a tool such as LFO to Go.
What did I incentivize? By asking students to fill in as many squares on the grid as possible in a given time, I encouraged them to have the fastest, most superficial conversations possible. By reflecting on what my assessable learning goals for the task are, rather than what my accountability measures will be, I can re-tool the task in a way that encourages student growth. If I want conversations to be more in-depth, with follow-up questions, I can make a 3 X 3 grid rather than 5 X 5. If I want students to use more breadth of vocabulary, then I can have students write down the activity their partner did over the weekend, not just their name. Then I can stipulate that each square must have a different activity. A sample conversation with these modifications might look like this:
To truly get information about what my students know how to do, I can ask them. As a whole class, I can ask for the most unusual answers that students heard. We can discuss the areas where people ran into difficulties communicating and what we can do to improve in those areas. I can also ask individual students to fill out a quick questionnaire. And finally, if we’re using a tool like LinguaFolio Online, I can listen to the interactions that my students recorded, read their reflections, and provide my own feedback.
When I care about assessment, I think about my objectives and assessment before I set my students to do a task. The result is that my task changes to maximize student learning gains, and that students can clearly see the connection between their efforts in class and their growth in proficiency. I used to keep my students engaged through accountability. Now we can all stay engaged through meaningful assessment of our growth.
References
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (2015). NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements: Performance Indicators for Language Learners. Available from https://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/Can-Do_Statements_2015.pdf.
Blaz, Deborah (2001). A Collection of Performance Tasks and Rubrics. Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education.
icebreakers.ws (2017). Human Bingo (Did You Know?) Game. Available from http://www.icebreakers.ws/large-group/did-you-know-bingo.html.
Sykes, J. (2017). The Top 12 List. CASLS InterCom. Available from http://caslsintercom.uoregon.edu/content/22390.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
Inputdate: 2017-03-30 14:15:12
Lastmodifieddate: 2017-06-12 13:05:43
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Publishdate: 2017-06-12 11:22:51
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Content Type: 4
Title: Taking on different perspectives: Where should we vacation?
Body:
This activity has students reading the same reading from two different perspectives and highlighting key information that would be relevant to each perspective. Then, they give a speech to convince their family where to take a family trip, catering their information to each member’s interests. After watching the speeches, students write a list of pros and cons from the perspective of the different family members.
Objectives: Students will be able to...
- read an article from two different perspectives, highlighting relevant information based on that perspective
- present a persuasive argument in a speech based on the likes and dislikes of the audience
- listen to other student speeches from the different perspectives, listing the pros and cons as presented in the speech
Modes: Interpretive Reading, Presentational Speaking, Interpretive Listening
Materials needed: Handout, Reading, Answer key
Procedure:
1.Introduce the topic, perhaps by saying you’re thinking about traveling somewhere so you are doing some research about the place and the things you can do there. Then mention that you friend is going too, but you have different interests, so you are interested in doing different things while you are there. Give students the handout.
2. Pass out (or have students read online) the reading, “Top 10 Reasons to Visit Portland, Oregon.” What any one person finds interesting will vary based on their interests. Have the students imagine first they are vegan hikers who want to visit Portland. As they read, they should highlight the things that would be interesting to this person.
3.Once they’ve read and highlighted, then have them go back and re-read the article from the perspective of a hipster who doesn’t like addictive substances (like alcohol and caffeine). They should highlight the things that would be interesting to this person in a different color than the one before.
4.Afterwards, let students check their work with the answer key. Discuss the answers as a class as needed.
5.Next students will pretend they live in Kansas with their family and they want to take a family trip to Portland. Students need to persuade their family to go to Portland. Taking in mind the different likes and dislikes of the members of their imaginary family on the handout, they need to prepare the speech they will give to persuade them. They can use the handout to help them prepare.
6.After students have recorded their speech, they should post it on a class discussion forum or somewhere where other students can watch them. Each student must watch 5 different speeches from the perspective of the different members of the family and post a list of pros and cons as if they were that family member (for example, maybe the first video the student pretends to be the sister, then the next video the student pretends to be the brother, etc.)
7.Look at some of videos and pros and cons posted with the whole class and discuss together if they were persuasive enough to convince the family to go to Portland for vacation. Address any language, structure, or register topics that arise.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
Inputdate: 2017-03-31 10:15:17
Lastmodifieddate: 2017-04-24 03:48:13
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Content Type: 4
Title: Reading for Key Information: Where to Eat?
Body:
This activity requires students to read about food trucks in Portland on Yelp and do some browsing of the websites to decide where they want to eat this week based on certain criteria (including food preferences and dietary restrictions). In order to complete this activity, learners must be focused on using language in authentic, meaningful contexts.
Learning objectives:
- Students will be able to pick out relevant information to help them decide where they should eat given certain criteria.
Modes: Interpretive Reading
Materials needed: Handout, Yelp link
Procedure:
- Introduce the topic, perhaps talking about restaurants where you like to eat and why.
- Give students the handout and review instructions; students will pretend that they are trying to eat lunch at a food cart in Portland Monday through Friday. They need to mark them in order of preference. When they pick the food carts they need to keep in mind the constraints on the handout.
- As students complete the handout, have them focus on language patterns that the notice. For example, they may identify different instances in which non-standard language is used in online review forums.
- Debrief on answers and linguistic observations as a group.
Notes: Though Portland, Oregon is featured in this activity, it can be easily adapted to other locations. Also, given the inherent dynamism of language used on social internet platforms, educators may wish to revisit the activity at a later point in the year to examine how/if the language used has changed.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
Inputdate: 2017-03-31 15:09:02
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Publishdate: 2017-09-11 02:15:02
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Content Type: 3
Title: Appreciating Sociolinguistic Variation in Language Teaching
Body:
Tyler Kendall is Associate Professor of Linguistics and directs the Language Variation and Computation Lab at the University of Oregon. His primary research interests focus on social and cognitive aspects of language variation and change using approaches from sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, lab phonetics, and psycholinguistics. Jason McLarty is a PhD student in the linguistics department at the University of Oregon. His research interests include language variation and change, sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, prosody, regional and social variation, ethnic dialects, and African American English.
All languages and their varieties are rich with systematic variation. For over 50 years, sociolinguists working in the tradition of “language variation and change” (Labov 1966; cf. Chambers and Schilling, eds. 2013) have explored the ways that aspects of language covary with the social identities of speakers and with larger cultural norms and practices. Some of this variation – for instance, the use of multiple negation (e.g. he didn’t do nothing about it.; Labov 1972, Weldon 1994) – is highly salient and subject to overt commentary and oftentimes stigma, but much goes relatively unnoticed (for example, the Pacific Northwest English feature of pre-/g/ /æ/ raising, where words like bag are pronounced with vowels closer to the vowel in bet than in bat; Wassink 2015), acting as subtle indicators of who we are and how we see ourselves with respect to one another. Considering this kind of sociolinguistic variation in the language teaching classroom can lead to useful exercises that help learners orient to the norms of native speakers’ speech communities (see Patrick 2002), explore how learners’ (foreign) accents might hinder or even help them in different kinds of interactions with native speakers, and, more broadly, better understand the language and culture they are learning. Such classroom activities might involve exercises that ask:
- How variable are forms in textbook descriptions of language use? Students can analyze speech from a native speaker (e.g. through a YouTube video) and contrast specific forms (such as pronunciation variants or verbal auxiliaries) with textbook descriptions.
- How do native speakers feel about their own language use, and the language use of other native speakers? Students can survey native speakers with maps that ask them to draw or annotate where different dialects are spoken and what stereotypes correspond with those dialects (i.e. doing “Perceptual Dialectology”; see Preston 1989).
- How do native speakers change their speech based on different social settings? Students can examine register (Biber and Conrad 2009) and/or audience-based (Bell 1984) differences in recordings (e.g. through YouTube), where the same speaker is recorded in different contexts.
- How does popular media (film, television, cartoons, etc.) use language to construct identities of characters? Students can use short excerpts from media to examine whether certain speech features co-occur with certain character types.
These examples are suggested as ways to help the class discover the social meanings of language variation in the subject language. Uncovering and exploring natural, native speaker variation can help elucidate fine points in language teaching and open students’ ears to different ways of sounding native or non-native.
References
Biber, Douglas and Susan Conrad. 2009. Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chambers, J.K. and Natalie Schilling (eds.). 2013. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 2nd ed. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of. English in New York City. Washington, DC: The Center for Applied Linguistics.
Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Patrick, Peter. 2002. The Speech Community. In J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 1st ed. Malden: Blackwell.
Preston, Dennis R. 1989. Perceptual dialectology: Nonlinguists' views of areal linguistics. Dordrecht: Foris.
Wassink, Alicia Beckford. 2015. Sociolinguistic Patterns in Seattle English. Language Variation and Change 27.1: 31-58.
Weldon, Tracey. 1994. Variability in Negation in African American Vernacular English. Language Variation and Change 6.3: 359-397.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
Inputdate: 2017-04-02 08:43:51
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Content Type: 4
Title: Learning Refusals in English for Japanese Learners
Body:
Aska Okamoto is a graduate student in the Language Teaching Specialization program at the University of Oregon.
This lesson was created for high school Japanese students learning English, to raise their pragmatic awareness of how to refuse invitations politely via email.
Learning objectives:
At the end of the lesson, students will be able to:
- Students will be able to apply the reasons of refusals using “will not be able to” in invitation situation.
- Students will be able to choose the right choices of words and not to translate from Japanese when they write emails with refusals.
- Students will be able to analyze the differences of pragmatics in Japanese and English in refusal emails.
Modes: Interpersonal Communication
Materials needed: Handout, teacher’s collected sample email refusals
References:
Osuka, N. (2009). Japanese learners’ refusal and apology problems: A pilot study. In A. M. Stoke (Ed.), JALT2009 Conference Proceedings. Tokyo: JALT.
Procedure:
- This lesson is spread out over three days.
- On the first day: Pass out the handout. Have students write an email in English to an English teacher who invited them to an international hour this Friday after school.
- Next, have students write an email in Japanese to a Japanese teacher who invited them to an international hour this Friday after school.
- Then pass out 3 email examples in English that you have collected on refusing an invitation via email to groups of students. Students should circle the parts of the email that are refusals and underline the reasons given. Students should use the handout to see what category the emails fall into.
- On the second day: Using the information on their handout that the collected yesterday in the example emails, students should now re-look at the English email the wrote at the beginning of class and compare it with the 3 examples they just analyzed. Are there ways they could improve their email?
- Students should now write a new draft of an email in English refusing the invitation to the international hour, using what they’ve discovered through analysis to help them.
- On the third day: Students share their email draft with one or two other students for peer review, then they should edit the draft and actually send the email to an English speaker (you can specify who they email), as well as cc’ing you on the email.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
Inputdate: 2017-04-03 09:54:10
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Content Type: 4
Title: Listening for Key Details in an Advertisement
Body:
This activity has students watch two advertisements for upcoming festivals, the first time watching without sound to use context clues and make predictions regarding pertinent information. The second time they watch it with sound and verify their predictions.
Learning objectives:
- Students will be able to identify key information during an advertisement for a festival
Modes: Interpretive Listening
Materials needed: Handout
Procedure:
- Introduce topic, perhaps by talking about an upcoming event you want to attend yourself.
- Pass out the handout to students. Go over instructions; have students first watch the video without sound and make predictions.
- Once they’ve made predictions, they should watch it again with sound this time and revise their predictions.
- Have students complete the reflection and evaluation part of the handout; then discuss as a class.
Possible extension activity: Students then create their own advertisement for an upcoming event.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
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