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Content Type: 1
Title: Teaching Ancient, Early Christian, And Medieval History in the Era of #MeToo: A Short Bibliography
Body:
From https://sarahemilybond.com
Sarah Emily Bond writes, "I think we can all agree that sexual harassment and assault are not inventions of the 20th or 21st centuries. While the visibility of these issues had increased notably in the past 6 months, they have sadly been a part of the tapestry of history since the very beginning. The good news (and there has been a dearth of it) is that historians, classicists, librarians, and theologians have begun to respond to the #metoo movement by incorporating it into their lessons plans and revisiting primary sources with a new eye towards awareness. Here are just a few of the exceptional articles on the subject (and a few that came out earlier) that may help you revise your syllabi..."
Access the list at https://sarahemilybond.com/2018/02/16/teaching-ancient-early-christian-and-medieval-history-in-the-era-of-metoo-a-short-bibliography/
Source: History from Below
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Content Type: 1
Title: AATSP K-12 Poster Contest
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From https://aatsp.site-ym.com/page/postercontest
Every year the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese sponsors the Poster Contest that is open to K-12 Spanish and Portuguese students whose teachers are current AATSP members. An excellent project for Hispanic Heritage Month and foreign language celebrations, the posters demonstrate student understanding of the importance of learning new languages.
The theme for the 2018 Poster Contest is:
¡El español y el portugués en marcha!
O espanhol e o português em movimento!
National Poster Contest Deadline: April 1, 2018.
For full details go to https://aatsp.site-ym.com/page/postercontest
Source: AATSP
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Content Type: 1
Title: Battle for English Learner Equity Heats Up in Delaware
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From https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/edcentral/el-delaware/
Battle for English Learner Equity Heats Up in Delaware
By Janie T. Carnock
January 22, 2018
Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Delaware filed a lawsuit against the state, arguing that it underfunds education services for its disadvantaged student populations. Backed by Delawareans for Educational Opportunity and the Delaware NAACP, the ACLU claims that the state's financing policies violate the state constitution, which charges Delaware to provide a "general and efficient system of free public schools" for all children.
The case has important implications, in particular, for the state's fast-growing population of K-12 English learner (EL) students. Over the past twenty years, the number of Delaware ELs has surged, increasing by 428 percent. From 2015 to 2016 alone, ELs grew 15 percent while Delaware's overall student population grew just 1 percent. According to statistics from the Delaware-based Rodel Foundation, the vast majority of these learners-75 percent-speak Spanish at home. Half are also identified as low-income. The overlap between EL and low-income student populations means that barriers related to language and poverty occur concurrently, functioning as a "double jeopardy" for many students.
Read the full article at https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/edcentral/el-delaware/
Source: New America
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Content Type: 1
Title: Global Competence in Practice
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Global Competence in Practice
Richard Lee Colvin
February 5, 2018
While teaching a unit on people who make a difference in the world as part of her German curriculum, Mareike Hachemer came to a realization: her students felt powerless to address the issues facing their community, let alone their country or the world. Wanting to change their minds, Hachemer helped them choose projects that could be completed in a month or less, set goals, define success, anticipate challenges, and determine what resources they'd need and how to get them. The students took action in a variety of ways: volunteering in an animal shelter, making friends with homeless people and eating with them, talking to younger children about proper eating habits, and coaching children's soccer.
Not earth-shattering, perhaps. But the students each learned a valuable lesson: although young, they could take steps to address community issues. "Efficacy is the best thing we can teach our students," Hachemer says. "If they know that if they do something, that they can change something, even if it is a small thing, the next time it will be something bigger."
Read the full article at http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/global_learning/2018/02/teaching_for_global_competence_in_a_rapidly_changing_world.html
Source: Education Week
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Content Type: 1
Title: March Madness in the Language Classroom
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The idea to use NCAA-style brackets to compare the merits of different songs, books, places, etc. has been around for a while; here's an Edutopia talking about the general setup: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/march-madness-meets-ap-lit-brian-sztabnik. Here's another approach, from the New York Times, that uses brackets to debate academic questions: https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/march-madness-using-tournament-brackets-to-debate-academic-questions/
Many language teachers have their students vote for their favorite of two songs; the class favorite moves on to the next bracket. See some of this year's song selections for Spanish in these blog posts:
http://misclaseslocas.blogspot.com/2018/02/mania-musical-de-mujeres-march-music.html
http://www.senorashby.com/locura-de-marzo-2018.html
https://spanishplans.org/2018/01/30/march-music-madness-2018/
Selection Saturday for the NCAA basketball tournament is on March 11 this year. If you want to time your brackets with the real event, you can keep up-to-date on this site: https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-men/bracket-beat/march-madness-dates-tournament-schedule
Source: Various
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Content Type: 1
Title: Website: Indian Ocean in World History
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From http://indianoceanhistory.org/Introduction.aspx
The Indian Ocean in World History website is intended for use by middle and high school teachers and students in connection with the surveys of world history, geography and cultures. The heart of the site is an interactive map of the Indian Ocean and region surrounding it, available for different time periods and with cultural, geographic, and historical information. The website also includes lesson plans and supplementary materials.
Explore this resource at http://indianoceanhistory.org/Introduction.aspx
Source: Indian Ocean in World History
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Content Type: 1
Title: Stamp Sheets for Formative Assessment
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From http://www.creativelanguageclass.com/
Kara Parker shares how she uses stamp sheets as a formative assessment tool throughout a unit. The stamp sheet is a natural product from her curriculum planning process and has been revised over the years to be more adaptable. Read her blog post at http://www.creativelanguageclass.com/love-stamp-sheets/
Source: Creative Language Class
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Content Type: 4
Title: Using Augmented Reality in Your Classroom: ARIS
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By Isabelle Sackville-West
The goal of this activity is to illustrate one way to integrate ARIS, a free platform for creating place-based mobile games to play on iOS devices, into the classroom. In this activity, groups of novice students will work together to create an ARIS game in which players must practice greeting and leave-taking with a character.
Learning Objectives: Students will be able to…
- Identify formulaic greeting and leave-taking expressions.
- Determine the appropriateness of greeting and leave-taking expressions.
- Select appropriate greeting and leave-taking responses in an augmented reality (AR) setting.
Modes: Interpretive, Presentational, and Intercultural Communication (Investigate)
Materials Needed: Conversation Tree Template, at least one iPhone per group, the ARIS app, at least one computer per group
Procedure:
- Provide an overview of greetings and leave-takings in the target language. This can be done through a dialogue, videos, teacher modeling, etc. Make sure that the context and responses are authentic in that they accurately represent real-world interactions.
- As a class, brainstorm and make lists about the types of greetings/leave-takings one would use with people of different relations to themselves. These people might include
- Someone in power, like your boss or teacher
- A family member
- A friend
- Someone younger than you
- Next, divide the class into several groups, probably no more than 3 or 4 people per group.
- Introduce the task: Students will be creating an AR dialogue game in which players need to select appropriate responses to have a felicitous outcome. Then they will be playing one another’s games.
- Have each group select a character and context in which they would like their dialogue to take place, e.g. Group 1: clerk at a grocery store; Group 2: talking to a teacher in the hallway, etc.
- For their selected context, have each group brainstorm their script using the Conversation Tree Template. For each turn, there should be both pragmatically appropriate and inappropriate responses, and there should be at least three turns in total (Greeting, transition, leave-taking). An example is below.
- e.g. Teacher on the first day of class says, "How are you?"
- You respond
- Good, what about you?
- Fine. How are you?
- Great!
- Not great, actually. (In this instance, iv. is not pragmatically appropriate because asking “how are you” is generally just an opener and therefore should be responded too somewhat shallowly/formulaically unless the interlocutor is close with you.)
- Next, students will need to familiarize themselves with ARIS. A great place to start is with the tutorials on their webpage:
- http://manual.arisgames.org/ - Link to the home page on how to make games with ARIS
- http://manual.arisgames.org/tutorials/aris101 - Step by step process on basic structures of
- Once students feel comfortable with ARIS, it’s time for them to start building their game! This game will be pretty simple to make because it only involves one character and a dialogue.
- Once the students are finished building their game, have them download the app on an iPhone and play their game themselves to verify that it works the way they want it to.
- Then have all of the groups play one another’s games and note the questions and responses they encounter. To do so, have them use fresh Conversation Tree Templates, just filling out for the path they select. Have them write out each response and circle the one they selected. Also, have them underline the ones they think are not pragmatically appropriate and briefly state why.
Notes:
- The Conversation Tree Template is taken from the STARTALK Bridging Course and was developed by Ben Pearson.
- Later Games2Teach will come out with an entire ARIS Teacher Resource, so keep an eye out if you are interested in implementing ARIS in your classroom!
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
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Content Type: 5
Title: The Chinese Flagship Program
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By Isabelle Sackville-West, Chinese Flagship student
Combining small class sizes, weekly tutoring, scholarships for studying abroad, and ample opportunity to engage with fellow students produces great results. The University of Oregon’s Chinese Flagship Program does just that. It provides the academic and scholarship support necessary for students to develop professional-level Chinese proficiency while pursuing any major of choice. The best part is, students don’t have to be highly proficient to start out. There are numerous language tracks to choose from based on entering proficiency level. Moreover, students receive twice-a-year counseling meetings to help them navigate class selection and study abroad programs. Additionally, the program provides external resources such as access to language learning apps to help foster student autonomy and improvement. While the Chinese Flagship Program is a fantastic place to improve your Chinese proficiency, it is also a small, language-loving community in and of itself. Fellow Flagship members come to feel like a family over the course of one’s time at UO. Not only is there a yearly retreat, there are also numerous bonding, cultural, and language-based extra-curricular activities students can attend (usually with free food too!). Examples include a yearly colloquium and talent show, movie nights, and trips to Portland for Dim Sum. If you’ve ever wanted to become a highly proficient Chinese language user then check out the Chinese Flagship Program!
Source: CASLS Spotlight
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Content Type: 3
Title: Co-Construction of Meaning through Peer Interaction: Peer Tutoring
Body:
By Isabelle Sackville-West, CASLS Fellow
Peer-to-Peer interaction provides a valuable opportunity for students to co-construct meaning, improving their communicative competence and connection to the target community. Essentially, the notion of co-construction underscores the concept that knowledge is acquired collaboratively, through social interaction. By facilitating a supportive environment in which interaction and co-construction of meaning can occur, learners are given ample opportunity to improve their language proficiency (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988). One such environment is peer tutoring. In peer tutoring, two learners are paired together. The more proficient learner mediates his/her partner’s uptake of new information (Thurston et al., 2009: 462-463). This co-construction of meaning between peers is vital to language acquisition, providing opportunity for authentic communication. Additionally, Lightbrown & Spada (2006) argue that language classrooms need to be environments that students enjoy and feel is not only interesting, but also relevant to their age and ability (64). Peer tutoring provides a means through which students learn pragmatic and sociolinguistic cues that are relevant to their age group. This is a crucial aspect of language learning that language classrooms often cannot address due to lack of time and resources.
As a Chinese Flagship student at the University of Oregon, I receive weekly peer tutoring from an expert speaker, usually an international student from Taiwan or Mainland China. For me, this opportunity has been invaluable. Currently, I am an advanced learner. As such, my struggle isn’t giving presentations or discussing politics, but rather engaging with members of the language community in normal, every-day environments. Peer tutoring provides insight on topics, slang, and current phenomena relevant to my age, helping to fill crucial gaps in my lexicon and making it easier to navigate authentic spaces both in the community and abroad.
It is often tricky, as students, to move away from “textbook speak” and become more linguistically creative. Adapting one’s language to different contexts, learning to express one’s identity in a new language, and identifying what is pragmatically appropriate when talking with peers are all difficult skills to pin down in the classroom. Peer tutoring, along with the co-construction of meaning that it facilitates, helps students build these skills and feel comfortable pushing their language beyond the confines of their textbooks. Co-constructing meaning through peer interaction is not only an opportunity for language practice and production, but also allows learners to flesh out their linguistic repertoire and improve communicative competence in a way that is relevant to their ability and age.
References:
Lightbown, R & Spada, N. (2006). How languages are learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tharp, R. G. & Gallimore, R. (1988). Rousing minds to life: teaching, learning, and schooling in social context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thurston, A, Duran, D., Cunningham, E., Blanch, S & Topping, K (2009). International online reciprocal peer tutoring to promote modern language development in primary schools. Computers & Education 53(2), 462-472.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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