Contents

By Isabelle Sackville-West, CASLS Fellow

This teacher planning guide is designed to complement this week’s Topic of the Week article.  It helps teachers design function-based lessons for their classrooms by guiding them to articulate only the grammar and vocabulary content that is critical.

Objective: Teachers will be able to articulate what grammatical structures and vocabulary are essential for performing a specific language function.

Materials needed: Planning Sheet

Procedure:

For each step, refer to the planning sheet.

1. First, teachers should select a topic or content that they want to address with their lesson. For example, the topic could be a specific daily interaction like greetings or service encounters.
2. Then, narrowing in further, teachers will select a single language function to focus on in a lesson. For greetings, it might be greeting a friend. For service encounters, it might be negotiating a price.
3. After selecting the topic and function, teachers should spend some time brainstorming language content (grammatical structures and vocabulary) that are necessary for performing the given language function and related content (such as verb forms that are unnecessary or related, but unnecessary vocabulary) should not be taught.
4. Next, teachers will think critically about the content that they came up with during the brainstorm in Step 3. They should answer the following questions:  1) Is it relevant?; 2) Is it authentic to how expert speakers use language?; 3) Is it necessary to successfully carry out the language function? These questions will guide limiting the list of language content until the teacher has identified what is absolutely necessary.

Note: For lessons that include additional targeted language functions, teachers should follow Steps 1-4 for each function individually.

CASLS and Portland State University’s Russian Flagship Program are leading the Pacific Northwest Pathways Collective. The collective is a group of Chinese and Russian educators strengthening the instruction of these languages by revising and developing curriculum, establishing educator networks, and creating professional development toolkits

Chinese Curriculum

The Pacific Northwest Pathways Collective funds an instructor and teaching assistant for the Chinese Bridging Project during the 2018-19 academic year. The Bridging Project is an online language learning course designed specifically for high school students with high proficiency levels.

Russian Curriculum

The collective also funds an instructor and teaching assistant for the Russian Bridging Project.

In addition, the collective developed the Russian Dual Immersion Language Instruction Repository, which eases the time burden required for teachers to develop curriculum. The repository includes curriculum for learners at all levels. The materials are searchable by tags, such as level and topic. Teachers can add their own activities to the repository to share with the community. They can also post comments on the materials uploaded by others.

Research

The collective analyzed proficiency testing data from Chinese and Russian programs throughout the Pacific Northwest. The research is synthesized in two documents that outline the various pathways of study to Flagship Programs in the Pacific Northwest.

By Lindsay Marean, InterCom Editor

When language teachers see grammar as a topic in a pedagogy article, we usually expect to hear sides in a debate over whether or not to explicitly teach grammar. During the past month, we’ve explored aspects of grammar and language teaching that you may not have thought about before. Julie Sykes explains how grammatical structures are critical to successful navigation of intercultural pragmatics. She and Stephanie Knight both emphasize the importance of limiting explicit instruction to what is needed for the communicative context and the task at hand. Misaki Kato and Keli Yerian both stretch our understanding of grammar beyond our usual focus on word order and correct prefixes or suffixes; Kato summarizes research that tells us that explicitly teaching about sound systems is important, and Yerian introduces us to research about gesture, both to facilitate learning and as a part of the linguistic systems we use to communicate with each other. Two points emerge from this month’s InterCom series: (1) grammatical structures encompass more than we are accustomed to thinking about; and (2) explicit teaching of grammar has value, but it must be linked to communicative needs.

As a language teacher, I must admit that I find this news to be intimidating. Having formally learned Spanish verb conjugations as a student, and supported by textbooks that teach these endings sequentially, I feel comfortable making verbal inflection a major part of my curriculum. However, discourse markers (such as you know in English or o sea in Spanish), while important for connecting ideas and indicating commitment to what one is saying, are challenging for me to teach. Must I read and digest academic articles about discourse markers in order to teach them? With less commonly taught languages, especially indigenous languages with little documentation (also, older documentation tends to neglect discourse-pragmatic structures), a teacher might feel even more at a loss. Fortunately, we already share a set of principles for good practice in language teaching and learning that can help us to address this challenge.

Specifically, three guiding principles from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages are relevant to ensuring that learners can become proficient across a wide range of language patterns:

Use of the Target Language: Although we address explicit teaching of grammar in this month’s series, there is no doubt that implicit learning also occurs. When you and your students use the target language, they acquire patterns, often unconsciously, that they may never have been taught. They and you also notice gaps in their communicative ability that can be addressed through quick lessons on key structures that may not be in your textbook.

Use of Authentic Texts: “Teacher talk” and learners’ interlanguage may by quite different from authentic language use. For example, teachers often leave out “extra” words such as discourse markers, and learners may restrict themselves to only the present tense where a different tense would be more appropriate. Target language use to expose students to the full array of grammatical patterns in a language is most impactful when it comes from authentic sources, which are generally linguistically richer than classroom-generated language, and which are always context-embedded.

Teach Grammar as Concepts in Meaningful Contexts: One approach to teaching grammar is to notice when a particular structure comes up in class interactions, give a brief explanation of the underlying concept behind this particular instance, and move on with communication. For example, we may come across this sentence in Spanish:

•             Lo aprendí de una persona muy sabia, o sea, de mi madre.
•             ‘I learned it from a very wise person, that is, from my mother.’

I can point out briefly that one use of o sea is to connect two ideas, with the second one being a reformulation or explanation of the first one. In this case, my students may notice, o sea is connecting “my mother” with “a very wise person.” Then, we move on with the communicative task at hand.

We learn guiding principles and core practices because they are simultaneously beneficial in several ways. One benefit that these three principles share is that they help our students to become proficient in much more than inflections; they must also become proficient in gesture, pronunciation, discourse marking, and intercultural pragmatics, along with many other areas that together comprise a language.

Developing Responsible Global Citizenship Through Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC): Selected Papers from the 2016 CLAC Conference
Edited by Dan Soneson and Caleb Silmer
Published by the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition

The essays in this collection are based on presentations given at the Tenth Conference on Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum held in October 2016. The essays represent a broad variety of approaches and facets that illustrate the inherently flexible nature of CLAC's main principle of promoting transformational learning through the integration of content, language, and culture. This is the first printed volume based on presentations given at one of the conferences.

Download a free copy this CARLA working paper at carla.umn.edu/resources/working-papers/documents/Proceedings-2016CLAC.pdf 

From http://sites.tesol.org/Bookstore/ItemDetail?iProductCode=14037&Category=VOICES

TESOL Voices: Online and Hybrid Classroom Education
Edited by Greg Kessler
Published by TESOL Press

What is the state of online and hybrid learning and where is it heading? Read about the diversity of English language study and teaching in online and hybrid environments, its evolution with technological change, and what the future may hold.

Visit the publisher's website at http://sites.tesol.org/Bookstore/ItemDetail?iProductCode=14037&Category=VOICES
Read a book review at http://blog.tesol.org/online-and-hybrid-classroom-education/

From http://www.nystesol.org/ALWC2019/

Call for Proposals
40th Annual Applied Linguistics Winter Conference 
(#ALWC 2019)
Saturday February 9, 2019
Binghamton University, SUNY
World Citizenship through media in the TESOL classroom

The theme this year surrounds the idea that technology and media are an integral part of language learning. For English language learners, we must continue to show media in other forms outside of the textbook. This includes multimodal texts, media not limited to images, and video. The conference provides the opportunity to present either research or practical methods that apply to English Language Learners. 

Deadline: November 1, 2018

View the full call for proposals and access early bird registration at http://www.nystesol.org/ALWC2019/

From https://my.tesol.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=010ad4e9-1124-420b-9b92-71023f98f28e

Book Title: Internationalization in Action: Leveraging Diversity and Inclusion in Globalized Classrooms
An edited volume by Dr. Ching-Ching Lin and Dr. Cristina Zaccarini
Adelphi University
Published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc.

The editors are seeking papers to be included in a book project dedicated to selective internationalization in American education. They particularly welcome papers based upon participatory action research that aims to leverage diversity and inclusion for global learning. These may include collaborative classroom activities between content-area and ESL professors that highlight successful instructional strategies, along with those that explore issues and challenges for utilizing transcultural interaction in the increasingly globalized classrooms. Proposals should be submitted by October 15, 2018 to Dr. Ching-Ching Lin at clin@adelphi.edu or Dr. Cristina Zaccarini at zaccarin@adelphi.edu.

View the full call for chapter proposals at https://my.tesol.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=010ad4e9-1124-420b-9b92-71023f98f28e

From http://nysaflt.org/annual-conference/

New York State Association of Foreign Language Teachers Annual Conference
October 19-20, 2018
Rochester
"Inspiring Proficiency for Life" #howlanguagematters

Keynote speaker: Noah Geisel, 2013 ACTFL National Language Teacher of the Year

Visit the conference website for full details: http://nysaflt.org/annual-conference/