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Content Type: 1
Title: Eight colloquial Greek verbs
Body:
From: https://blogs.transparent.com/greek/eight-colloquial-greek-verbs/
Idiomatic or colloquial expressions are always fun to dissect in class, and they always bring some conversation about cultural meanings or stories behind the expressions. In this post of the Greek language blog you can see how and in which contexts to use different eight colloquial verbs.
Read more: https://blogs.transparent.com/greek/eight-colloquial-greek-verbs/
Source: Greek language blog
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Title: Bake Swedish Cinnamon Buns Using Imperative Verbs
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From: https://blogs.transparent.com/swedish/bake-swedish-cinnamon-buns-using-imperative-verbs/
The blog post gives the grammar explanations and a step-by-step description with pictures of the recipe in the target language. It could be a great (and tasty!) in-class or try-at-home opportunity for learners.
Learn more: https://blogs.transparent.com/swedish/bake-swedish-cinnamon-buns-using-imperative-verbs/
Source: Swedish Language Blog
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Title: Eight Colloquial Greek Verbs
Body:
From: https://blogs.transparent.com/greek/eight-colloquial-greek-verbs/
Idiomatic or colloquial expressions are always fun to dissect in class, and they bring some conversation about cultural meanings or stories behind the expressions. In this post of the Greek language blog, you can see how and in which contexts to use different eight colloquial verbs.
Read more: https://blogs.transparent.com/greek/eight-colloquial-greek-verbs/
Source: Greek Language Blog
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Content Type: 3
Title: Tailwinds for Critical Innovation in the Language Learning Field
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Gabriel Guillen (PhD) is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Summer Intensive Language Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS). At MIIS, Gabriel teaches content-based language courses such as Spanish Social Entrepreneurship, Spanish Fake News, Spanish Digital Projects, Spanish Talks for Social Change, and Spanish in the Community, connecting his students with English learners in the Salinas Valley, California. With Robert Blake, he recently published Brave New Digital Classroom (2020), an overview on key concepts and challenges of teaching and learning languages with technology, with a new focus on social CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning). With Julie Sykes and Christopher Daradics from CASLS, and Thor Sawin from MIIS, Gabriel will be hosting the panel Mavericks of Mind: A Followup Report on Social CALL for Language and Technology Professionals at CALICO 2020.
The winds are favorable for the field of language education, with more than 777 language startups, a single app with more than 300 million users, and an online language learning market projected to grow by 18.61bn in the next four years. We should be suspicious about the commodification of language learning, and the proliferation of deceiving “magic pill” disruptors, but the truth is that none of us work for free as language professionals. What are we doing to make sure these resources are not wasted, positioning ourselves at the helm of our field for formal and informal learners who want to maintain and speak new languages? Higher education enrollments are declining and language learners are not in the business of giving language teachers work.
Working together, we have the potential to set the pace for meaningful collaborations between academia and industry players. This includes our work (in collaboration with CASLS) planting the seeds of a Community of Practice for strengthened intersections between Instructed Second Language Acquisition, user-experience design, and product development. Millions of users are subscribing to language apps, but they often obtain disappointing results. We understand language development as a wicked humanitarian problem and our goal is to promote transformative tools, spaces, products, and tech jobs that address the complexity of learning a language, in other words, a new way of being in the word.
What I like about CASLS is not different from what I like about many intrapreneurs that I have interviewed in the last 10 years. They are thinkers and doers, critical innovators like that group of instructors at Princeton who created their own Spanish textbook, breaking up with an industry that benefits from a broken market. When I talked to them, I felt agency, a special and contagious energy such as the one that Joan Bajorek infuses in Women in Voice. Joan left a promising career in academia for a job in the tech industry and is now a role model for applied linguists intested in alternatives to the tenure-track path. And back to higher ed, recently two language professors at Yale started a course entitled Languages in Dialogue, blending Arabic and Hebrew. As challenging as it seems, one can only hope to see more multilingual initiatives such as this one, since the world outside of the classroom is rarely monolingual.
We face, indeed, a time for the language field to reconsider its relationship with innovation. The winds are more favorable than we think.
Source: Gabriel Guillén
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Content Type: 4
Title: Leveraging Commercial Apps in the Language Classroom
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This week’s Topic of the Week illustrated the reality that learners have incredible access to language learning opportunities in the informal market (via apps and the like). However, attrition within these platforms is high, and may contribute to general dissatisfaction with language learning. This activity was designed with this reality in mind and is intended to leverage the learners’ activities within popular tools from the commercial market while simultaneously increasing their explorations of communicative competence.
Outcomes:
Learners will be able to:
- Explore decontextualized sentence-length utterances in the target language and connect those utterances to meaningful communicative contexts.
Modes: Interpersonal (though any may arise at the activity’s close)
Materials: Popular language learning apps and/or fill-in-the-blank exercises
Procedure:
1. Ask learners to consider a phrase with a meaning that changes drastically depending on communicative context. For example, learners might consider, “Shut up!” This phrase is both a command to tell someone to stop talking and an exclamation of excitement shared between friends when something exciting or amazing transpires.
2. Ask learners how they know the illocutionary force (intended meaning) when they hear an utterance such as “Shut up!” Brainstorm relevant context and communication cues as a class.
3. Next, tell learners that they are going to play a game. Within the game, they will collect as many potentially ridiculous utterances as they can from decontextualized grammar and vocabulary exercises found on popular language learning apps (or within other fill-in-the-blank classroom activities). By the end of this search, each learner should have collected at least five different phrases.
4. Next, ask learners to offer their phrases to the class. Provide a small prize for the utterance that the class finds to be the most ridiculous.
5. After voting, have learners work to articulate communicative scenarios in which they would use the ridiculous phrases they collected. For example, they may collect a sentence like “I have three rocks in my shoe.” and brainstorm that they are track champions explaining to the press why the lost a race.
6. Discuss the scenarios as a class. If time allows, have the learners practice the scenarios is small groups or pairs.
In addition to this week's activity, we invite you and your students to offer your opinions and insights concerning critical innovation in language learning. This give you an opportunity to weigh in on some of the key ideas noted in this week's Topic of the Week.
Survey for Learners: https://oregon.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5hwWfyjoBxKemsR
Survey for Educators: https://oregon.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9nRNs5bBg4SDjuJ
Source: CASLS
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Content Type: 3
Title: Reflection and Self-Evaluation: Foundational Skills for Learner-Centered Classrooms
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by Stephanie Knight, CASLS Assistant Director
Any lived experience has the potential to result in learning. A child running with untied shoelaces may trip and come to a painful realization that said shoelaces give gravity an unfair advantage in determining his or her trajectory. A gamer may fall into a pit of lava and quickly discover that his or her character cannot overcome the smoldering heat. A L2 learner may try to apologize to a friend he or she met online and discover that the L1 conventions for apologizing do not align with those in the L2 and struggle to repair a fraught situation. In each of these instances, there is action, feedback from the environment that informs the person at hand of his or her relative success, and ideally, the individual will engage in reflection related to correcting course.
Though each of the aforementioned situations describe informal learning scenarios, they provide an apt trajectory of learning in formal (classroom) contexts. Ideally, learners experiment, hypothesize, and explore. The teacher guides those processes by providing feedback that informs individuals of “whether I [the individuals] am on track or need to change course” (Wiggins, 2012). The learner’s actions are at the center of the class, and the teacher provides a supporting role.
As the old adage indicates, true learner-centeredness in classroom contexts is easier said than it is done. In each of the informal learning contexts mentioned, there was a single action that inspired direct feedback to the individual. Given that most states average close to 30 secondary learners per classroom (DeGuerin, 2019), it is impossible for a teacher to provide each individual the feedback they need to register whether they are on course and the extent to which they need to correct course; the infrastructure at hand within formal learning environments is undoubtedly limiting.
Yet, the environment itself is an amazing tool for educators; in even the informal learning contexts described, no teacher provided feedback, and only one instance even involved feedback from a human. Classrooms can replicate these feedback loops by including places to experiment and play and check-in points for leaners to evaluate their work. For example, learners can engage in close, multi-step, detail-oriented reading or listening that produces an answer to a mystery articulated by the teacher. If the answer isn’t correct, learners know immediately that they missed an important detail or two and can try again.
Importantly, however, the aforementioned example requires that learners have the reflective and evaluative skills to examine their own work. As such, the teacher in modeling and providing practice time for those skills emerges as critical; as Wiggins (2012) discusses, the mere existence of information in an environment does not ensure that the information will be used by learners. In order to conduct classrooms in the spirit of learner-centeredness, all learners must be empowered to examine the information at hand and relate it to their work and the work of their fellow learners. As such, teachers must carve out and protect time for developing these skills. If they do, learners can truly take charge of their own outcomes.
References
DeGuerin, M. (2019). Many public school classrooms are overcrowded, but some states fare worse than others. Here’s the average class size for every US state. Insider. Retrieved from: https://www.insider.com/states-with-the-best-and-worst-public-education-systems-2019-8.
Wiggins, G. (2012). Seven Keys to Effective Feedback. Feedback for learning. 70(1). Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept12/vol70/num01/Seven-Keys-to-Effective-Feedback.aspx?utm_source=zapier.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=zapier
Source: CASLS
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Content Type: 4
Title: Guiding Self-Reflection and Peer Review
Body:
The purpose of this activity is to guide educators in developing a practical reflection tool that can be used in modeling and supporting the development of critical evaluative and reflective skills within learners. These skills support a learner-centered classroom.
Learning Objectives:
Teachers will be able to:
- Draft a handout that guides self-evaluation and reflection and/or peer review.
Modes: Any
Materials: Formative or summative assessment(s) and related evaluation criteria
Procedure:
1. Examine an assessment (formative or summative), a series of related assessments (formative or summative), and the evaluation criteria for those assessments. Identify critical skills and characteristics that are indicated by the evaluation criteria (e.g., organized presentation of ideas, use of cohesive and/or rhetorical devices, the ability to repair miscommunication).
2. Create a list of those skills. Some example lists are provided below.
Presentational Mode
- Has a clear purpose/objective
- Uses effective transitions
- Has clearly developed ideas
- Has clearly supported ideas
- Organizes ideas in an effective manner
- Employs an appropriate tone and register throughout
- Structural features are appropriate to genre
- Uses varied and engaging language
Interpretive Mode
- Articulates main ideas
- Identifies supporting details
- Uses genre-specific cues to predict meaning
- Uses contextual cues to predict meaning
- Comprehends pronoun usage
- Provides evidence to support conclusions
- Corretly interprets implicature
Interpersonal Mode
- Communicates ideas
- Demonstrates awareness of breakdowns in communication
- Repairs misunderstandings
- Uses gesture and/or images to appropriately emphasize and communicate ideas
- Handles unexpected complications
- Actively negotiates meaning
- Pronunciation and/or written emphasis contribute to meaning making
3. Use your list to create a guide to direct learners in their own self-evaluation and/or peer review. Provide space for them to identify their strengths, provide evidence of their strengths, and to provide one goal for improvement. An example guide is included here.
4. Identify specific times within your upcoming lessons to model the skills you identified in Step 2. Provide learners time to evaluate examples as you model so that they understand what the skills look like in practice.
Notes:
The lists indicated in Step 2 are agnostic of proficiency level. Teachers may want to adapt these lists to their specific contexts. For example, teachers of novice learners may indicate that the ideas communicated and interpreted are familiar and/or practiced and may omit skills related to adapting to unexpected complications.
Source: CASLS
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Content Type: 1
Title: Book: Intercultural Transitions in Higher Education
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From: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-intercultural-transitions-in-higher-education.html
Universities are one of the most dynamic areas for intercultural contact. This book explores the experience of being an international student and how that affects studying. Further, it examines the implications international study has upon policy and practice in an international arena.
Learn more: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-intercultural-transitions-in-higher-education.html
Source: Alina Schartner and Tony Johnstone Young
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Title: Book: The Foundations of Teaching English as a Foreign Language
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This textbook, perfect for those with no knowledge of linguistics or SLA, presents an overview of the theoretical foundations, methods, and practices of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). This book would be ideal for pre-service teachers and teacher training classrooms around the world.
Source: Paul Lennon
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Title: Book: Translanguaging in Multilingual English Classrooms
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From: https://www.springer.com/us/book/9789811510861
This book applies the theory of translanguaging to multilingual classrooms in an Asian context. It enriches the methodology of coding bilingual transcripts with a detailed analysis of a large data set. This book would be an interesting read for anyone in theoretical physics.
From: https://www.springer.com/us/book/9789811510861
Source: Viniti Vaish
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