Foreign Language Methods

A blog that provides ideas and resources for the foreign language classroom

Last week, #langchat participants discussed a HOT topic-literally! The discussion centered on higher order thinking skills (HOTS), and instructors worked together to figure out what HOTS mean for novice learners, to discuss forms of support that encourage learner engagement in HOT, and to brainstorm ways to integrate HOTS in interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational tasks.

Commentary Editor's note: The Commentary "Differentiation Doesn't Work," by James R. Delisle, provoked an avalanche of reader comments. Because of the extraordinary level of interest in the essay, Education Week is publishing this Commentary by one of differentiated instruction's foremost proponents.

I thought I could read my students' body language. I was wrong. As an experiment, I used Socrative when I taught binary numbers. What I learned forever changed my views on being a better teacher. Formative assessment is done as students are learning. Summative assessment is at the end (like a test).

DifferentiationCentral is a service of the Institutes on Academic Diversity (IAD) at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education. Created in 1996, the goal of the IAD is to help educators understand the principles of Differentiated Instruction and develop competence and confidence in creating responsive classrooms that meet the diverse learning needs of today's students.

Last Thursday night, #langchat participants met to discuss some logistics of communicative summative assessment. In the middle of an action-packed hour, Twitter started to lag, and many instructors reported that their feed was no longer loading. Some Langchatters felt that Twitter just couldn't keep up with our energetic participants.

I am an English teacher, so my ears perk up when writers talk about their process. I've found the advice handy for lesson planning, too. That's because both writing and planning deal with craft. In writing, you want your audience to be absorbed. You want them to care about your characters.

Feedback is an element of classroom practice that has received a great deal of attention and discussion. Despite widely varying views of how, when, and if corrective feedback should be given in the classroom, second language development theories all agree on the critical role of guidance in the process of learning.

Certainly, students need some help with pronunciation, and even repeating sounds to perfect their pronunciation skills, we ought still to be careful to differentiate between pronunciation and accent. Non-native speakers can certainly be understood even if they maintain something of their native accent!

Beauty and Aesthetics, Interdisciplinary & STEM, Communication and Media, etc.

If you didn't study any foreign languages in school, picking one up as an adult can be challenging, since the human brain is best-equipped to absorb a new language in the early childhood years.

From talking to lots and lots of teachers about it, I hope I can anticipate a lot of questions you might have about the document. Several teachers helped me realize that simply posting it out here isn't enough. You need some explanation on it.

In response to my very controversial blog 'Six useless things foreign language teachers do' many of my readers have asked me to point out the 'good' things about a language lesson, rather than criticize the 'bad' ones. I am not going to respond by listing the obvious features of a good lesson which scores...

How to exploit the full learning potential of a target language song in the L2 classroom I have observed many lessons in which classic or contemporary songs were used. However, I have rarely come out of those lessons feeling that the full learning potential of that song had been exploited.

One of my interests is Standards Based Grading (SBG). The SBG sessions are my second choice when attending world language teaching conferences. It seems a lot of people are doing SBG, but everyone I have talked to has different standards. How is that possible when we're all the same discipline?

A few weeks ago, I attended a retirement luncheon for a close teacher friend of mine whose daughter recently accepted her first teaching position. As you might imagine, this dynamic inspired quite a bit of reminiscing among the attendees, and soon enough, every veteran teacher in the room was sharing memories of his or her first year on the job.