Foreign Language Methods

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

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.

Great question on Twitter, yesterday, from a high school french teacher named Martha Behlow: ( Link for tweet here) 90% target language in upper levels is realistic, but what about levels 1 & 2? How do you keep them from freaking out?

ODE's RESA, OTES and mentor teacher website.

by Terry Heick Recently, I've been thinking of the universal truths in teaching. Students should be first. Don't always start planning with a standard. Questions matter more than answers. Trust is a currency of a human classroom. So I thought I'd gather twelve of them to start with.

After a week immersed in the spectacular theater of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I found myself thinking about what it would be like if the classroom was perceived of as a theater and teaching as a theater production.

What is the point of teaching culture, anyway? Is it to get kids to realize that people are different? (They already do.) Is it to get them to try a new food? ( Lengua, eww, gross. Does that have peanuts in it?) No, cultural awareness is more about perspective-taking.

Forgive me while I brainstorm in public a moment. Almost four years ago I created this rubric, based on the ACTFL guidelines and the Jefferson County (KY) Public Schools' world language rubric. I loved it. It's one of my most requested resources. I used it for years.

Last week I posed a question on twitter trying to find out what teachers thought was the biggest challenge facing world language educators today. I got some interesting responses and some expected responses.

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.

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.