Foreign Language Methods

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.

Recent History of Our Struggle to Make Foreign Languages Core Foreign language study is in the national education Goals 2000, which states: "By the year 2000 all American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, foreign language, civics and government, arts, history, and geography..."

TedX Talk

Last Thursday, Langchatters were so eager to discuss how to move students to a "novice-high" level that they were already tweeting on the topic before the first question was posted! In this Q&A #langchat, participants covered lots of ground.

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Welcome, Spanish language educators for all grade levels! We realize the importance of assessing and gauging the progress of your students' speaking skills, and we understand the challenges you face in this evaluation process. Introduction to Oral Proficiency Levels is a free open educational resource (OER) that can help you gain a foundational understanding of how to evaluate Spanish speakers.

When I started teaching, I knew one thing: I didn't want to teach language the way I was taught. When I was in jr. high and high school, I learned about Spanish (in English), but I never used it. I got A's in all of my Spanish classes because I could conjugate verbs and translate...

Daily collaborative planning time at Mesquite Elementary enables teachers to plan differentiated instruction to address the progress of each student. Credit: Zachary Fink Tips for downloading: PDF files can be viewed on a wide variety of platforms -- both as a browser plug-in or a stand-alone application -- with Adobe's free Acrobat Reader program.

This month I am celebrating my first year anniversary using Integrated Performance Assessments (IPA) in my classroom. This kind of assessment has simply transformed the way I teach. I just finished re-reading my posts about my first IPA and my second IPA. I cannot believe how much I have grown since then!

Do you ever feel stuck in a rut while planning your language classes? Perhaps you spend a lot of time lecturing at the white board, use the same activities with different vocabulary for every unit, or rely on teaching students grammar because that's how you were taught.

If you are teaching English Language Learners, here are some tips and strategies that you can practice in the classroom to create a safe environment and support the students throughout their learning process: Speak slower, not louder : Students need to process the words separately and form an understanding, for ELL students this requires some extra time.

By Samantha Cleaver When fourth-grade students in Becca Morris's class start listening to R.J. Palacio's Wonder, she looks forward to the discussion it will inspire, with questions like "What does it mean to be a true friend?" "What's the role of the bystander in bullying situations?"

This paper revisits again Krashen's hypothesis, making a special emphasis on the Input Hypothesis, his implications for the classroom and the criticisms to his hypothesis.

8 ways to think about tech in ways that actually improve the classroom. Bringing technology into the classroom often winds up an awkward mash-up between the laws of Murphy and Moore: What can go wrong, will - only faster. It's a multi-headed challenge: Teachers need to connect with classrooms filled with distinct individuals.