I can't begin to tell you how pleasantly surprised I was about how informational these professional developments were! At first when I read about the Twitter community, I thought to myself, "hmm...I don't even have a twitter account and haven't a clue how to tweet. What type of language instructors will be on twitter at 8:00pm on a school night anyway?" On the contrary, there were tons of FL teachers online this past Thursday on the twitter community of #langchat! I signed up for a twitter account Wednesday, and joined this FL teacher community called LangChat, and it was so interesting! The topic for this past Thursday's conversation was how to manage the logistics of speaking assessment? Well, with twitter, there can be hundreds of people tweeting at the same time, so there was always like eighty more tweets in the feed and it was hard to keep up! I did try to write down good advice when I saw it. The first piece of advice that caught my mind was from a French teacher who said she uses an area of her room and sets it up like a cafe. Students meet there for speaking quizzes. Unfortunately, she didn't have time to explain how she manages her classroom while the quizzes are going on, but I plan on asking her this coming Thursday. Another teacher said that with the Interpersonal/Presentational mode, she preps her students by using self-rubrics that ask questions like "Did I use English?" "Did I respond to questions in TL?". Another suggestion was keeping track of participation by walking around with a clipboard to check off lists of students by the groups there in. Another conversation activity suggested was Speed dating. Every turn of the activity the teacher can make the questions more challenging. So I just got a ton of great ideas and links to websites about speaking activities that I wouldn't have gotten if I hadn't joined this twitter community. I am actually really glad that I joined and I can't wait for the next conversation!
The second professional development I went to was the fall Outreach workshop of the Department of Modern languages and Literature at Grand Valley State University. This outreach focused on addressing the community standard in your classroom. I gained a lot of insight as to what it means to create an "In-out" relationship with the community in your school district. That Teachers don't always have to teach inside the classroom, that we can go to restaurants, to community centers, to libraries and experience learning with our community. Even is it's just going to another classroom inside our school, we can still create a community. Professor Moret explains, "once you have created community, that wall of anxiety in your students will come crashing down." I really related to that. Looking back on my own experiences as a Spanish language learner, the classes that I thrived in were the classes where I felt I knew everyone. The classes where we were leaning together and not individually. Learning together is a great way to build trust with our students. I absolutely loved the idea of "Virtual homework" presented by professor Gomez, it was brilliant! I think connecting via Skype with native speakers is a great way to engage our students in "real-life" conversation! This is what they need to practice. Also, when speaking with a native speaker, our students can practice their listening, their pronunciation, and they can also teach their Skype partner English as well! That way they can feel good about their native language as well. Other presentations such as the "Screamers" and the Puppets, were all great ways of building community in the classroom. Ultimately, I think my perspective on the community standard has changed from being a standard that I thought would be hard to implement into a fairly easy standard to implement into my classroom. All in all, these were two great experiences that helped me as a student, develop my understanding of the professional world of FL teachers and encouraged me to get creative and try new things!
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Technology in the Classroom
The use of technology in the classroom is rapidly increasing because of how fast it is changing society. Thus we (future teachers) are now responsible to teach technology literacy. Our students will not be able to compete in the professional world if they do not know how to use technology. Thus, it is our job to incorporate technology into the classroom when it will enrich our lesson, engage our students, and improve their literacy in the technological world.The hardest part is figuring out when to integrate technology into our classrooms. I believe that technology should be incorporated into certain parts of the curriculum as enrichment assignments. I do not believe it should completely replace other forms of instruction that use books and paper. My reasoning behind this is the theory of differentiated instruction. We know that not every student has the same learning style or is at the same academic level as their classmates. Therefore technology is another outlet to provide this differentiated instruction for those students who would prefer to use it. In the classroom I’m in now for example, if the students want to know what is going on, what’s due, what they will be learning that week, the teacher uses a Google calendar to post homework assignments and update reminders for upcoming tests. This allows the students to go online and check the calendar to help them stay organized. She also has a written calendar in the classroom on the whiteboard for students who prefer to refer to that calendar.
Technology can also be used as a background semester long project like Pixton comics. Pixton is a very reasonable online website for educators that allows students to design their comics. This would fall under the genre of a graphic narrative where the students have to work on their creativity, writing, reading, listening and speaking skills. This type of project has to be thought out by the teacher as to when they could implement it into their class, but it is a great tool to get your class working on something that makes them have to write their own storyline, create characters, and also record their voices as they read through their comic. We saw an example of this project by Professor David Shultz, the technology coordinator at the language resource center at Grand Valley State University. I would use this comic book idea for a semester long project which allows the students enough time to devote quality to work, but it also gives them an assignment to continuously work on so that when you have free time in class, they can always work on their comic.
As to my future classroom, depending on the level of technological support I have in my future classroom, I would use technology with my weebly account for my class. Upload helpful videos of grammatical structures or cartoons that use the vocabulary we are studying. I would also like to create a semester long project for them to do like the Pixton comics. The good thing is that in order to differentiate your instruction, you could give the option of actually drawing and making a real comic book themselves as well, if they did not want to do it online. There are many options where we can utilize technology in the classroom, but we need to take precautions as to when we implement it into our curriculum and how we will be assessing them on an activity where technology is used. We need to prepare a strong rationale for why we are using technology in that specific task, how we will assess, and what our objectives are. Technology is made to help the process of learning be more fun and more interactive!
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Journal Article: Creating a Low-anxiety classroom environment
After being a foreign language learner and now a teacher assistant in a Spanish classroom, I have experienced and observed certain levels of anxiety when asked to speak in the target language. For me, my anxiety came when I would speak Spanish with other native English speakers because I knew that we were speaking for correctness and proficiency and not for survival. My preference is to speak with native Spanish speaker who knows no English at all, thus allowing me to make errors with no shame or hesitation so that I can try my best to get my point across. This anxiety is different for every student. The anxiety for some might come from confidence issues with social conversations in general, they are not given back encouragement for their efforts after spoken, or the environment of the classroom is a a high anxiety classroom where errors are publicized and effort are not recognized.
Research on foreign and second language anxiety is hard to address because the relationship between anxiety and language learning/performance could not be viewed without taking into account an assortment of variables, such as language setting, anxiety definitions, anxiety measures, age of subject, etc. Dolly Young suggests in her journal Creating a low-Anxiety Classroom Environment: What does language anxiety research suggest?, that language anxiety arises from: 1) personal and interpersonal anxieties; 2)learner beliefs about language learning; 3) instructor beliefs about language learning; 4) Instructor-leaner interactions; 5) classroom procedures; and 6) language testing.So from these six probable causes of language anxiety, how do we as teachers create a low-anxiety classroom to have an effective learning environment?
Well Young suggests that the modeling approach to error correction, students are not spotlighted in front of their peers and corrected, but correct feedback is given to those language learners who need it (Young, 8). This relates to our classroom discourse article as it talks about modeling feedback. Lyster and Ranta (1997) found the following types of corrective feedback were used by teachers in their interactions with the students: recasts, explicit correction, repetition, metalinguistic feedback, and clarification requests. By providing corrective feedback in your classroom, you can help the student's language anxiety of Instructor-learner interactions which is one of the listed causes of anxiety in the classroom.
Another aspect of language anxiety are personal and interpersonal anxieties. Research was done in a classroom in Turkey to seek an answer to the question as to whether Computer-Mediated Communication Technologies be a solution for overcoming problems of sufficient time for practice to enable students to achieve fluency in speaking though internalizing the structures, and establishing a balance between fluency and accuracy. Research found that computer-mediated communication (CMC) emerges as a feasible solution particularly for improvement of speaking skills and decreasing the level of foreign language anxiety by raising self-confidence of the students within the scope of both formal and distance education (TOJDE,2). For example, these numbers were obtained by an analysis of the data from the text chat logs automatically kept via flash player, the findings show that with the task based information gap activity via chat room, where 96.7% of the words used by the students during activity were in the target language. Their comments as to why they enjoyed these activities the most important reason was because they were related to their own lives ans that they used them frequently. One student says, " it was enjoyable to explain something that belongs to me." We see, that integrating technology and really trying to create a low-anxiety classroom is really important. The modeling approach and CMC can be used to differentiate your instruction to allow students to achieve fluency in the target language. My response to my research about classroom anxiety is that as teachers, we need to be attentive to the needs of our students, how we interact with them and how we create procedures to combat language anxieties. If you want to read more, the two articles are attached below.
Creating a Low-Anxiety Classroom Environment: What Does Language Anxiety Research Suggest?
Research on foreign and second language anxiety is hard to address because the relationship between anxiety and language learning/performance could not be viewed without taking into account an assortment of variables, such as language setting, anxiety definitions, anxiety measures, age of subject, etc. Dolly Young suggests in her journal Creating a low-Anxiety Classroom Environment: What does language anxiety research suggest?, that language anxiety arises from: 1) personal and interpersonal anxieties; 2)learner beliefs about language learning; 3) instructor beliefs about language learning; 4) Instructor-leaner interactions; 5) classroom procedures; and 6) language testing.So from these six probable causes of language anxiety, how do we as teachers create a low-anxiety classroom to have an effective learning environment?
Well Young suggests that the modeling approach to error correction, students are not spotlighted in front of their peers and corrected, but correct feedback is given to those language learners who need it (Young, 8). This relates to our classroom discourse article as it talks about modeling feedback. Lyster and Ranta (1997) found the following types of corrective feedback were used by teachers in their interactions with the students: recasts, explicit correction, repetition, metalinguistic feedback, and clarification requests. By providing corrective feedback in your classroom, you can help the student's language anxiety of Instructor-learner interactions which is one of the listed causes of anxiety in the classroom.
Another aspect of language anxiety are personal and interpersonal anxieties. Research was done in a classroom in Turkey to seek an answer to the question as to whether Computer-Mediated Communication Technologies be a solution for overcoming problems of sufficient time for practice to enable students to achieve fluency in speaking though internalizing the structures, and establishing a balance between fluency and accuracy. Research found that computer-mediated communication (CMC) emerges as a feasible solution particularly for improvement of speaking skills and decreasing the level of foreign language anxiety by raising self-confidence of the students within the scope of both formal and distance education (TOJDE,2). For example, these numbers were obtained by an analysis of the data from the text chat logs automatically kept via flash player, the findings show that with the task based information gap activity via chat room, where 96.7% of the words used by the students during activity were in the target language. Their comments as to why they enjoyed these activities the most important reason was because they were related to their own lives ans that they used them frequently. One student says, " it was enjoyable to explain something that belongs to me." We see, that integrating technology and really trying to create a low-anxiety classroom is really important. The modeling approach and CMC can be used to differentiate your instruction to allow students to achieve fluency in the target language. My response to my research about classroom anxiety is that as teachers, we need to be attentive to the needs of our students, how we interact with them and how we create procedures to combat language anxieties. If you want to read more, the two articles are attached below.
|
04/2008, Volume 9, Issue 2, p. 16
|
Creating a Low-Anxiety Classroom Environment: What Does Language Anxiety Research Suggest?
The Modern Language Journal
Vol. 75, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 426-439
Vol. 75, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 426-439
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/329492
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Lesson Planning
What Teacher's really do #lessonplanning
When I think about lesson planning, I think about a long process that starts with figuring out your objectives, aligning it with the curriculum, narrowing the objectives into activities. When ever I hear the words "lesson planning" I think about a process that takes a lot of thought and time to do well. The more experience you get at doing it the better you become, but it is the most important part of Teaching. It outlines how you do your job as a teacher.
After interviewing two forign language teachers about their apporoaches to lesson planning and there were some similarities and some differences between what the teachers said and what our readings have shown us.
How long before a specific lesson do you prepare it?
Our readings show how to approach lesson planning with organizing thematic units that are derived from the unit divisions in the text books. One of the teachers said that she planned a month a head. She has about 1 month planned out before school starts and gauges her schedule based on how the daily objectives go. The other teacher said she gets an idea of the curriculum and objectives about one month ahead of time as well, but actually writes down her lesson plans at one week in advance increments. So gathering from that, I would say it is good planning, if you have one month planned ahead.
How do you decide to do on any given day?
Our readings from Shrum & Glisan tell us that one of the most important aspects of daily lesson planning is to identify the objective(s) that you want to achieve by the end of the class period. From my interviews, I gathered that both teachers follow the curriculum for the daily objectives, also incorporating different activities (3-5) each week, to differentiate instruction based on the students of each class. These sound like great answers, but I wasn't given an specific examples of objectives. My thoughts are that the teachers are using just the textbook objectives to guide lesson planning and not reaching from the students personal goals(objectives) that they could integrate into the planning process. I agree that aligning the objectives to the curriculum is needed, but for my future classroom I would like to incorporate my students personal language objectives as well, and try to accomplish their goals over time.
Do you write down your objectives? How do you determine your lesson objectives?
The biggest factor that stood out to me in the answers to these questions was that neither teacher said they took their standards from ACTFL. They both stated that they get their objectives from the book, but one teacher did say that she does try to align her lessons with the five C's, standards for foreign language learning. Some of their answers do not line up with our readings, for instance, niether of the teachers talked about any kind of anticipatory set in there lessons, something to get the students excited about the objectives that are to be reached in that specific lesson.
Do you write down lesson notes to guide you?
Both teaches stated that they do take notes on their lessons. One teachers jots down notes, circles a concept that works, highlights or crosses activities out that weren't successful. The other teacher writes notes down in bullet form, more like an outline that she can later organize for adaptions for future lessons. Srum & Glisan talk about the reevaluation and reorganization aspect of lesson planning where the teacher checks for flow and transsitions, controlled versus open ended communicative applications. The comments about note taking from my two teachers seemed to be focused on the moments during instruction more than a reflection after. Either way, taking notes to guide you for the future lesson is a great way to continiuously assess and reevaluate your instruction.
These interviews were helpful in the sense that it made me reflect on the research behind lesson planning and how intricate it can become, depending on how much time and effort you put into it. For me, it seems like the over all take away that I got from my interviewees, was that since they are experienced 20+ year veteran teachers, they seem to be able to just familiarize themselves with the curriculum, plan ahead, integrate authentic activities, and plan their lessons. My goal is to strive to write lesson plans that integrate the goals of my students as well as tie my objectives into the curriculum ( not the book objectives, but the national ACTFL standards), and really take time my first few years of teaching to create lessons plans that are interesting and engaging to my students. The more I observe teachers, the more they tell me that you (as a teacher) don't have to write detailed lesson plans and objectives, but I don't see how that is possible because that is what strives the car! If you don't have a hold of the wheel, you might take your students to places they either won't remember, shouldn't have went simply because you don't know where you're taking them! I want to create lesson plans that take my students to places they never thought they'd be able to go to before and ones that they'll never forget!
-Srta. Myers
When I think about lesson planning, I think about a long process that starts with figuring out your objectives, aligning it with the curriculum, narrowing the objectives into activities. When ever I hear the words "lesson planning" I think about a process that takes a lot of thought and time to do well. The more experience you get at doing it the better you become, but it is the most important part of Teaching. It outlines how you do your job as a teacher.
After interviewing two forign language teachers about their apporoaches to lesson planning and there were some similarities and some differences between what the teachers said and what our readings have shown us.
How long before a specific lesson do you prepare it?
Our readings show how to approach lesson planning with organizing thematic units that are derived from the unit divisions in the text books. One of the teachers said that she planned a month a head. She has about 1 month planned out before school starts and gauges her schedule based on how the daily objectives go. The other teacher said she gets an idea of the curriculum and objectives about one month ahead of time as well, but actually writes down her lesson plans at one week in advance increments. So gathering from that, I would say it is good planning, if you have one month planned ahead.
How do you decide to do on any given day?
Our readings from Shrum & Glisan tell us that one of the most important aspects of daily lesson planning is to identify the objective(s) that you want to achieve by the end of the class period. From my interviews, I gathered that both teachers follow the curriculum for the daily objectives, also incorporating different activities (3-5) each week, to differentiate instruction based on the students of each class. These sound like great answers, but I wasn't given an specific examples of objectives. My thoughts are that the teachers are using just the textbook objectives to guide lesson planning and not reaching from the students personal goals(objectives) that they could integrate into the planning process. I agree that aligning the objectives to the curriculum is needed, but for my future classroom I would like to incorporate my students personal language objectives as well, and try to accomplish their goals over time.
Do you write down your objectives? How do you determine your lesson objectives?
The biggest factor that stood out to me in the answers to these questions was that neither teacher said they took their standards from ACTFL. They both stated that they get their objectives from the book, but one teacher did say that she does try to align her lessons with the five C's, standards for foreign language learning. Some of their answers do not line up with our readings, for instance, niether of the teachers talked about any kind of anticipatory set in there lessons, something to get the students excited about the objectives that are to be reached in that specific lesson.
Do you write down lesson notes to guide you?
Both teaches stated that they do take notes on their lessons. One teachers jots down notes, circles a concept that works, highlights or crosses activities out that weren't successful. The other teacher writes notes down in bullet form, more like an outline that she can later organize for adaptions for future lessons. Srum & Glisan talk about the reevaluation and reorganization aspect of lesson planning where the teacher checks for flow and transsitions, controlled versus open ended communicative applications. The comments about note taking from my two teachers seemed to be focused on the moments during instruction more than a reflection after. Either way, taking notes to guide you for the future lesson is a great way to continiuously assess and reevaluate your instruction.
These interviews were helpful in the sense that it made me reflect on the research behind lesson planning and how intricate it can become, depending on how much time and effort you put into it. For me, it seems like the over all take away that I got from my interviewees, was that since they are experienced 20+ year veteran teachers, they seem to be able to just familiarize themselves with the curriculum, plan ahead, integrate authentic activities, and plan their lessons. My goal is to strive to write lesson plans that integrate the goals of my students as well as tie my objectives into the curriculum ( not the book objectives, but the national ACTFL standards), and really take time my first few years of teaching to create lessons plans that are interesting and engaging to my students. The more I observe teachers, the more they tell me that you (as a teacher) don't have to write detailed lesson plans and objectives, but I don't see how that is possible because that is what strives the car! If you don't have a hold of the wheel, you might take your students to places they either won't remember, shouldn't have went simply because you don't know where you're taking them! I want to create lesson plans that take my students to places they never thought they'd be able to go to before and ones that they'll never forget!
-Srta. Myers
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Blog #2-Why study a foreign Language
Dear
Parents,
Currently,
the state of Michigan has a two year foreign language requirement for high
school graduation as part of its Merit Curriculum. However, many of you are not
aware of the reasoning behind this requirement. I am writing to inform you of
the benefits of foreign language study. There are many benefits your student
will receive, but this Washington State University article "Why Study a foreign Language" clearly summarizes three reasons why this requirement will benefit your student.
Give Yourself a
Competitive Edge
Did
you know that studying a second language can improve your student’s skills and
grades in Mathematics and English and can improve entrance exam scores -- SATs,
ACTs, GREs, MCATs, and LSATs? Research has shown that math and verbal SAT
scores climb higher with each additional year of foreign language study, which
means that the longer you study a foreign language, the stronger your skills
become to succeed in school.
The Job Advantage in a
Global Economy
More
and more businesses work closely with companies in other countries. They need
many different kinds of workers who can communicate in different languages and
understand other cultures. No matter what career your student chooses, if they
learned a second language, they will have a real advantage. A technician who
knows Russian or German, the head of a company who knows Japanese or Spanish,
or a salesperson who knows French or Chinese can work successfully with more
people in more places than someone who knows only one language.
Learning other Cultures
Studying
a new language, reading other peoples’ stories, and connecting with people in
their own language can be a source of pleasure and surprise. Connecting and learning
about other cultures will help your student expand their personal horizons and
become a responsible citizen. Their ability to talk to others and gain
knowledge beyond the world of English can contribute to their community and
their country.
I
hope that you are now more aware of the benefits of your student’s foreign
language study. I ask that you help as we try to educate and prepare our future
generation for the ever changing global society! If you want to read more from this article, I encourage you to visit http://www.forlang.wsu.edu/top10.asp.
Ms.
Myers
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Blog #1-TELL Framework
When I first read about TELL framework, I loved the introduction about teacher effectiveness. It stated that research suggests that it is not so much what the teacher knows but what the teacher does in the classroom that maximizes student achievement. Teacher effectiveness is a goal that I will be striving for this semester. I aspire to be a teacher who instructs in such a way that my students can walk out of my classroom and use what they’ve learned in the real world. I want my students to be able to apply their knowledge and show off how much they know inside and outside of the classroom. A few main points I liked in the TELL framework was how it said to use background information about my students learning to inform my approach in section E1-a. Second, I resonated with the LE3-c; helping students see connections among learning experiences. This allows students to build on previous knowledge by helping them make those connections throughout instruction. Building on prior knowledge is part of the philosophy of Dewey’s progressive approach which is part of my own philosophy of education. Lastly, I really liked how TELL included the learning tools section; especially LT2 about incorporating authentic materials. This is important to help build their knowledge of the target language culture.
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