A Radical Departure in Foreign-Language Teaching

            In this article in The Language Educator, Oregon teacher Caleb Zilmer wonders why so many adults who took a language in school don’t remember more than how to ask directions to the nearest bathroom. Did they lack intelligence or the knack for learning a language? Did they study the language after the magic age of eight? What happened to all those hours of work? Zilmer offers these basic principles for an approach he believes will make a language stick:

            • Focus on meaning rather than grammar. The key is pushing for 100 percent of classroom discourse conducted in the target language, including attendance, giving out homework, jokes, and of course instruction. This puts the emphasis on communication and fluency. Students will make mistakes – what they need is a “sympathetic listener,” says Zilmer. “Students quickly learn that self-correction goes hand-in-hand with working through communication… As proficiency increases, so does the need for accuracy, and learners become more capable of attending to accuracy with greater proficiency.”

            • Create a safe environment for experimentation. Students’ experiences and stories, not the textbook, become the focus of the curriculum, and a free-flowing dialogue creates the kind of climate that builds enthusiasm, ownership, and fluency. In this format, groupings are fluid and desks are not in straight rows. In fact, students may be on their feet talking in small groups a good part of the time.

            • Instruction and assessment inform one another. “With every interaction with students every day, teachers are attending to how students’ productions look and sound,” says Zilmer. “Depending on what is most appropriate… teachers either instruct in the moment or save thoughts to share later. Thus, assessment happens in the moment, as does instruction.”

            A teacher had this to say about Zilmer’s approach: “It is 100% unconventional and 100% effective. It makes sense, and because it makes sense, it will work. Not to mention it’s a blast.”

“90% Target Language, Authentic Texts, No Isolated Grammar? How?” by Caleb Zilmer in The Language Educator, April 2013 (Vol. 8, #3, p. 26-29), no e-link available

Nature vs Nurture

Go to this video and tell me what it says about nature vs nurture
It is called    Why Some Apples Fall Far From the Tree.

http://bigthink.com/users/laurencesteinberg

Unleashing Creativity/Language Teaching/learning

What's do you think creativity has to do with language teaching/learning?

            “Most people are born creative,” say Tom Kelley (University of California/Berkeley and University of Tokyo) and David Kelley (Stanford University) in this thoughtful Harvard Business Review article. “As children, we revel in imaginary play, ask outlandish questions, draw blobs and call them dinosaurs.” But as the years pass, formal education takes its toll and many people no longer see themselves as creative.

Kelley and Kelley believe creativity is vital to getting results, and they’re in the business of helping people rediscover their creative confidence, defined as their “natural ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.” They use “guided mastery” to help people get past fears that inhibit creativity:

            • Fear of the messy unknown – One’s office is cozy and predictable, say Kelley and Kelley: “Out in the world, it’s more chaotic. You have to deal with unexpected findings, with uncertainty, and with irrational people who say things you don’t want to hear. But that is where you find insights – and creative breakthroughs.” Venturing out of one’s comfort zone and treating it like an anthropological expedition is a sure way to fire up creativity.

            • Fear of being judged – “If the scribbling, singing, dancing kindergartner symbolizes unfettered creative expression,” say Kelley and Kelley, “the awkward teenager represents the opposite: someone who cares – deeply – about what other people think. It takes only a few years to develop that fear of judgment, but it stays with us throughout our adult lives, often constraining our careers.” People self-censor ideas for fear they won’t be acceptable to peers or superiors, constantly undermining the creative process. Kelley and Kelley recommend keeping an idea notebook or whiteboard and scribbling ideas – good, bad, indifferent – with abandon. It’s amazing how much good stuff is written down by the end of each week. They also suggest scheduling “white space” time when the only task is to think and daydream – perhaps while taking a walk. It’s also important to reach an agreement with colleagues to use more supportive language in response to wild and crazy ideas, shifting from “That will never work” to “I wish…” or “This is just my opinion and I want to help.”

            • Fear of the first step – “Creative efforts are hardest at the beginning,” say Kelley and Kelley. “The writer faces the blank page; the teacher, the start of school; businesspeople, the first day of a new project… To overcome this inertia, good ideas are not enough. You need to stop planning and just get started – and the best way to do that is to stop focusing on the huge overall task and find a small piece you can tackle right away.” A boy who procrastinated on a school report on birds till the night before it was due was on the verge of a panic attack, but he got some great advice from his father: “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

            • Fear of losing control – Many people think they have to solve problems or come up with answers by themselves. Kelley and Kelley say that when we’re stuck, we need to let go and reach out for help. “Confidence doesn’t simply mean believing your ideas are good,” they write. “It means having the humility to let go of ideas that aren’t working and to accept good ideas from other people.” Call a meeting of people who are fresh to the topic and brainstorm. Let the most junior person in the room lead the meeting. Look for opportunities to let go and leverage different perspectives.

Robert Marzano on Student Engagement

As teachers, what we all want is that are students enjoy and are engaged in our classes.  Here Marzano gives us some points that I think are relevant to this matter.  When you teach, do you feel all of your students are paying attention?  Do you lose some of them?  If so, what do you thinks is happening?  

We will talk about this issue when we come back from Spring break.  Have a great holiday!

(Originally Titled “Ask Yourself: Are Students Engaged?”)

            In this Educational Leadership article, author/consultant/researcher Robert Marzano has four questions on maximizing engagement:

            • Do I provide a safe, caring, and energetic environment? Without this, engagement will be minimal. The key is clear classroom rules (periodically revisited), evidence that the teacher likes students and appreciates their efforts, a high energy level, and getting students up out of their seats on a regular basis.

            • Do I make things interesting? Marzano distinguishes between triggered interest (a teacher captures students’ attention by singing) and maintained interest (a teacher asks an intriguing question and hooks students’ interest for much longer). Teachers can also maintain academic interest with games like Jeopardy, cold-calling (students don’t know when they will be asked to participate), and setting up debates on controversial topics.

            • Do I demonstrate why the content is important to students’ lives? Many kids will be more interested in polynomials upon learning that they are used to compute NFL quarterback ratings. A teacher’s genuine enthusiasm for a topic can also capture students’ interest – plus a story about how the teacher came to love it.

            • Do I help students see the role of effort? If students don’t think they can be successful in the classroom, they won’t engage. The best way to handle this is explicitly teaching the growth mindset – the belief that individual effort is what matters – including teaching about the changes that take place in the brain when people learn.

“Ask Yourself: Are Students Engaged?” by Robert Marzano in Educational Leadership, March 2013 (Vol. 70, #6, p. 81-82), www.ascd.org

Using the Target Foreign Language 90% or More of Classroom Time

         This article was written in an English speaking context.  So in our context the target language would be Spanish.  When it says that students would address you or talk to you in English, for us it would be in Spanish. 

In this article in The Language Educator, New Jersey French teacher Douglass Crouse suggests ways that teachers can reach the goal of students using the target language 90 percent or more of each class:

-   Start the year by explaining why staying in the target language is so important to fluency and proficiency in the language.

-   Praise students individually and collectively when they make the effort.

-   When students address you in English, give a quizzical look and say you don’t understand.

-   Plan lessons to eliminate idle time that allows students to chat in English.

-   Use activities like inside-outside circles to allow students to practice common expressions and structures in rapid sequence. This also allows the teacher to listen for places where communication is breaking down.

-   Change seating plans often so students can pair up with different classmates.

-   Design activities that allow students to use the language to get information they’re missing.

-   Let students know they may be asked to report their information to the class at any moment.

-   Post commonly-used phrases around the classroom so students can use them when they’re stuck.

-   Try a reward system in which students can earn points for maintaining the target language.

-   Encourage students to come up with silly stories as part of a survey.

“Going for 90% Plus: How to Stay in the Target Language” by Douglass Crouse in The Language Educator, October 2012 (Vol. 7, #5, p. 22-27), http://www.actfl.org

Can Non-Native Speakers Teach a Foreign Language Well?

            In this Foreign Language Annals article, Amy Thompson and Amy Fioramonte (University of South Florida) report on their interviews with teachers of Spanish who are not native speakers. These teachers are often treated as second-class citizens by colleagues and students. Thompson and Fioramonte interviewed a number of university teaching assistants, hoping they would “reveal their experiences as both language learners and teachers by reflecting on their past and present experiences and imagining their future selves as teachers.” This article focuses on three of the interviewees who taught Spanish and had diverse language backgrounds; one was Russian, one Thai (with Chinese parents), and one English (she grew up in Canada and the U.S.). These themes emerged from the interviews:

            • Everyone makes mistakes – “Interestingly, all of the participants commented that making mistakes was acceptable, whether on the part of the student or on the part of the teacher,” say Thompson and Fioramonte. One of them said, “I don’t have to know everything. It’s not my job as a teacher [laugh] to know everything. It’s my job as a teacher to direct them to the information that they need to get.”

            • Pronunciation – The interviewees said that speaking like a native was important to them and to their students, and speaking with a thick non-native accent makes a teacher of Spanish less credible and effective. But is pronunciation the most important indicator of a teacher’s competence? ask Thompson and Fioramonte. They believe it’s superficial compared to knowledge of the language and culture and teaching skill. In addition, native speakers also make mistakes and some speak with non-normative accents.

            • Teaching advanced classes – All the interviewees said they were reluctant to teach upper-level Spanish courses because of their perceived inadequacies. That’s a shame, say Thompson and Fioramonte: “It is probable that these three participants would, in fact, be able to teach higher levels of Spanish, but their self-perceived limitations are preventing them from doing so… Thus, the theme of not being able to teach higher levels of Spanish potentially comes from a combination of three factors: self-deprecation or lack of self-confidence, prior language learning experiences, and the expectations of the students and supervisors in their current teaching positions.”

            What conclusions flow from these interviews? Thompson and Fioramonte believe the field needs to move beyond negative stereotypes of non-native speakers and focus on the more important issues of knowledge of the language and teaching competence. “Language students should strive to be competent users of the language, rather than try to achieve the unattainable ‘native-speaker’ status,” they say. Non-native speakers can be excellent role models in that process. Thompson and Fioramonte conclude by saying that “bilingualism and multilingualism of language teachers should be highly valued and emphasized, as bilingual and multilingual individuals have a heightened metalinguistic awareness when compared to monolingual teachers…”

“Nonnative Speaker Teachers of Spanish: Insights from Novice Teachers” by Amy Thompson and Amy Fioramonte in Foreign Language Annals, Winter 2012 (Vol. 45, #4, p. 564-579),

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1944-9720.2013.01210.x/abstract