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

Keys to Learning a New Language

    What do you think about this five recommendations to learn a language.  Comment below and we will talk about it in class next Tuesday.  Have a nice week-end.      

  “It’s a myth that intelligent people are better at learning languages,” says Anne Merritt in this article in The Telegraph (summarized in The Language Educator). “Most language learning skills… are in fact habits, which can be formed through a bit of discipline and self-awareness.” She lists five ways language learners can soar:

            • Listen a lot. Find music, podcasts, TV shows, and movies in the target language and “listen, listen, listen as often as possible,” says Merritt.

            • Be curious about the culture. “The culturally curious students will be more receptive to the language and more open to forming relationships with native speakers,” she says.

            • Guess and have fun. Clutching a dictionary and trying to understand every grammar rule won’t work. “Find a song or text in the target language and practice figuring out the gist, even if a few words are unknown,” says Merritt.

            • Use a variety of methods. Don’t get stuck in a learning rut. Practice different skills and see concepts explained in different ways.

            • Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. “The more learners speak, the quicker they improve,” concludes Merritt.

“Five Common Mistakes Language Learners Make” by Anne Merritt in The Telegraph (UK), December 19, 2012, summarized in The Language Educator, February 2013 (Vol. 8, #2, p. 10), www.tinyurl.com/five-mistakes-merritt

A Radically Different Approach to Foreign-Language Instruction

As you already know, there are a lot of different theories about second language acquisition and the teaching-learning processes involved.  By the end of the course you will have your own point of view.  

At the end of this article taken from the Marshall Memo,  please comment. 

            “For too many years, we have maintained a language-learning strategy that simply does not work,” say David Young and J.B. Buxton in this Education Week article. “[We] seek to teach language to 100 percent of the students with a success rate of 1 percent.” Why the dismal results? Because there’s too much emphasis on grammar and translation and not nearly enough on learning to speak the language, say Young and Buxton: “If graduates of our high schools regularly reflected that, after four years of mathematics, they couldn’t solve for an unknown variable, we would be outraged. But we share a laugh when someone says, ‘I took four years of a language, but I can’t really speak it.’”

            Of course there’s more to taking a course in Spanish or French or Mandarin than oral proficiency – there’s cultural awareness and sensitivity, global knowledge, and exposure to a new language. But because the typical instructional platform rarely has enough intensity or time, these courses don’t deliver oral proficiency or cultural knowledge.

So what is to be done? Young and Buxton believe it is possible to have it both ways if we redeploy the existing world-languages teaching positions, curriculum, and support resources to prepare students for the world in which they live – while satisfying  the demands of states, businesses, and parents:

            • Narrow oral proficiency goals to practical, relevant, real-life language skills, teaching a subset of the current curriculum in greater depth.

            • Teach the other material in a way that helps students understand a country’s cultural identity and compare it to other countries.

            • Teach global knowledge by comparing and contrasting countries that speak the target language.

            “To be clear,” say Young and Buxton, “students will not leave these classes with advanced language proficiency. What they will obtain, however, are the language skills needed to travel in countries that speak the language, an understanding of other countries and cultures, and an awareness of the global issues that impact both those countries and our own.”

            What about the 10 percent of students who want a higher level of oral proficiency? Dual-language instruction is best for them, say the authors. These classes make the target language the vehicle of instruction in all subjects, and studies have shown that students master it at a much high level. A 50/50 split of English and the target language is best for ELL students, a 10/90 split is best for native English speakers.