Now that we know where we want to go, how do we get there? How do you advance student learning?
Well you build your arsenal of activities, curate authentic resources, continually add to your tool box of techniques for providing comprehensible input, and provide opportunities for students to be autonomous learners. A really good place to start is at Tellcollab.org/Startalk. There are videos of classroom vignettes, interviews with veteran teachers, essays, self-assessment tools, and my favorites, the infographics!
An interesting activity that I just added to my arsenal, is the day two opening activity of the Tellcollab Unconference called Powerpoint Karaoke. Prepare slides with various random pictures that can be described in the target language. Give each student a minute to describe the images and vote on the best one by audience applause! See the video on twitter #TELLcollab.
Teaching grammar in context was one of the session topics. Here is an example of how I teach grammar in context. I prefer to use the pace model and storytelling, Teaching-Grammar-in-Context. How do you teach grammar in context?
To keep students in the target language, provide lots of practice in circumlocution and clarification techniques. To teach circumlocution, there are a couple of phrases that are very helpful: It’s a thing that… It’s a person that…. It’s a food that…Play the Pyramid game. Have one student with back to board, the rest of the team takes turns to get through list of 6 words.
Another tool I intend to incorporate this year is Interactive Student Notebooks. In the target language, we will set up interactive notebooks with proficiency charts and their first day writing sample. In the first day lesson, the students do a 5 minute write, if possible they describe themselves in the target language or list all the words they know. If they don’t know any French or Spanish I have them write about themselves in English which also gives me information about them and their writing abilities. I write the proficiency level on the paper and it becomes evidence of student growth for me, the student, the parents, and my administrators. Here are more websites with information on interactive notebooks. Here is a blog in french and this one too. Here is one in Spanish and this one. Most importantly, interactive notebooks are not craft projects. It’s about students organizing and reflecting on their learning and becoming more autonomous.
Check out the TELL videos on Youtube and below are links to those infographics I mentioned.
AdvanceLearning_Engagement_Infographic, AdvanceLearning_TargetLanguage_Infographic, AdvanceLearning_EmpoweringLanguageUse_Infographic