Daily Archives: February 25, 2017

conferences Core Practices for World Language Teacher effectiveness

Fun with Functional Chunks!

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With over 30 years teaching middle school, it doesn’t take research to convince me that the average teenage brain can only focus intently for about 12 minutes. Building structured activities into lesson plans that provide opportunities for students to interact with each other and practice the target language is brain friendly instruction and good for everyone.  These structured activities give the teacher’s voice a rest while the students are practicing the target language, but more importantly it allows the teacher to walk around and provide some individualized feedback in a relaxed non threatening environment.  I am curating all of my favorite activities into a presentation called “Fun with Functional Chunks.”

Functional Chunks of Language are expressions, phrases or words that students learn as a chunk without necessarily understanding the grammatical structure.  However, they learn where and when to say them when communicating.  These functional chunks of language empower students to use the language early and often and help students and teachers stay in the target language.

I will be presenting a workshop on this topic called “Put the Fun in Functional Chunks” on March 18th at the WAFLT Spring Regional at Eastside Catholic School in Sammamish.  In this workshop common language chunks and language functions at various levels will be presented and discussed.  Engaging activities to practice interpretive and interpersonal communications skills with functional chunks of language will be presented and practiced by participants.  Let’s put the fun back in language functions.

Here are the top ten language functions, can we create relevant related tasks?

 

Here is an example of one of my structured activities.  I learned it as Pancho Carrancho, but in French we say Mon Frère Pierre.  For now, here is a list of structured activities I posted earlier. Strategies-for-Guiding-Interactions   The new and improved list will be coming out soon.

Please join us at the WAFLT Spring Regional: Saturday, March 18th at Eastside Catholic School in Sammamish, Washington. The price is $35 WAFLT members / $45 non-members.

Registration is now open:  http://tinyurl.com/gvnnpna  

Sessions will begin at 9am and run until 4pm, with lunch from 12-1 (included in registration fee). Pre-registration is accepted until Thursday, March 16, 2017. Pre-registration will guarantee that you will have lunch. Registration includes 6 free clock hours, lunch, and all conference materials. Please consider becoming a WAFLT member.  For more information go to the WAFLT website.

 
conferences Storytelling Teacher effectiveness

Feeling Lucky

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I am a lucky person.  I have won a trip to the Philippines, a TV, hundreds in free groceries, free paint and sip classes, novels, and much more.  This week I won a hand-painted wine class from a wine event, an autographed poster from Señorwooly, and $100.00 off registration for me and another teacher to the iFLT conference in Denver.

So I am hoping to spread the luck.  I would like to offer $100 off registration to the International Forum on Language Teaching (iFLT) conference to a teacher who has not been to an iFLT conference before.  I also have a companion ticket for Alaska Airlines that we could use to reduce the cost of airfare, and of course split the cost of a hotel room in Denver.

As a conference junkie, I have attended hundreds of conferences and think the iFLT conferences by Fluency Matters are awesome. Carol Gaab and her team are among the best in the business.  I attended the iFLT conference in Breckenridge, Colorado and learned a lot. This years conference is July 11-14 with Fluency Fast classes available before the conference July 7-10. For more information on the conference go to the Fluency Matters website.  If you are interested contact me at JohnstonL@edmonds.wednet.edu.

Here is my submission to the contest as to What Fluency Matters means to me.

Congratulations To Our Runners-Up:

Runners-up will receive $100 off iFLT registration for themselves and $100 off iFLT registration for a colleague!**

Lynn Johnston
I feel like I am learning how to teach in the target language 90% of the time with novices from day one because of the Fluency Matters team. Every time I am lucky enough to secure a spot in a Carol Gaab presentation I leave with new ideas and inspiration. The class sets of novels and teachers guides have made teaching easier for me and reading more enjoyable for my students. However, my light bulb moment was at an ACTFL session when Carol Gaab demonstrated higher order thinking using compelling comprehensible input. Probable or possible or its variations logical and illogical are now standard in my teaching. Students are hearing vocabulary in context and are thinking at a higher level, but are able to respond with very little forced language. Who might say is another higher order thinking activity I learned from Fluency Matters. Students must infer who might say something based on context, content and/or verb form. Another activity I learned from the fluency matters team is the action chain. Students love to act and I get lots of repetitions of the language structures while having students determine a logical order for the events. This summer I discovered the webinars and the CI peek blog. I plan to use these a lot more in the future. I would really love to attend the IFLT conference and bring a new teacher I am mentoring in my district.