PD 2

For my second Professional development I am going to talk about ACTFL and Twitter. I joined ACTFL in the beginning of the semester when professor Guikema   introduced it to us with the packet. I find being a member of ACTFL helps me develop as a professional because I get a lot of up to date information on how to be a better foreign language teacher. A lot of their articles are very insightful. I will be a member of ACTFL for the rest of my professional career.  Most people do not like to pay for a subscription to anything so what is a free way to get updates on teaching methods and other insightful material on how to become a better teacher? The free alternative is Twitter, I found out that Twitter can be used as a professional development tool as well as being a member of ACTFL. I signed up and started following people that were in the foreign educational field and now every time I want to know what’s going on in the field I just refresh my twitter feed and find numerous amount of posts and articles on professional development, methods and strategies teachers are using all over the world. Twitter was the way I found out about many tools I have used in my own classroom, for example, Plickers. This is an application that allows you to formatively assess students and see how each student is doing and what you can do to help them. Professional development can be found everywhere; it is our job as teachers to look for them.

PD

For my first professional development event I attended the K-16 World Language Instruction: Preparing students for the next level and beyond. This event took place on November 1^st and it was held at Grand Valley. At the event there were several speakers and I learned a lot about different techniques I would like to use in my classroom. There were three specific items that I thought stood out the most from the speakers that day. The first thing is using stories in order to teach a lesson.  The example given was about a tree’s using humans as their Christmas trees, one of the younger trees asked what happens to the humans when they are done with them and it was explained that they are just thrown out. The moral of the story was that we should not just cut down trees to decorate and then throw away but the story was created to make the students more interested and show the situation from the trees perspective. This gave me a new idea for my future classes to make the learning more interesting.

            The second big idea of the presentation was similar to the topic above in that it was about making the learning fun and also teaching students the needed information. This is something that I think about every time I create a lesson plan. The speaker discussed how students learn and comprehend more when the lesson is exciting and fun. When the lesson is fun the students become more engaged and this helps them to understand the material better.

            The third important thing I learned from the professional development seminar was another way to help the students remember material better. The presenter spoke about how if you want your students to remember information such as the states of the country to not give them a map already filled in but rather a blank one. She explained that giving the students a blank map requires them to fill it in themselves and therefore helps them to remember the material better. This learning strategy does not just have to do with remembering geography but I can translate this to even remembering vocabulary words and not just giving them to my students but having them fill in the information themselves.

            Overall I thought this experience was very helpful and provided me some with some great strategies for my classroom. I think that attending events like this can be very helpful and provide me with other teachers’ experiences and strategies that I can implement in my class. The strategies I learned from the seminar I think will be a great addition to my future class.

Blog #5

The journal that I read had to do with cognates and how cognates can be used to help new students to a foreign language or students who are struggling. It explains how cognates can make anyone read in Spanish. Meaning even if it’s a Spanish one class if the Reading has enough cognates students will be able to comprehend what the reading is about. The author described it as “puzzle reading”. Puzzle reading basically means that if students uses the cognates and pieces them together they can get the overall view of what the article was about. After all comprehension is one of the main goals a Spanish learner has to meet. Some classroom strategies the article talked about was “reading aloud”, the teacher reads an article out loud slowly and when the students think they hear a cognate they say “stop” and they go over what the cognate is or if it’s a false cognate. Another strategy discussed in this reading is “student reading” which means that the students read an article then they circle or underline what they think is a cognate then the whole class discusses the answers. Some activities mention in the reading is “Word sort” this activity consist of pairing up students and giving one student a set of card’s in English and the other student a set of card’s in Spanish and then they have to work together in order to match up the cognates. And lastly the Article talked about false cognates and how it is important to tell students that false cognates do exist so that they don’t think that every word that sound or looks the same is a cognate.

My opinion on this topic is pretty much the same as the article I believe that cognates are a very useful tool for students who have trouble reading the targeted language and even for more experienced learners like myself. I still look for cognates when I read in Spanish. If I don’t understand what a word means in Spanish I look at it and see if it looks like any word in English and usually it does so I get a general idea of what the word means. So I do believe that cognates are a good tool to teach Spanish. As for the article I think that the strategies discussed might sound like common sense like “reading out loud” but I think sometimes the most common sense strategies are the best.

Blog #4

1. What are the most common ways that you have experienced listening and reading comprehension as a learner in FL classes?  Please identify and evaluate the approaches or techniques that were used most often, explaining any difficulties you experienced with listening or reading comprehension. In your critique, make sure you reference the Omaggio text.

I have not have had many foreign language classes threw my educational carrier but in the few that I have taken I have seen a similar trend. In all of my classes there has been a lot of “teacher talk” I like this approach because it makes the student fill like they are part of a real conversation in the targeted language. I personally liked this approach because it made the class open for conversation but I also know that most of my other classmates did not like this approach and one of the reasons was that the teacher was talking too slow and that would make the class very boring for them and that is one of the down falls of this approach like Omaggio says that “it consists of a simplified code, characterized by slower, more carful articulation” so for a native speaker this approach might not be the best one. Another way I saw listening and reading comprehension in my foreign language classes was by students doing “Oral presentation of a written text” unlike “teacher talk” this approach involved students more because the students are the ones that had to write the text that they are going to present to the class. I like this approach because it gives time to the student to think and practice what they are going to present to the class before they have to. That is a good idea because if students don’t get that chance to write something down and the teachers just puts them on the spot most students will just freeze and will have a very hard time saying what they want to say in Spanish. And finally the most important reason why this approach is important for foreign language students is because it involves both writing and speaking the two most important things a foreign language student needs to learn in order communicate in the targeted language that they are studying which is the goal of the class in the first place.

2.  What strategies have you used for listening and reading comprehension that you think might be helpful for your students? What strategies did you use that you would not recommend?

Some of the listening comprehensions strategies that I think might be helpful for my students is the use of multimedia software. Like Omaggio says multimedia can be used to bring authentic material to the classroom. For example if in my class I am teaching the student about day of the dead I could use multi media to show them a video of the day of the dead or could even make it more interactive by asking a native speaker in his native country to video call us and explain to my students what day of the dead is. An example of reading using multi media is giving my students a newspaper article of a Spanish speaking country about the day of the dead. This way my students are exposed to readings made for native speaking people. I have not use a lot of strategies yet because most of the time I just help my CT but one of the strategies that my CT uses that I would not recommend other teachers to do is give the students a text to read in Spanish and have the translation on the back. Most of the students will not even look at the Spanish and just go strait to the English side. this defeats the purpose of the class.

Blog #3

I believe that using the target language in class is essential for students to learn not just the language and the rules of the language but also learn how to communicate with the language. It’s important that students use the targeted language in the classroom because some students only hear the language in the classroom. The majority of high school classes only last 60 minutes, which means most students only have a chance to listen to the targeted language 5 hours a week. This is why teachers should use as much of the targeted language as possible for the majority of the time.

Brigid M. Burke gives an excellent example of how important using the targeted language can be in the introduction of “In the classroom promoting communication in the target language with and among students”.  In this introduction the student who is blind folded does not realize she is in a Spanish class until the students have to read their homework answers out loud. During the whole class the main language is English, even the instructions are given in English. This connects with my point that if students learn how to create sentences in Spanish this does not mean that they are going to be able to communicate in Spanish. Another thing we can see in the introduction of this article is that the teacher is using the grammatical translation method which is in my opinion is not a good way to learn a second language. This is because students only concentrate on the English translation rather than concentrate on the Spanish language.

Some obstacles teachers run into when using the target language in the classroom is that most of the students, especially students in Spanish one do not understand you when you speak in Spanish. This is why it is very important to talk slowly and to try to use as many cognates as possible so that the students have a general idea of what you are talking about. Another obstacle that all teachers have is to not give up and just translate the instructions or lectures because once the teacher starts doing that the students will not even try to listen to the Spanish because they know the teacher will translate whatever the instructions are. Other strategies teachers can use to overcome these obstacles include.

·      

        1. Group work using the targeted language

·      2.  Using technology like Skype to get someone who is a native speaker to talk to the classroom.

·      3. Incorporating the culture in the students every day lives.

·      4. Use reading materials made for native speakers.

·      5. And the most important thing is to make your students have fun while they learn the new language.