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Organizing my work with Trello
I’ve written previously about how I use Trello to organize my teaching and large programs/events, so in this post I thought I’d take a look at my Trello “Workbox”, which is the overall system that links these together at work (I use similar boards/boxes for home and dancing). I call it a workbox as I’ve…
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Can-Do Assessments: An Update
In an early post on this blog I talked about making assessments based on what students “can do” with language. This year, as we redo our Intermediate Arabic curriculum, we also decided to have no tests. In some ways, this is just a change in terminology, as we have a week of Can-Do Assessments at…
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The Whiteness of U.S. Study Abroad
This post is a summary of part of my talk where I used photos on a program website to demonstrate how even when we take real steps (such as financial support) to promote and support including underrepresented groups in study abroad, we often still do it in a way that doesn’t really challenge what I…
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Using Trello to organize large events and programs
Last Fall, I wrote about how I use Trello to organize my teaching. Another area I find Trello very useful for is organizing large events or programs, in my case dance competitions and our summer Arabic STARTALK program. Although a dance competition and a summer program for middle and high school students seem like very…
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Lesson plans: Genre-based approaches and the interpersonal mode
The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) describes three modes of communication: interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational, and lists Can-Do statements in each of these modes. The presentational mode is for sharing information, opinions, etc, and usually consists of one person communicating with a larger audience, either in writing, speech, or multi-modal forms.…
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Color-coding to develop meta-linguistic awareness in the classroom
In genre-based approaches to language learning, one of the key goals is to teach students not only what texts mean, but how they mean, so students can use (or resist) these conventions when they express themselves. While the goal of understanding WHAT a text means is fairly straightforwards for students and instructors, I find that…
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Multilingualism and Plurilingualism: Implications for the language classroom
Last year, I did a series of posts on language ideologies (What is language?) arguing that while these frequently inform our expectations and actions in the language classroom, we don’t think enough about this. Recently, I’ve been delving into the literature on plurilingual ideologies and pedagogies, and thought I would discuss the differences between these…
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Pacing, not Sprinting: My Semester Plan Spring 2019
It’s the start of a new semester, so time for a new semester plan! In the Fall, I shared my Fall semester plan and one thing I like to do at the end of the semester is review how that went (as it is never exactly to plan!). So, here is the plan at the…
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Curriculum Development Part 8: Week 6 Recap, and Final Thoughts
In my last post, I described Weeks 3, 4, and 5. In this post, I’m back with a recap of Week 6 and some final thoughts on the project. I’ve also placed links to all of the curriculum development posts leading up to this unit at the end of this post if you want to…
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Curriculum Development Part 7: Week 3 Recap, Weeks 4 and 5, Week 6 Planning
In my last post, I reflected upon the second week, and plans for week 3. As I’m posting every other week, the class is going faster than my blog, so this post will cover a week 3 recap, plans for week 4, the week 4 recap, planning week 5, a week 5 recap, and planning…