Tag: curriculum development
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Curriculum Development: Event Planning Take 2
Last year, I blogged about the creation of our party planning unit in second year Arabic, including some of the challenges. Since we are on the verge of creating the second round of this unit, I thought I would give an update on how it is going this time (short version: much better!). First, we…
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Learning from Indigenous Language Revitalization Programs
This semester, I’m teaching the capstone class for the Languages majors at my university, and we recently finished a unit on Indigenous Language Revitalization. While this is an important unit for a Languages Capstone Class, it is not my area of specialization, so I was excited to learn more along with my students. While Indigenous…
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Telecollaboration in the Language Classroom: Challenges and Benefits
Although telecollaboration is one of my research contexts, I realized I’ve never written a post about it. So, here is a long overdue discussion of telecollaboration, the projects I’ve been involved in, and the lessons I’ve learned.
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Reflecting with Students
As is probably clear to readers of this blog, I think reflection is a crucial skill for learning and teaching. I’ve discussed making time and space for reflection as a language teacher, and ethnographic projects as a way to encourage reflection during study abroad. In this post, I’ll discuss reflecting with students, another valuable practice.
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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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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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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…
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Curriculum Development Part 6: Week 2 Review, Planning Week 3
In my last post, I reflected upon the first week, and plans for the second one. In this post, I’m reflecting upon week 2 and describing planning for week 3.
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Curriculum Development Part 4: Unit Plan and Week 1 of Party Planning
As I mentioned in my previous curriculum development posts, this year in our Intermediate Arabic classroom we are moving away from the textbook and designing our own units informed by genre-based approaches to language learning. We are concluding our unit on housing, and starting our unit on planning an end of the year party. This…