Foreign Language Teacher S Guide To Active Learning

The easy-to-implement activities and strategies in this book will help middle and high school foreign language teachers enhance their students' success. It shows how to create a classroom in which students can actively experience, experiment and discover a foreign language. It applies brain research, multiple intelligences, alternative assessment, technology and other educational innovations to the foreign language classroom.

Enhance your students’ success and improve the likelihood of retention with the easy-to-implement activities and strategies in this book! Bestselling author Deborah Blaz shows how to create a classroom in which students can actively experience and explore a world language. The new edition features updates in every chapter and incorporates the latest ACTFL standards, more information on teaching with authentic resources, a new chapter on teaching with technology, and additional resources for personalized learning. It is organized to allow you to easily find and pull activities you want to use in your classroom the very next day. You’ll learn how to... mix up your repertoire of activities, games, and exercises to keep students engaged; introduce students to the culture of the language you teach by hosting parties and celebrations; overcome some of the biggest obstacles in the path to fluency, including verb conjugation, using object pronouns, and the subjunctive mood; customize your teaching strategies to accommodate a broader range of talents, skills, and intelligences; implement new assessment strategies to improve verbal skills and reading comprehension; and more! Bonus: Downloadable versions of some of the resources in this book are available on the Routledge website at www.routledge.com/9781032258294 so you can print and distribute them for immediate classroom use.

First Published in 2007. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

While Active Learning Classrooms, or ALCs, offer rich new environments for learning, they present many new challenges to faculty because, among other things, they eliminate the room’s central focal point and disrupt the conventional seating plan to which faculty and students have become accustomed.The importance of learning how to use these classrooms well and to capitalize on their special features is paramount. The potential they represent can be realized only when they facilitate improved learning outcomes and engage students in the learning process in a manner different from traditional classrooms and lecture halls.This book provides an introduction to ALCs, briefly covering their history and then synthesizing the research on these spaces to provide faculty with empirically based, practical guidance on how to use these unfamiliar spaces effectively. Among the questions this book addresses are:• How can instructors mitigate the apparent lack of a central focal point in the space?• What types of learning activities work well in the ALCs and take advantage of the affordances of the room?• How can teachers address familiar classroom-management challenges in these unfamiliar spaces?• If assessment and rapid feedback are critical in active learning, how do they work in a room filled with circular tables and no central focus point?• How do instructors balance group learning with the needs of the larger class?• How can students be held accountable when many will necessarily have their backs facing the instructor?• How can instructors evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching in these spaces?This book is intended for faculty preparing to teach in or already working in this new classroom environment; for administrators planning to create ALCs or experimenting with provisionally designed rooms; and for faculty developers helping teachers transition to using these new spaces.

This textbook serves as a current and comprehensive resource on effective Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for TESOL practitioners in various contexts around the world at various stages in their careers. The practices described by language teachers, teacher educators and professional development providers in this book offer a vision of critical issues to consider when designing and evaluating professional development opportunities. Effective professional development requires careful planning informed by the realities of the local context and the specific needs of the teachers. This textbook is designed to support those who provide professional development opportunities by presenting global perspectives on professional development for a range of teaching contexts at different language levels. Each chapter includes a discussion about the type and source of support available in the given context, as well as a reflection on the challenges that exist for both teachers and CPD providers. These insights serve to help CPD designers and providers as they problematize teacher development opportunities in their context. Each chapter concludes with a synthesis of the strengths of CPD in the local context and a discussion of future directions that target opportunities for transformation and improvement. This volume celebrates teachers, teacher educators and CPD providers around the world. High-impact practices are presented from fifteen countries: Cameroon, Canada, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Qatar, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and the United States of America.

The need to introduce pupils to learning languages at an early stage has been widely acknowledged, with MFL now a core part of the primary curriculum. Fully updated to support busy schools and teachers in planning, teaching and delivering the new primary MFL entitlement for all primary pupils, this user-friendly guide covers significant pedagogical issues and is a key point of reference for all MFL work in the primary classroom. Now fully updated to include substantive writing about planning and introducing the new assessment scale, this book contains: comprehensive coverage of resources and planning; valuable new cross-curricular links; ready-to-use activities that are anchored in research; advice on assessment, SEN and the use of technology; a development of the broader issues of leadership, learning strategies and continuing professional development. Modern Foreign Languages 5–11 will help practitioners to teach MFL as a dynamic, stand-alone subject while retaining a cross-curricular focus. It builds upon core principles of cultural learning, differentiation, language awareness and transferable skills by providing practical strategies that can be easily implemented in your setting. Offering comprehensive guidance on the pedagogy that underpins language teaching and covering everything you’ll need to teach effectively, this book delivers a range of practical ideas and examples of best practice to help integrate effective language learning, teaching and assessment into the curriculum. Written to support the needs of trainees, practising teachers and school leaders as they develop their foreign language provision, this guide is key reading for those seeking to enhance their professional practice in primary MFL pedagogy.

In Understanding the World Language edTPA: Research?Based Policy and Practice, two researchers in the forefront of world language edTPA discuss the new beginning teacher portfolio, including its required elements, federal and state policies concerning teacher evaluation, and research from their own programs. Higher education faculty members and language teacher preparation program coordinators who would like to better understand edTPA requirements and gain suggestions for necessary programmatic changes will find this book of interest. The book is composed of eight chapters. The authors begin by describing edTPA and how it became a national trend to assess beginning teacher ability. In Chapter 2, the authors present ideas about curricular changes that may need to occur in traditional world language teacher education programs, as well as suggestions to assist teacher candidates as they begin to develop their portfolios. Afterward, the authors discuss the context for learning (Chapter 3) and they begin with assessment, moving to planning, and then to instruction (Chapters 4, 5, 6). In each chapter, the authors discuss the work sample that teacher candidates must create, an analysis of a high?scoring portfolio, and steps to stimulate teacher candidates’ professional thinking. In Chapter 7, the authors present activities for the methods classroom. In the final chapter, the authors provide a critical analysis of edTPA, in general, and the world language edTPA, in particular. Understanding the World Language edTPA: Research?Based Policy and Practice provides readers with a much?needed guide to inducting teacher candidates into the new portfolio requirements, while helping higher education faculty make appropriate curricular changes to accommodate edTPA.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.