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This week’s reflection deals with the textbook analysis questions we looked at in class this past week. I am working with a fourth edition copy of Chez Nous: Branché Sur le Monde Francophone by Valdman, Pons, and Scullen. I found that of the thirty questions asked, this book got 12 Yeses and 18 No’s. Overall, I think these questions tell me that this particular textbook does not do as much as it could to help students interpret texts. Most of the exercises tend to check comprehension or ask students to compare subject matter to their own experience.  It did not do much to help the students work through the text and get the most meaning out of it. Some of these shortfalls can, however, be supplemented by teachers. For example, even if the textbook doesn’t ask students to look at the title and pictures of a text before the reading, teachers can do it in class. They could also write up those questions and assign them as homework to accompany the reading. Overall, I don’t think that these problems are too serious if a teacher knows how to teach around them. They might cause a problem, however, in a larger class when students may have less access to teachers and have to rely more on themselves and their book to learn.

These questions are different from other questions one could ask about textbooks in that they are test to see how well a textbook teaches students to approach a text. People could also ask questions about the authenticity of texts, how much vocabulary they include, or how many grammar drills there are.

Since I have already reflected on the UT Austin module on technology in language teaching (see last week’s post for my reflection entry), this week I thought I would look at some of the blogs listed on the syllabus and the elements of technology we have already used in our class and examine some of their positive and negative aspects. From the UT Austin module we got a lot of examples of things that we could use in the classroom, but due to the nature of the modules, we didn’t really get to see them in action. After having participated in many technology-based exercises in class, I thought it might be good to talk about what did or did not work, and what that technology use has added to my learning.

First of all, I think the use of blogs in this class has been a great way to create discussion and enable us (the students) to engage with the material we are working with. For example, sometimes Dr. Rings will begin class with an excerpt from a student’s blog that she found particularly thought provoking or perceptive. This then serves as a springboard for a genuine discussion of the topic in class. It always feels to me, that when students are able to ask and answer our own questions as a group, we (I) somehow have more of a role in our (my) education. It makes us (me) (an) active participant(s) in learning. I also like the fact that the blogs are available on the internet 24/7 (barring technical difficulties) so that the discussion can continue outside of the classroom. For example, if someone has a really interesting idea that they write about in their blog that they then bring to a discussion in class, if I come across something in my reading next Tuesday that relates back to that discussion, I can go back to that person’s blog that afternoon and engage them in continued discussion. The classroom schedule no longer puts a time limit on what we are learning.

Blogs are also a great way to share information and lessen the burden of on teachers and individual students. I was clicking through some of the blogs that Dr. Rings emailed to us, and while I don’t read German, I could tell that there was a large amount of information on the blog http://camille4321.wordpress.com/ that incorporated images as well as text. In one of my graduate level French classes, each student is responsible for presenting a topic and leading discussion on the various works that we read, that way everyone is not required to look up everything, and the teacher is not the center of the classroom for the entire 3 hour period. A blog would be another great way for students to share what they have learned with other students and increase overall learning. For example, if everyone kept up a blog on a certain aspect of 18^th century French culture and literature, but the end of the semester, everyone would know a little bit about everything and a lot about some things and they would also still be responsible for their own learning.

One negative aspect of blogging in the classroom could be the possibility to misuse the technology and abuse one’s classmates. In our class, we seem to be a fairly mature collection of adults who know how to respectfully disagree with our peers. In the hands of high-schoolers or middle-schoolers issues of cyber-bullying might arise, as we discussed last week in class. This could discourage students who have valid but non-conventional points of view from writing what they think in order to avoid ridicule from peers. I think that in this setting, teachers may want to exclude certain activities from blogging until students are mature enough to deal with it.

This week I will be responding to Dr. Orlando Kelm’s module on incorporating technology into the foreign language teaching. I found it interesting because technology is such an integral part of life for students (at least my age and younger) yet, until recently, it has been treated as a teacher’s adversary in most of the classes I have ever taken. It was very refreshing to see Dr. Kelm embrace iphone apps and different kinds of technology in the learning process, as opposed to simply associating technology with amusement and banning it from the classroom. I am going to discuss some of my favorite of Dr. Kelm’s points and then discuss how they could be incorporated into my teaching going forward.

One of Dr. Kelm’s first points was that technology could contribute to “time on task”, or the amount of time spent by students working with the second language. He used the example of a website called “Portuguese Communication Exercises” that had clips of native-speakers of Portuguese that students can work with. I know that at UTA, lover level French classes have an online lab component that does include some native-speaker audio components, though I have yet to discover any kind of video components. From time to time my professor of record will supplement this lack of videos with Youtube videos that she can find relating to the topic at hand.  As someone who spends more time on Youtube than she should, after this lesson, I thought that maybe a Youtube assignment might not be a bad idea. For more advanced students, you could have them search for videos on a certain topic to work with, or for beginning students just having them watch a video picked by an instructor. The only trouble with this kind of activity is that there are not always school-appropriate Youtube videos for every subject in a foreign language class, but it would be a start.

I also liked Dr. Kelm’s discussion on “chunks and scripts” and how technology can be used to teach students how native speakers expect to speak to each other. He used the example from his own life of going to the bakery in a Latin American country and not really knowing how to negotiate the exchange that he wanted to make. He then used the website Conversa brasiliera to show examples of video footage of native-speakers of Portuguese interacting in every-day situations. This, I feel, would be very useful to students of all levels, especially if they ever intend to visit or study in a country where their second language is spoken. Aside from teaching useful grammar and vocabulary, this would also be an opportunity to teach students some aspects of culture as well. For example, students could observe use of personal space between people, pace of conversation, and registers of speech, just to name a few. These kinds of resources may be harder to find, however. Some textbooks do include dialogues with their digital content, but all the materials I have every worked with/been subjected to seemed scripted to me. I think that if I wanted to incorporate some kind of footage like this in my teaching, and I wanted to make it very authentic, I would have to make some of it myself, which would take a lot of time and preparation. This, I think would be something to look into in the long-term.

Overall, I really liked this module, because it addresses a topic that is particularly pertinent to my generation. I think being able to incorporate technology into teaching and learning languages will make it more accessible to students, and more enjoyable as well.

This week I would like to address Dr. Thomas Garza’s module on “Culture” found on the University of Texas Foreign Language Teaching Methods website. After recapping some of his high points, I would like to discuss how I have seen culture presented to myself and other students of French and then expand upon how I feel that I could contribute to teaching culture in the future.

Some of the more exciting points that I thought Dr. Garza made were: 1) the importance of cultural competence to communication in a language, 2) the importance of integrating culture into every activity possible, in order to maximize efficient use of class time, and 3) the difference between “Culture” with a big “C”, and “culture” with a little “c”.

In my own learning experience, culture seemed to be presented as “interesting tidbits” or “fun trivia” apart from grammar and vocabulary. It was actually always my favorite part of class because it was a both a break from “language” and an opportunity to learn about people, as opposed to verbs. Cultural “faux pas” always made for some amusing comic-relief in class. I don’t think that I personally began to pay attention to the cultural appropriateness of certain words and modes of communication until I was actually living in the target culture and it became of vital importance to me. I feel like in the class for which I am a TA here at UTA there is a much more concerted effort by my professor of record to include culture in vocabulary and grammar discussion and grammar and vocabulary in culture discussion. This may, however, be due to the time constraints that teachers here face. As a high school student and lower-level undergraduate student I have been particularly fortunate to have had between five and six hours of French class per week, compared to the standard 3 here at UTA.  Therefore, I have not experienced the wild time-crunch that exists here, but I have seen it in my TA class.

Finally, the difference between “Culture” and “culture” was not one that I had ever seen made before, but it makes sense to me and I like it. Those who object are welcome to provide evidence to the contrary, but based on my own experience, I have found that “culture” with a little “c” tends to be taught (when it is explicitly taught) in the lower levels of foreign language instruction, and “Culture” with a big “C” tends to be mostly taught at the higher levels of foreign language instruction. What I mean is that day-to-day “survival” culture is taught to people looking to “survive” in the language or culture: For example, how to purchase a train ticket, or how to buy stamps for a letter would all be small “c” culture items that one might find in the first few semesters of L2 instruction. Big “C” “Culture includes ideas, events, and objects that inform a culture’s view of the world and/or themselves. This makes me think of “The Cannon” that is introduced to upper-level undergraduates and then terrorizes graduate students as they continue their second language education. It seems to me that big “C” Culture is part of what needs to be known to be “educated” or “well-read” in a culture.

I readily agree with the fact the cultural competence is essential for effective communication in a language and that culture should be integrated into all parts of class. That is simply a question of careful lesson planning. What I question is how and when to introduce different aspects of culture. Yes, it is good for students to get a broader view of a second culture by understanding what artwork is important to them, but for students who are only looking to use their French to vacation in Paris or Quebec, is that really a practical use of their time? Would they not be better off focusing on more down-to-earth concerns such as locating bathrooms and libraries in foreign countries? Or, if they are only in class to fulfill a requirement, would they be more interested in the art, history, and religion(s) that inform that culture?



This week I would like to respond to Dr. Rafael Salaberry’s grammar module on the University if Texas at Austin Foreign Language Teaching Methods website.  I found it particularly interesting in light of the reading on communicative competencies and proficiency standards I have been doing for the teaching practicum class French GTA 1’s are requited to take. In my reading of the book Teaching Language in Context (Hadley 2000) I found that there was a lengthy discussion of what was included in  “communicative competencies” and what role grammar education was to play in teaching foreign languages. In his module Dr. Salaberry got into topics not covered in the chapter I read in TLIC, such as defining what constituted “grammar” in the first place, and how best to teach it. I am going to apply these ideas and theories to my most recent teaching experience as a TA: teaching my first grammar lesson on the French pronoun complements lui and leur (“him/her” and “them” respectively).

Setting aside the issue of proficiency standards and the multiple definitions of communicative competences, I would like to look at the place grammar lessons hold in the language classroom I am in.  Overall, I would say that grammar is given slightly more weight than vocabulary in the classroom and both are given more weight than culture, although culture points are regularly discussed in class. From Dr. Salaberry’s explanation, I believe grammar is taught explicitly in this classroom, and I have observed that large grammar points are usually taught in individual lessons devoted solely to explaining grammar. For example, my lesson on lui and leur was entirely devoted to explaining the use of these two pronoun complements, and then guiding students through activities that enabled them to use them correctly. Vocabulary was reinforced during these exercises by having students recognize and re-use previously introduced vocabulary in the exercises, but this was not the main goal of the lesson.

I found Norris and Ortega’s findings that explicit grammar instruction is more effective than implicit grammar instruction very interesting, and I agreed with them. As I thought about those findings I wondered how feasible it would really be for students on a four-semester schedule to learn grammar implicitly. There is one element of implicit learning, however, that I found interesting, and that was a question on a worksheet that the students discussed where students were asked to look at a certain verb form in Spanish and hypothesize how it worked. After watching that clip I wished that I had written my lesson plan in a way that let students look at how lui and leur were used in sentences and ask them if they noticed any patterns, or if they thought they could tell me how they might be used. The week before we had covered the pronoun complements le / la / les which functioned as direct objects and followed many of the same basic placement rules as lui and leur.  I felt like I had done a lot of talking for that lesson, and it would have been another way to open up the floor to students.

Additionally, I would like to incorporate more samples of authentic native speech into my lessons to help students perceive the differences between written text and spoken text. I found that when I fist went abroad and attempted to speak French with native speakers, I had to adjust my language that was based primarily on what I absorbed from literary texts. My first day with my host family, my host sister told me that I spoke my more properly than they did and she found it rather amusing. Granted, I know I cannot teach people everything Americans ever say or do incorrectly in France (for even I have not managed to make that many mistakes), but if I can save one person from at least one mistake I will consider myself as having been of use to others.

This week I would like to address the points brought up in Chapter 10 of Lee and Van Patten regarding listening. The first point that Lee and Van Patten made, and then took great pains to stress, was that listening was not a passive activity. According to them, listeners must actively sift through the auditory input they receive and decide what is worth deciphering and what can be ignored. I agree with this point of view and suspect that listening is only a passive activity in the foreign language classroom when teachers let it be a passive activity. When teachers make listening comprehension an important element of class participation the portion of auditory stimulus provided in the classroom students decide is important enough to decipher increases. Lee and Van Patten, for example, suggest doing importance class announcements in the second language to increase students’ incentives to listen carefully.

I have found from personal experience that frequent comprehension checks encourage increased focus on listening. As a third-year undergraduate I had the opportunity to study abroad in France and take a course on Marketing in a French university.  This particular marketing course was part of a core curriculum for all of the students at this business school, so every first-year student at that school was enrolled in that course. The structure of that class was to have smaller lecture classes that sometimes included group-work punctuated by larger lecture classes in an auditorium. Even though this was a sort of passive second language learning situation, I found that I worked much harder to understand what was being said in French when I knew that I might be asked a comprehension question in the smaller classes than in the larger lecture classes where it would be nearly impossible for a professor to pick on individual students from the audience.

Lee and Van Patten also discussed how students are sometimes reticent to admit to not understanding a listening exercise. By tactfully asking students what they understood during or after a reading you can also help correct misunderstandings that have occurred.  By engaging in pre-listening activities, I think you have to potential to avert major misunderstandings before they happen. Lee and Van Patten talked in chapter 10 about some pre-listening activities that teachers can do with a class that, to me, greatly resembled some of the pre-reading activities we have already covered in this course. This caused me to wonder if most of the techniques instructors use in teaching reading could crossover and be used to teach listening as well. For me, reading is like a visual form of listening. When I see a word written on a piece of paper, I can hear the sound of the word in my head. Last week we dealt with literature as a subset of reading, and the importance of selecting texts that are accessible and meaningful to students. I wonder if any of this came into play in selecting listening “texts”. In the class I TA for example, the professor makes an effort to show YouTube videos from different parts of the francophone world, thus exposing students to different accents and ways of communicating in French. I found it interesting that in Lee and Van Patten no mention of accents or “levels” of speech like the Rings article that we read for this week, although this may fall under the category of “language standards” that are left to individual teachers’ discretion.

This week I will be responding to the excerpts from Gillian Lazar’s Litterature and Language Teaching : A Guide for Teachers and Traniners available on google books, and the website on “Teaching  Foreign Language Literature”. To me this week’s discussion of literature instruction seems to be an extension of last week’s discussion on reading instruction. Many of the issues brought up in the “Teaching Foreign Language Literature” article dealt with helping students through the work, describing some of the same techniques that Dr. Swaffer outlined on her teaching module.  In this reflection piece, I would like to concentrate on the issues specific to working with literature as opposed to reading in general.

The first issue the articles both brought up that I thought was important, was the accessibility of literature for students. The “Teaching Foreign Language Literature” article emphasized making the article accessible in terms of language comprehension so as to not discourage students from reading literature in a second language. In the Lazar excerpts, the author brought up accessibility in terms of relevance of literary texts for L2 learners. She used the examples of students from Kenya and from the Caribbean reading European-English literature receiving a view of their own culture that conflicted with their daily reality (16). She also mentioned the importance of selecting works that engage students by drawing them into a dramatic plot, or raise interesting or difficult questions (15).

As a student myself, I can personally attest to the importance of making texts accessible to students. I will take my experience with Rhinocéros a play written by Eugène Ionesco, and the first full-length “grown-up” work that I ever read in French. I have to give my high school French teacher a lot of credit because she took an absurdist play about people turning into rhinoceroses and helped a class of high school seniors work through not only new vocabulary and grammar, but also themes such as conformity and critical thinking. She (or the school district) first selected a work that took place in a time period and culture that students would be somewhat familiar with. They knew, for instance, that all the students who came from their school system would have spent and entire unit in eighth grade covering the Holocaust and World War II as well as another brief review of the topic in a high school world history class. The parallels between characters progressively turning into bellowing rhinoceroses in the play to people conforming to fascist ideas in Nazi Germany would not be that hard for most students to see. It was a subject that we knew enough about so that we could make logical guesses about what was happening, even if some of the higher-level vocabulary and grammar escaped us. Secondly, she created a list of new vocabulary, defining words from the text that students would not necessarily know, so that we would not get lost in our dictionaries as we read and become frustrated with the assignment. Finally, she (or the district) selected a work that had a lot of action and moved fairly quickly so that it would hold our attention. Reading that someone in the story had turned into an actual rhino kept me turning pages to find out why, even if I missed what some of the sentences meant.  Usually she would help us through the harder sentences in class the next day anyways, so we didn’t have to worry about understanding every single sentence in the play as we read.

Unlike other classes I have taken, and other works I have read, this play Rhinocéros didn’t feel like something I had to “get through”. When we had a background context for the piece and a feeling that it related to something that had happened in our history and could happen again, it seemed like we had a vested interest in our understanding and discussion of the text. In turn, I think that students thinking and having opinions about a text can help classes move away from the Atlas classroom dynamic to a more open discussion of what is being learned.

This week I will be responding to Dr. Swaffer’s UT foreign language teaching module on helping students learn to read in a foreign language. I found this module especially compelling as I felt that it really began to answer the questions I asked at the end of my first week’s response writing regarding how teachers can practically move away from the “Atlas” classroom setup. I will begin with my impressions of Dr. Swaffer’s thoughts on teaching reading and then conclude with my findings on the Atlas question.

To me, it seemed that the overarching goal of Dr. Swaffer’s approach to teaching reading in a foreign language is to help students to move away from the point of view that “I must understand every single word in every sentence to understand what I am reading” to “I can understand what I am reading if I can find enough words that I understand”.  To do this the teacher has to slow down the students who want to delve right into the text and to show them how to approach the L2 text with specifically structured activities. I have seen this done in the class that I TA and can attest to its efficacy, although at the time I did not quite understand why it worked.

In the very first chapter of the beginning French class I TA, the professor of record took the students through a reading exercise similar to what Dr. Swaffer prescribes in her module. The theme of the chapter was family and family vocabulary, and one of the authentic texts presented in the textbook was a series of French announcements: one for a birth, one for a marriage, and a third for a PACS (a civil union).  The professor began by asking what the texts were about, and at first no one volunteered an answer. So, she had the students look at the pictures on the announcements and look for English cognates and they came to the conclusion that texts were announcements. Then she had them look more closely at the texts to see who was getting married/united and who had been born, when it had happened, and any other details they could pick up. After a third run-through of the material, students had a strong enough understanding of the material to move on and have a discussion about marriage/family norms in France and how they compared to marriage/family norms in the US. Having been guided through activities like this myself as a language learner, I didn’t think much about it until I read this chapter. As a student I had always thought of these activities as a sort of “pre-torture”, “torture”, and “post-torture” series of activities. I always just wanted to plow headfirst into the text, pictures and cognates be darned! I would usually get through with very little information gained and then have to go back and go through these steps anyways. I’m not sure where this impetus to “get through” a text comes from, but I almost wonder if sharing the logic and the science behind these exercises with students might help them see these kinds of exercises, not as torture or punishment, but as a way to help them get more out of foreign language texts and to help them move away from the “one-word-at-a-time” mentality.

It also struck me as I was going through this module, to what extent teachers function in this situation as guides rather than founts of knowledge. I particularly liked Dr. Swaffer’s statement: “I can’t teach you German, but I can teach you how to learn German”. In this instance students are responsible for the amount of information they learn, not the teacher. A teacher cannot read for a student. They can only show them how to get the most out of what they read. I think this is what I was looking for in the Atlas chapter as a concrete example of how to remove the burden of labor from teachers in the classroom. In these sorts of activities, teachers merely provide the structure for students to go through the process of learning on their own.

This week I would like to address the UT teaching module on vocabulary instruction. I found this module very interesting and relevant because in the class for which I am a teaching assistant, most of the material I am responsible for presenting is vocabulary. I am hoping that Dr. Guilloteau’s explanation of how student learn vocabulary will make my presentations more effective in the future.

The first point that Dr. Guilloteau made that very much impressed me was the importance of repetition in the process of vocabulary acquisition. The fact that students need to use a vocabulary word sixteen times (on average) before they have it down showed me part of what wasn’t working for my class that I TA. So, far I have presented vocabulary lessons on invariable adjectives, question words, and school subjects with varying degrees of success. I have found that pairing visuals with the written word on a power point helps with explanation and comprehension but, retention seems to be an issue. Directly after presenting the vocabulary, students usually have little trouble participating in simple input-based activities, but two days later the professor has to go back and give them mini-review and it sometimes feels as though I hadn’t presented anything at all. Granted, the recommended sixteen uses of a word probably don’t need to be within the first twenty minutes after its being introduced, but I do think that if I were to have the students use words four or five times during my teaching segments instead of just once or twice, they might be able to better remember the words next class period.

Another point that Dr. Guilloteau made that I had never considered was the gradation of exercises from input-based to output-based as learners work with vocabulary. It is something that makes a lot of sense when you stop to think about the logic, but not anything I had ever noticed on my own. After listening to this module I went back and looked at the textbook that UTA uses for beginning French, Chez Nous published by Prentice Hall, and the exercises that come after the initial vocabulary page do follow this pattern of input-based to out-put based. The exercises start with simple questions with formulaic answers based on the meanings of the different words, and later they ask questions requiring students to create their own sentences and communicate their own original answers. I think that this is going to be very helpful to me in terms of gauging comprehension during my presentations and working on those vocabulary repetitions. I suspect another one of my problems during my presentations was that my questions tended to be a little too output-oriented, and my hypothesis for this week’s next lesson is that if I am very careful to only ask input-based questions, I might get more participation during my vocabulary presentations. Something like (in reference to school subject vocabulary), “Do you study math?”  or “(While pointing to a picture of a student with a lab coat and test tube) Is he studying history or biology?” might be easier to deal with than, “What is your class schedule like?”

Overall, I think this module has left me feeling excited about teaching vocabulary. I do agree with Dr. Guilloteau that sometimes vocabulary does get shortchanged in the classroom where the emphasis is on points of grammar. As we discussed last week, binary lists of vocabulary can be dangerous and/or misleading and I think more time spent working with vocabulary in the classroom is one way to avoid this pitfall. As the Rings article showed us this week, simply relying on cognates such as “Cliquen” in German and “cliques” in English can lead students astray, even if the words mean generally the same thing on the surface. By giving students a better understanding of vocabulary in a foreign language, I think teachers set students up for more success in communicating later on in their language careers.

September 27, 2010

This week’s UT module on pragmatics and the two Rings articles we read this week both dealt with the difference between intended meaning and perceived meaning in communication. I found this discussion very interesting both from a learner’s perspective and a teacher’s perspective because as a learner, I did not have any significant exposure to pragmatics until I had reached a more advanced level of proficiency in my second language. I agree with the students in Dr. Koike’s class that students can be taught pragmatics within the context of beginning lessons, and that pragmatics can enhance their ability to communicate with native speakers of a foreign language.

In my own experience learning French, I did not really learn much about the pragmatics of the language in my beginning classes.  We did, as most students of French do, learn the difference between the tu/vous (informal singular 2^nd person vs. formal singular or plural 2^nd person) and when and with whom it would be appropriate to use each of these forms. We also learned stock phrases for politely asking where things were, or how to find things. What we did not cover were things, as the module with Dr. Koike pointed out, how to follow up with this information. I very much identified with the anecdote of the students in Spain not knowing what to say to their Señoras as they ate their dinner. When I lived with a host family in France, I could usually understand most of what was being said at the dinner table, but was never quite sure how to add my input to a conversation. I also felt the same way about going to the post office, the grocery store, or doing any of the other daily tasks I had to carry out in France. I knew exactly how to say, “How much does a stamp cost?” or “Where are the lentil beans?” but I never learned how to open a conversation in French. In fact, one of the things I missed most about the United States while I was away was knowing how to ask for the information in the appropriate manner. The anecdote about the young German student in the U.S. American grocery store in the Rings article reminded me very strongly of the experiences I had in the French post office. I considered it a personal victory when I finally learned to send letters without getting the stink-eye from the postal clerk. It struck me that growing up in our native cultures, most of us have parents or caregivers that take us along on errands and allow us to observe them carry out these mundane tasks for about 10 or 12 years before we are expected to start performing them ourselves. When you are learning a second language in a classroom, you do not have the benefit of these thousands of observations to show you how people behave in a grocery store, for example. It would seem only logical (to me) that if a teacher should be responsible for teaching students to speak and understand a second language that he or she should also be responsible for teaching the students to use it in a socially acceptable manner. After all, the point of learning a language is not so that you can have another way to communicate an idea to a person who would understand it just as well in your native tongue. The point of being able to speak another language is to be able to communicate with persons from cultures different from one’s own.

As a teacher then, I would make sure to stay away from binary explanations of vocabulary and grammar, as these do not serve students who later go on to communicate with native speakers. A better approach might be to pay attention to opportunities presented by the material in the lessons themselves to explain pragmatic points of interest as they come up. I like the idea of pair work and interaction with native speakers presented in the pragmatics module as they both force students to go beyond the “I say something, you say something, done” nature of dialogue activities.