Teaching Culture

In my view, culture is the collection of beliefs, customs and arts of a particular society or group that contributes to the identity of that society or group. Things such as religion, perspectives, arts, literature, music, traditions and food all fall under these three categories. They are the three categories that essentially shape what a culture consists of. It is incredibly important to teach the culture of the target language so that students can best understand it and think about the other viewpoints or customs that this target culture might have. Teaching culture opens students up to new ideas and traditions and exposes them to things that they perhaps would have never had the chance to experience; since some students may not ever have the chance to study abroad and see the target culture for themselves, it is incredibly important to bring the culture to the students as much as we possibly can by incorporating it into lessons. It is definitely possible to teach culture in the classroom setting; some of the best experiences in my foreign languages classes that I can remember are the days when we would spend an entire class period on culture discussing festivals, foods, customs or the music of the target culture. Not only did it create a more relaxed atmosphere as we got to enjoy food, music and speaking the target language in a relaxed setting, but it encouraged students to ask questions about the customs or festivities that we were studying. Of course, relaxed culture courses like this cannot happen every day but I think incorporating classes such as these creates a great, relaxed atmosphere for students. The limitations of teaching culture are that students could perhaps be unwilling to accept the differences of customs and traditions of the target culture and may not take an interest in it; however, I believe that it is up to the teacher to create an interesting and interactive lesson incorporating the target culture into the foreign language classroom. Culture should be taught in a way that doesn't make it seem random to the lesson plan. I have had countless teachers who would simply throw in a song by Juanes or Shakira and mention that they were from Colombia and consider that their culture lesson, or just mention Dia de los Muertos around Halloween. In order to make the culture seem more appealing to the students, the teacher must make sure that the lesson is not random and is planned out well. One of my Spanish teachers in high school always made it a point to bring up cultural issues such as immigration or elections happening in a country that spoke the target language and asking us our viewpoints on it. That was one of the most effective ways of teaching culture and I think it is something that should definitely be incoporated into the classroom, especially at a higher level of the foreign language.

Discussion #6: Teaching Culture

In your view, what is culture? Is it important to teach L2 culture? Why? Is it possible to teach L2 culture in the classroom setting? What are the limitations? How should culture be learned or taught? Use examples to support your points of view. 

Free Topic: iPads in the classroom

During my first classroom observation, I went to my local high school which has started integrating iPads into the curriculum.  As part of the program, incoming freshmen, along with sophomores, have received new iPad 2s.  The idea behind this new curriculum is that students need to adapt to a new world of education and business in which technology is paramount.  As of now, although the students have their iPads already, only a certain number of classes are using the new iPad/online curriculum.  The schools are rolling out in phases this new curriculum first as a relief to the taxpayers, and second to ensure that the new curriculum is tested slowly and carefully. 
In the class I observed, I witnessed one of the first Spanish classes to use the new iPad system.  The teacher I observed is the only Spanish teacher using the iPads, and one of only three foreign language teachers using the iPads.  Because of this, she told me that the new system can be overwhelming at times.  She does not have the resources she is used to because other teachers are not using the system yet.  From what I saw, I would say that the iPad system is working at about 33% efficiency right now. 
I can see the benefits of this system because it allows instant feedback and interactive learning for the students.  It allows for the teacher to provide the students with their own technological world of learning, and it allows the students to explore technology early in their education.  Not only does the system make it easier for the students, but eventually I think the teachers will become accustomed to online work making up a vast majority of the coursework. 
However, I think this system could be doomed to fail. I did see some positive aspects of the iPad system in my observation.  Students seemed to like the technology and one student even bragged to me about how his class was one of the first to use the iPads so much.  But with all of the upside, I did see some drawbacks.  One glaring problem with the iPads now is that there does not seem to be any way to regulate or eliminate time-wasting.  As I sat at the back of the class, one student was on her facebook and Twitter feeds while another played a racing game.  Another problem, at least in the class I observed, is the lack of "traditional" (used loosely) teaching methods; i.e. authentic materials, comprehensible input, students production.  As I stated in class, the teacher told me that she only uses about 20% target language right now, and only hopes to improve to 50-60% target language usage by the end of the year; and I think this is because of the technological aspect of the curriculum.
So, my thought process here goes two ways: (1) this system really is beneficial and the only problem now is that there is simply not enough data to consider it a success yet; or (2) this system is not working because it is not taking into account the attention spans and interests of the students, and the lack of "traditional" teaching is hurting the students.  What do you think of this kind of system? Do you think my observations about the shortcomings are valid?

Free topic: A well rounded learner?

Lately, I've been thinking about my own, and others, experiences as an L2 learner. It seems that I haven't really met any student who is really great at all three aspects of the language: speaking, reading, and writing. And it makes me wonder why that is. Why can some students be really great writers and readers, but be awful at speaking? Or students who have an amazing oral proficiency, but struggle to construct a logical argument in essay form? Many of the language theories that we have studied and I would say the overwhelming majority of topics that we have covered in class have been about oral proficiency. Oral proficiency is great for when students have experiences with native speakers whether it be face to face or while using technology. But I feel that we have spent very little time talking about reading or writing skills. How do you even go about these skills? In high school, there was a student a few years above me who was a Spanish native speaker, yet was taking classes in the language because she was unable to write well. Another friend is a Greek native speaker, and cannot read or write even as close to how well he can speak. So this leads me to ask, if we focus so much on learning an L2 in the same ways in which people learn their L1s, won't we have students who are great at oral proficiency, but lack in other areas. I believe that, as we have most seen in our language learning classes, it is important to provide transcripts when using authentic listening activities. It is also important to have students practice their writing skills as well as listening. I think that ways in which we can do that are having students read passages and use the vocab from said passages to write a summary. I think that, as much as we all believe that oral proficiency is important, all the other stuff is too. I think that if students are being exposed to a lot of native language authentic materials, it is very, very important to have a transcript, in order to see how things are written. A lot of the models for learning that we have talked about seem to exclude these and focus only on learning through auditory skills, including Gattegno’s Silent Way approach and Asher’s Total Physical Response method.

Another question that comes to hand it at what point do we start teaching each of these: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. I think that it is important to start off with speaking. These should be supplemented by vocabulary and grammar exercises in order to expand what you know and construct new forms of speech. I think that reading and writing can be the hardest to teach because they require a fair bit of vocabulary work and knowing how grammar works at its basic levels, but universal grammar can be used for this. I think that when each of these is introduced really depends on what the aims for the classes are. If you are trying to get your students to develop survival knowledge of the language, then oral proficiency is the key. If you want your students to be progressive in their language learning, then I think that there needs to be an even focus on all of the aspects, using many different teaching styles.

Free Choice Topic: Krashen's theories and acquistion

The topic that I really wanted to discuss for this week’s blog entry is the language learning theories that have been developed by Stephen Krashen. His hypotheses and theories have been the most intriguing concepts that we have learning about so far this semester and after watching the short video clip of him explaining his research, I thought that it seemed so relevant to real-life language learning.

One reason why I wanted to bring this particular topic up again was because Krashen’s theories reminded me a lot of my language learning experience while I was in Granada last semester. Obviously we had to live with a Spanish host family for five months there and I would say that I was “lucky” enough to get a family that didn’t speak any English so I had no choice but to learn the language. According to Krashen’s acquisition-learning hypothesis, the acquisition of a language is a subconscious process that happens when the learner is not even aware that it is happening, nor do they know when they have acquired new knowledge. I believe that this experience happened to me while I was living in Granada when I started noticing that I was using new vocabulary and phrases that I had only heard from my host family around the house that apparently I had picked up on. I never asked them what it meant or how to use it in a sentence, I just knew it and it came out of my mouth during conversation. This phenomenon is something that normally doesn’t happen in schools and in Krashen’s research, he talks a lot about how acquisition of the target language requires meaningful interaction during which the learner is focusing on the meaning of something rather than the grammatical aspects of it. He also distinguishes language learning and language acquisition; language learning involves formal instruction, which is less effective than the process of subconscious acquisition. This theory is so interesting to me because, as I stated above, it happened to me several times while I was living in Granada, but also I’d like to know how we can make sure this kind of acquisition happens in the classroom.

I think one way that we can attempt to teach for acquisition rather than learning would be to speak in the target language 100% of the time regardless if our students are at that level of proficiency. Just from hearing the language constantly (in an hour class period), students will eventually become more comfortable hearing the language and may have an easier time reproducing the language orally and on paper. Reaching this level of competence will probably be frustrating to many students but I think that using the target language all the time is the closest way that we can be immersed in that languages’ culture without leaving the traditional classroom and the most effective way we can achieve language acquisition as opposed to learning. 

Free Topic: Engagement in the Classroom

One thing that has concerned me so far during my observations and during my internship experience is engagement in the classroom.  What is going to make students interested in learning Spanish and what is going to keep them paying attention in class?  I do not think that these questions have easy answers.  For instance, we have to take into account all of the students that do not want to take another language, but are in class simply because it satisfies some kind of requirement.  This is especially true for the lower level classes.  Through my experiences so far I have a made a few observations.

First, students are more engaged if they are  presented with activities than with lecture, but there are still many students who do not participate.  A teacher can present a class with as many activities as possible, but how do you interest the students who simply do not care?  Furthermore, some moments of explanation are completely necessary.  I do not think that a class can be all activity based simply because some rules or concepts will have to be explained.  Many teachers I have observed to very well with keeping a balance, yet in lower levels sometimes about a third of the class does not care at all.  I think this is one of those challenges that teachers will have to experiment with for years and they still might not figure it out.  To me it would seem that the most you can do it vary your instruction enough so that the majority of students do not become disengaged.  I am not sure yet what to do for the rest, but I do think differentiation is a good place to start.

Second, I have some concerns with complete instruction in the target language, and those concerns arise from the engagement factor.  Now I believe that in an ideal world all classes would be taught in the target language, but we do not live in that world.  I think that complete instruction in the target language is acceptable for level three and above because those are students that have chosen to continue learning the target language.  Speaking and understanding the language will be engagement enough for them.  Personally, as I went on to more advanced classes I began to like Spanish classes more than anything else because it challenged me to understand everything in another language.  My brain was working overtime.  I think that this is the case with the students who continue their studies.  My concern then, is for those students in level one or two; the students that do not want to learn and cannot be made interested in the subject to a certain extent.  I think that if lower levels are taught completely in the target language that we may create more of the apathetic students.  That is, if students are overwhelmed from day one with another language they might choose to check out entirely.  Those students who might have decided to continue with the language would deem it worthless because it was too difficult.  I support the use of the target language, but perhaps more use of the native language might be necessary in introductory courses.  I am not certain about any of this, but I am looking for solutions to the issue of engagement.  I think it could potentially take an entire career to figure out.

Free Topic: Using Target Language in the Classroom

A topic that is very interesting to me about teaching to the target language is solely using the target language in the classroom.  I think that this is a huge aspect of teaching a foreign language that teachers often overlook. Most of the time, teachers assume that before they can really teach their students in the target language, they need to teach them that language, but in reality it is the other way around. 

After doing a few observations in foreign language classrooms, I have had the opportunity to see many different teaching styles.  In addition to this, I, as most prospective foreign language teachers, have attended many of foreign language classrooms where I have been the student.  This is important to remember because often times, we based our preferred method of teaching not only on our own personal preferred learning style, but also on the impact that certain methods have had on us that previous teachers have used. 

I can see that for both the teacher and the students, using solely the target language can be overwhelming in the beginning.  As a teacher, I would have concerns that students did not really understand my language or the material at all, but feel that they cannot communicate this because they cannot use the target language proficiently.  I think that in my future classroom, I will try to make sure that students have a few minutes in each class period or once a week (depending on the level) to ask questions in English to better understand ideas that they may be unsure about.  I think that asking and answering questions for up to 5 minutes in a class period allows students to feel secure about their understanding of different concepts that are taught.  Other than these few minutes, it is highly important that students heard and become used to the target language as much as possible.

An important thought is that the Direct Method is the way that we are taught our first language.   Learning vocabulary and grammar through practice is the way that our parents helped us acquire our first language.  We did not sit for 45 minutes a day memorizing random vocabulary words.  It is important to note that we used words that we actually needed to say so we learned these words to participate in conversations, in which we gained the understanding of the vocabulary through practice.  In a foreign language classroom, it is impossible to completely use the Direct Method, but teachers need to try to teach students as if they are learning their first language as much as possible.  Clearly we all became proficient at using our first language because we were exposed to the language directly.

            

Free Topic: Importance of Natural Approach in the Classroom

Even before learning about all the different methods of teaching foreign languages, the Natural Approach had been one that had seemed the most effective to me. During my Education 500 experience, I worked with an elementary school Spanish teacher for grades two through five. This teacher spoke in the target language part of the time, choosing to use repetition as one of her methods; she would say something in Spanish, repeat it in English so that the students knew what she was saying. The students learned a decent amount of Spanish, but it was nothing different than most other classes; they spoke Spanish perhaps 10% of the time. However, halfway through the semester this teacher left on maternity leave and her long term subsitute took her place. This substitute had a completely new method of teaching - the Natural Approach. From the first day that she began teaching in the class, she refused to speak a word of English except to give instructions at times, although she usually still instructed the students in Spanish. For the first few days, the students were completely overwhelmed. They had gone from a classroom where they were not required to read, write and speak in the target language all the time. Though they were intimidated at first, the students soon began to warm up to this approach. The substitute preferred a teaching style that focused on reading paragraphs of short stories and learning the vocabulary necessary to comprehend the story rather than teaching the students lists of random vocabulary words each day and having that be the extent of the lesson. Not only did this teacher require the students to read stories and answer comprehension questions about the story in Spanish, but she also required them to write a summary of the story in complete Spanish after they had read it, with an ungraded assessment given at the end of each story unit. The stories used all different tenses, which gave the students an exposure to preterite, imperfect, future, etc.

I had been skeptical of this approach when the substitute teacher had first started, but by the end of my Education 500 experience I had seen what a great approach the Natural Approach really is. The students had been nervous at first but by the end of the semester, they were able to comprehend the stories with almost no problems. They began using more and more Spanish in their speaking and writing and although they would make many errors, they knew a great deal more of the vocabulary and grammatical structures than they had before. They also began using different tenses in their writing which was something that I was amazed by; as they had been exposed to the preterite in one of the stories, in their assessments some of the students remembered that the teacher had taught them that "comio" is the third person singular preterite tense of "comer" and wrote comio instead of come, changing the tense correctly without even understanding what they were doing! This was something that was completely amazing to me as students were not even introduced to the present tense and how to conjugate verbs until the seventh or eighth grade level of Spanish at the school I was working at. This experience only reaffirmed my belief that teaching in the target language as much as possible is completely necessary to promote growth and understanding in the L2 no matter what age the students are. While I think it may be necessary to use a little more English than necessary in the introductory level of a foreign language class, I think that the teacher must begin to limit the amount of English in the classroom as soon as possible. After seeing the benefits of the Natural Approach, it completely makes sense as to why it works; as Spanish majors at UNH, we were required to study abroad. Is it not true that the largest amount of growth in our knowledge of Spanish occurred when we were abroad? For me, I definitely learned much more while studying abroad in Spain than I did in the semesters of Spanish courses I had taken at the university level. While of course younger students in elementary, middle and high school cannot study abroad, it is important to bring the "abroad" part to them - by immersing students in as much of the language as possible. Only then will they be able to grow in the language and become more proficient.

Topic of Our Choice!! Scripted Dialogues

For this free topic blog, I decided to write about the advantages and disadvantages of using scripted L2 material in an L2 classroom. When I was a senior in high school, the Spanish teacher for whom I was a TA told me about the idea of having students repeat pre-memorized, scripted phrases each day in order to become more familiar with the structures and sounds of grammatically correct sentences. For example, if I were to use this idea in a Spanish classroom, the students would come into class and I would say, “Hola clase, ¿cómo están ustedes hoy?” and they would say back to me “Hola señorita Ainaire, estamos muy bien, ¿y cómo está usted hoy?” I would say “Estoy muy bien hoy, gracias por preguntar. Clase, ¿qué quieren hacer en clase hoy?” And they would say “Señorita Ainaire, ¡queremos aprender mucho español hoy!” I would say “¡Eso es fabuloso, porque vamos a aprender mucho español hoy!” and they would say “¡Hoy va a ser un buen día!”

I know this example is pretty simple and a little cheesy, but this is just so you all can get the basic idea. Although the teacher that I was a TA for never actually used this idea in her classroom, she highly recommended it to me and I’ve thought about it many times since then. We saw from the Audiolingual Approach that memorizing dialogues can be helpful sometimes, but it does not promote much creativity. I definitely do not think that this dialogue memorization idea should be the only approach used by the L2 teacher because, as said before, this approach does not allow the students to use much creativity at all. However, I do see some benefits to this idea. By repeating a scripted set of phrases every day, the correct structures for these sentences will become engrained in students’ memories throughout time and practice. Even if the students have not learned about the verb “estar” or about “ir + a + infinitive,” they will have these forms in their memories so when it does come time to formally learn about them, students will already feel (at least a little) familiar with them. With this idea, I think it would be good to have one short set of dialogue (like the example above) for about two or three weeks. After those two or three weeks, I would teach the students a new dialogue (something about the current season, for example) and we would practice that one for two or three weeks as well. These short dialogue exchanges would only take one or two minutes from each class, and they would be done every day.

            I’ve always thought this was a pretty neat idea, and I’d like to hear what you all think about it. Again, I would not use these pre-memorized dialogues for more than one or two minutes of each class—I just thought it seemed like a good way to get students familiar with some verb forms, some vocabulary, and some grammatical structures before formally learning what they mean and how to use them. Although there is no student creativity involved, I think that, for a short little activity, this idea could be very helpful to many students.  

Technology and Foreign Language Learning

I believe that technology is a wonderful asset to have in any classroom, but especially in a foreign language classroom. Our future students will undoubtedly be more tech-savvy than this generation is as technology keeps advancing as such a rapid pace; therefore it will be even more a part of their lifestyle and teaching should be adjusted accordingly to keep up with the times. My particular article that I was assigned to read was “Promoting intercultural exchanges with blogs and podcasting: a study of Spanish-American telecollaboration” and I believe that the type of technology and media mentioned in this article would be something I, and other teachers, would definitely try to incorporate into their classroom. The use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is only getting more popular in our everyday lives but we also see its usefulness in foreign language education. I believe that these types of tools – blogs, podcasting, social media connections, etc. --- are an asset, but shouldn’t necessarily have to replace traditional tools. For example, students may find it very helpful to listen to a native speaker talk about a concept through a podcast to get a new perspective and to get used to a different accent, but they should also be working just as hard in the classroom with face-to-face discussion where they aren’t hiding behind their screens, so to speak.

                As stated above, I personally feel that social networking tools are awesome and provide an opportunity to dig deeper into a topic that may not be fully discussed in a classroom. For me, I’m not always the one to participate in classroom discussions but I do have an opinion and it makes it easier to share it from the comfort of my own home and putting it on the internet on a blog, for example. Even over the past few years, our country has been rapidly turning to online responses, from business emails to now tweeting about popular television shows and sharing thoughts with the rest of the world. With language teaching, this helps us future educators because we can simulate real-life situations with social networking tools, share authentic materials that we discover online, and at the same time our students can learn from it all at once and have a lengthy discussion with each other. The message that I’m trying to convey here is that putting not only discussions online, but tools like articles about real people, podcasts with native speakers, thought-provoking tweets, are all things that contribute to a learning environment in which we can show our students that this language is a useful thing to know, or else we could not have access to these materials; essentially the options are limitless when you incorporate technology.

                Regarding the Second Life language learning, I think that this is a great opportunity for students to interact with real native speakers and practice their L2. This is a great tool that would surely speed up the learning process and gives an opportunity to students who cannot necessarily practice their L2 where they live --- there aren’t many opportunities to practice Spanish in rural New Hampshire! I think this idea is awesome, I’ve never seen anything like it before and I don’t really have anything negative to say about it!