I have always had a rapport with older people; growing up as a child of a geriatric social worker, I was "voluntold" to play music for populations living in retirement homes and nursing homes. In addition, I am fortunate to have been raised to respect my elders. So, it is not surprising that at a certain point in my language teaching career, it would occur to me that older learners should have teachers that specialize in helping them to achieve their potential as language speakers and listeners.
Having often taught learners over 60 throughout my music and language teaching experience, I have recently been doing research - both linguistic and general - on older learners' cognitive profiles. There are many concepts and techniques that I have put on my mental list when I teach learners over a certain age; not because they are inferior, but because they just need different techniques sometimes than younger learners.
Often, our hearing does not have the same frequency range as we age, which can make hearing the different intonation and even vowel pitches difficult. In addition, our brains become so full of knowledge that we can be cognitively overloaded. The biggest take away, though, that I have gained is that older learners really need to feel like they are making progress and that they are good enough to be learning a language in the first place. Eroded confidence is the biggest detractor from acquiring the language. In linguistics we talk about the affective filter: the level of emotion that either allows or disallows our brain access to acquisition of language. When our emotions are too high, we cannot learn well. A good teacher makes the language learning experience very low stakes and so fun and engaging that the students doesn't even think it's a class!
Another take away from research and empirical classroom experience is that older adults have tons of life experience and have often figured out strategies to get through life; they use these to also learn language. In addition, the amount of native language they have acquired helps them to grasp concepts in the target language that younger learners can't, due to a lack of knowledge.
I find that patience is the biggest quality we teachers need when helping older learners to acquire the language, as they can be much more deliberate and thoughtful with output.
The research that I have done confirms all of this, and recommends that in addition to taking into account all of the above elements, we make sure that we adjust fonts to be highly visible, maker sure that listening activities are played at a volume that is accessible and that as with any learner we vary the mode of input (print, sound and movement).
Monday, June 29, 2020
Tuesday, June 9, 2020
Representing...
When we teach whatever content we (or others) deem important and integral to the classroom experience, do we always think about who we represent when we teach it? For example, when I teach a lesson on Christmas traditions in France, am I representing the many Jews and Muslims that live in l'Hexagone? Probably not... Do I teach about Chanukah and Eid? Perhaps. But perhaps not.
You might say, "Well, France IS a Catholic country; after all, most of their holidays are built around the Christian calendar." While this may be true, I am an American who teaches a language. Therefore, I do not or should not only concern myself with France. What about Senegal (where a very large percentage of the population is Muslim)? What about Morocco or Tunisia or Algeria, where Jews and Muslims live side by side and Christians are not the majority? Even if there is a majority, in my opinion, it is important and crucial to teach about minorities in the countries that speak the languages we teach. Very often the native speakers will avoid this if they are of the majority, thinking either that the minorities are not necessarily representative of their country. As neutral parties, we can do that job and teach about the cultures and peoples that do not make the cut in the top 10 of important things to talk about.
So, beyond the obvious reason, why should I consider this important? Well, because it also makes you think about which of your students may not see themselves in your curriculum. Imagine a scenario all too common:
"How can I do this? I don't even know who the minority population is." Do some research. Ask native speakers specifically about minority populations in major cities that may or may not be talked about. Use the information you gain to do more research. Then, bring it into the classroom. Or, better yet, have your students do the research and teach you about it.
I guarantee that it will make your time so much richer.
You might say, "Well, France IS a Catholic country; after all, most of their holidays are built around the Christian calendar." While this may be true, I am an American who teaches a language. Therefore, I do not or should not only concern myself with France. What about Senegal (where a very large percentage of the population is Muslim)? What about Morocco or Tunisia or Algeria, where Jews and Muslims live side by side and Christians are not the majority? Even if there is a majority, in my opinion, it is important and crucial to teach about minorities in the countries that speak the languages we teach. Very often the native speakers will avoid this if they are of the majority, thinking either that the minorities are not necessarily representative of their country. As neutral parties, we can do that job and teach about the cultures and peoples that do not make the cut in the top 10 of important things to talk about.
So, beyond the obvious reason, why should I consider this important? Well, because it also makes you think about which of your students may not see themselves in your curriculum. Imagine a scenario all too common:
"How can I do this? I don't even know who the minority population is." Do some research. Ask native speakers specifically about minority populations in major cities that may or may not be talked about. Use the information you gain to do more research. Then, bring it into the classroom. Or, better yet, have your students do the research and teach you about it.
I guarantee that it will make your time so much richer.
I want to connect my class, but it's soooo hard...
Every year I think about how to compel my students to want to speak in French and every year I think the best way to do it is to connect them with the outside world- meaning native speakers their age. Of course, this is often easier said than done, as there are a whole host of challenges and frustrations that come with this type of project. This post will help address these obstacles and maybe give you more confidence when it comes to finding a class and setting up a relationship.
Challenge 1
Finding someone who is interested and follows through...
This is perhaps the most frustrating part of the whole thing; so many people either are not interested when approached or say they are interested, but don't really want all the extra work that goes into it. Either that, or their schedules simply don't allow for the time to commit to it- or so they think.
My advice will sound obvious: keep trying until you find someone who really values the relationship enough to burst the obstacle bubble and give it a try. It might take a while, but it is well worth the wait. You might also think about finding curricular ties for them so they see this as beneficial. Sometimes it's a matter of thinking that this is extra to what they are trying to accomplish. If their program want students to speak at all, then find ways to help them understand that this may help students to improve speaking more than they could if they were doing a lesson in the classroom.
Challenge 2
Navigating complicated schedules...
Once the impossible happens and you find that perfect fit, your schedule decides that there is no time when you can actually connect.
Here, my advice is to be creative and to find solutions that still necessitate interaction, but maybe not live. Have students make short videos in the target language and upload them to Youtube. Then share the links with your partner class. Or, have students use Google Hangout and leave voice messages for their partners and then return them. Ask the teacher of the partner school if they can ever stay after school or do an early morning session, or consider doing this yourself. Have your students snapchat with the other students. Create a Google presentation and leave comments on Google voice. Any of these things will be better than not doing anything.
Challenge 3
Compromising on what the interactions will be between the students and how much time will be spent in L1 and L2...
All culture and countries have different ways that they see education; some teachers have complete control over their curriculum and some are beholden to a centralized bureaucracy that makes them choose to do one thing over another for fear of not preparing their students for the end of the year tests and the end of the program exams to get into college.
Have a Skype meeting with the teacher (yes, you should skype first so you know what your students are going through) and suss out what the two of you would like to accomplish with the exchange. After a brainstorming and writing down of all of the ideal outcomes, decide which ones are feasible and then find a couple that each would like to have happen. Then, backward design your exchange. Sometimes I just give my students suggestions for questions and topics and let them go at it with no goal in mind other than to have them listen to and speak with native speakers in the L2. I find that this often leads to richer conversations because they are not trying to role play with canned dialogue. This also allows for them to see how many topics they can talk about.
Challenge 4
Getting a regular thing going because drive-by education doesn't really do what we want it to do...
After the first session, even if it doesn't go like we thought it would, there should be a feeling of elation that you connected your students with native speakers- and students their age to boot. But, how do you make this a regular thing so your students (and you too!) can benefit from the cultural and linguistic knowledge and skills you can gain from this type of exchange?
One way to do this, is to choose maybe two times per semester to skype; this is manageable and also tells students that you will do this four times per year, letting them know that it's not just a
Challenge 5
Making this a physical exchange...
This is perhaps the biggest challenge of all; taking that step to meet in person can be a very daunting task. All of the logistics and organization can make an already over worked teacher run away screaming! But, if you take it one step at a time and take your time, knowing that perhaps it will be two or three years before anyone actually steps out of a plane, you can minimize the stress. Make a timeline and accomplish each task according to the timeline. Make sure that you have talked to all administrators and asked about risk management which is a big deal right now, especially with terrorist attacks and other things like zika.
As teachers and world travelers, we know that life is not 100% safe and that not taking the risk diminishes not only our linguistic potential, but our ability to interact with and understand in a deep way other cultures with other ways of seeing the world.
Our school just recently had consultants come in to talk about risk management and recommendations for our trips; one of these was to hire a company to lead the tours. I whole-heartedly disagree with this method unless you don't know anything about the country you are traveling to.
Let's take for example our French exchange with the Lycée de l'Iroise in Brest, Brittany. Because I had lived in France and knew about Breton culture and had enough connections to start talking about what we might do and where we might go, I wanted to have control over the programming. Often, for a company, you are just another school, and even if they try very hard to personalize it, there is nothing like actual personal connections to deepen the learning and immerse students in the target language.
One example, is that we always program a day of service working with a community center that we have formed a relationship with. The first time, we weighed and parsed out organic veggies that were subsidized buy the government for mainly low income people (although anyone could take part) and handed them the bags, collecting the money on the bill. We have also surveyed people on the street in a low income neighborhood to see how what their internet usage; this data was used by the community center in a grant to get subsidized internet for the whole neighborhood. Of course, both of these activities were all in French, as the residents did not speak English. We also had our students interviewed on a community radio show about being Americans and their impressions of Brittany. Before you say that students need to be super advanced to do this, just know that even our novice speakers were able to communicate things.
For me, this is why I teach students language; it is a tool to interact with people and is a means to an end, not an end in itself. It is extremely gratifying to see the students use whatever language they have acquired to accomplish tasks in a place where people actually live in the language the students have been acquiring.
So, what is the point of this article? It is to drive home the point that it could seem superfluous to teach a language if we don't allow students access to native speakers of the language in order to see the reasons why they study it in the first place.
Every year I think about how to compel my students to want to speak in French and every year I think the best way to do it is to connect them with the outside world- meaning native speakers their age. Of course, this is often easier said than done, as there are a whole host of challenges and frustrations that come with this type of project. This post will help address these obstacles and maybe give you more confidence when it comes to finding a class and setting up a relationship.
Challenge 1
Finding someone who is interested and follows through...
This is perhaps the most frustrating part of the whole thing; so many people either are not interested when approached or say they are interested, but don't really want all the extra work that goes into it. Either that, or their schedules simply don't allow for the time to commit to it- or so they think.
My advice will sound obvious: keep trying until you find someone who really values the relationship enough to burst the obstacle bubble and give it a try. It might take a while, but it is well worth the wait. You might also think about finding curricular ties for them so they see this as beneficial. Sometimes it's a matter of thinking that this is extra to what they are trying to accomplish. If their program want students to speak at all, then find ways to help them understand that this may help students to improve speaking more than they could if they were doing a lesson in the classroom.
Challenge 2
Navigating complicated schedules...
Once the impossible happens and you find that perfect fit, your schedule decides that there is no time when you can actually connect.
Here, my advice is to be creative and to find solutions that still necessitate interaction, but maybe not live. Have students make short videos in the target language and upload them to Youtube. Then share the links with your partner class. Or, have students use Google Hangout and leave voice messages for their partners and then return them. Ask the teacher of the partner school if they can ever stay after school or do an early morning session, or consider doing this yourself. Have your students snapchat with the other students. Create a Google presentation and leave comments on Google voice. Any of these things will be better than not doing anything.
Challenge 3
Compromising on what the interactions will be between the students and how much time will be spent in L1 and L2...
All culture and countries have different ways that they see education; some teachers have complete control over their curriculum and some are beholden to a centralized bureaucracy that makes them choose to do one thing over another for fear of not preparing their students for the end of the year tests and the end of the program exams to get into college.
Have a Skype meeting with the teacher (yes, you should skype first so you know what your students are going through) and suss out what the two of you would like to accomplish with the exchange. After a brainstorming and writing down of all of the ideal outcomes, decide which ones are feasible and then find a couple that each would like to have happen. Then, backward design your exchange. Sometimes I just give my students suggestions for questions and topics and let them go at it with no goal in mind other than to have them listen to and speak with native speakers in the L2. I find that this often leads to richer conversations because they are not trying to role play with canned dialogue. This also allows for them to see how many topics they can talk about.
Challenge 4
Getting a regular thing going because drive-by education doesn't really do what we want it to do...
After the first session, even if it doesn't go like we thought it would, there should be a feeling of elation that you connected your students with native speakers- and students their age to boot. But, how do you make this a regular thing so your students (and you too!) can benefit from the cultural and linguistic knowledge and skills you can gain from this type of exchange?
One way to do this, is to choose maybe two times per semester to skype; this is manageable and also tells students that you will do this four times per year, letting them know that it's not just a
Challenge 5
Making this a physical exchange...
This is perhaps the biggest challenge of all; taking that step to meet in person can be a very daunting task. All of the logistics and organization can make an already over worked teacher run away screaming! But, if you take it one step at a time and take your time, knowing that perhaps it will be two or three years before anyone actually steps out of a plane, you can minimize the stress. Make a timeline and accomplish each task according to the timeline. Make sure that you have talked to all administrators and asked about risk management which is a big deal right now, especially with terrorist attacks and other things like zika.
As teachers and world travelers, we know that life is not 100% safe and that not taking the risk diminishes not only our linguistic potential, but our ability to interact with and understand in a deep way other cultures with other ways of seeing the world.
Our school just recently had consultants come in to talk about risk management and recommendations for our trips; one of these was to hire a company to lead the tours. I whole-heartedly disagree with this method unless you don't know anything about the country you are traveling to.
Let's take for example our French exchange with the Lycée de l'Iroise in Brest, Brittany. Because I had lived in France and knew about Breton culture and had enough connections to start talking about what we might do and where we might go, I wanted to have control over the programming. Often, for a company, you are just another school, and even if they try very hard to personalize it, there is nothing like actual personal connections to deepen the learning and immerse students in the target language.
One example, is that we always program a day of service working with a community center that we have formed a relationship with. The first time, we weighed and parsed out organic veggies that were subsidized buy the government for mainly low income people (although anyone could take part) and handed them the bags, collecting the money on the bill. We have also surveyed people on the street in a low income neighborhood to see how what their internet usage; this data was used by the community center in a grant to get subsidized internet for the whole neighborhood. Of course, both of these activities were all in French, as the residents did not speak English. We also had our students interviewed on a community radio show about being Americans and their impressions of Brittany. Before you say that students need to be super advanced to do this, just know that even our novice speakers were able to communicate things.
For me, this is why I teach students language; it is a tool to interact with people and is a means to an end, not an end in itself. It is extremely gratifying to see the students use whatever language they have acquired to accomplish tasks in a place where people actually live in the language the students have been acquiring.
So, what is the point of this article? It is to drive home the point that it could seem superfluous to teach a language if we don't allow students access to native speakers of the language in order to see the reasons why they study it in the first place.
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Ever feel like...?
Cette année, comme toutes les années, je suis en train de naviguer des défis que l'école m'a balancés, afin de conserver le programme de français; à savoir, un cours qui combine les élèves de NH avec les élèves de IL comme cibles de compétence linguistique.
Le défi n'est pas nécessairement que cette tâche soit impossible en elle-même; pourtant, quand on a deux cursus différents, c'est ça qui pose le problème. La question que je me pose ad infinitum, c'est comment ne pas passer des heures à préparer chaque séance et en même temps fournir assez de "input" pour les différents niveaux afin de les préparer pour une atteinte éventuelle de leur niveau de compétence linguistique?
Pour le moment, je travaille en labo et je fais des expériences avec des cobayes et des rats et des souris, c-à-d, les élèves. Reste à voir quels seront les résultats. Si jamais j'en ai de bons, je vous les communique.
Bonne semaine!
Pour le moment, je travaille en labo et je fais des expériences avec des cobayes et des rats et des souris, c-à-d, les élèves. Reste à voir quels seront les résultats. Si jamais j'en ai de bons, je vous les communique.
Bonne semaine!
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Joyeuse St. Patrick! Une activité très simple pour apprendre les bases de la musique irlandaise
Hi all. This post will be perhaps the shortest I have written since I started my blog; the goal of this article is to share a very simple activity with you that allows students to learn content in the TL with the simplest French possible. This enables advanced students to feel very confident and lower level students to feel like the activity is feasible for them.
The activity is basically a webquest to 1) learn the names of the instruments used in traditional Irish music in French; and 2) learn a little about the forms of the dance music that we often hearthis time of year, but know nothing about. You may even have some Irish dancers in your class, but often they don't necessarily know about the music. In addition, the teacher will learn alongside the students.
Here is the activity:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7N0wQje-qwAaU5KM3RwMmpXNkE/view?usp=sharing
You can search youtube to find music to listen to, as well:
Dervish is a great example of a band that incorporates many of the instruments.
If you have any problems, feel free to email me at blipshutz@usmk12.org.
The activity is basically a webquest to 1) learn the names of the instruments used in traditional Irish music in French; and 2) learn a little about the forms of the dance music that we often hearthis time of year, but know nothing about. You may even have some Irish dancers in your class, but often they don't necessarily know about the music. In addition, the teacher will learn alongside the students.
Here is the activity:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7N0wQje-qwAaU5KM3RwMmpXNkE/view?usp=sharing
You can search youtube to find music to listen to, as well:
Dervish is a great example of a band that incorporates many of the instruments.
If you have any problems, feel free to email me at blipshutz@usmk12.org.
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
A way-out, easy way to talk about art for intermediate-advanced students
Welcome to my wacky world! I am a flutist. I am also a language teacher. In addition, I have been described as quirky. When you put these three things together, you get this activity for the language classroom.
When I was teaching English at the Université de Paris III, I was always trying to find ways to engage the students so that they were so compelled to speak that they dropped their inhibitions. I had somehow been thinking about the great experimental composer / musician, John Cage. You may know his famous piece, 4'33'', where the entire piece is silent.
So, one day, I took my flute into class, with a music stand and a copy of his piece, and I "performed" it. There are three movements, but because they are all tacet (silent), I put my flute up to my mouth for a certain time. Then, to change movements, I put it down and put it up again to signal the next movement. At the end of the piece, I wrote this question on the board: Is this music? Why or why not? When I began to teach French, I just translated the question into French.
Another activity that works well is to project a picture of Marcel Duchamp's R. Mutt and to write on the board: Is this art? Why or why not? As a follow-up, students can create their own music or art and justify it in the target language.
Here is a link for the sheet music:
file:///Users/blipshutz/Downloads/5F0788C58DD115C8FC1CA2935553CA48.pdf
Here is a link for R. Mutt:
https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3456/3257727248_836bb65cf7.jpg
Bonne classe!
When I was teaching English at the Université de Paris III, I was always trying to find ways to engage the students so that they were so compelled to speak that they dropped their inhibitions. I had somehow been thinking about the great experimental composer / musician, John Cage. You may know his famous piece, 4'33'', where the entire piece is silent.
So, one day, I took my flute into class, with a music stand and a copy of his piece, and I "performed" it. There are three movements, but because they are all tacet (silent), I put my flute up to my mouth for a certain time. Then, to change movements, I put it down and put it up again to signal the next movement. At the end of the piece, I wrote this question on the board: Is this music? Why or why not? When I began to teach French, I just translated the question into French.
Another activity that works well is to project a picture of Marcel Duchamp's R. Mutt and to write on the board: Is this art? Why or why not? As a follow-up, students can create their own music or art and justify it in the target language.
Here is a link for the sheet music:
file:///Users/blipshutz/Downloads/5F0788C58DD115C8FC1CA2935553CA48.pdf
Here is a link for R. Mutt:
https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3456/3257727248_836bb65cf7.jpg
Bonne classe!
Sunday, February 7, 2016
How Healthy Do People Eat? Stats, food and cheese!
In my French II class, we have been looking at different foods in various Francophone countries and preparing to create cooking show videos; one concept we learned at the beginning of the unit was whether the food we eat is healthy or not. (It should be noted that this survey is an introduction to the passé composé. We do not learn anything about the tense other than they are in the past. I also introduce devrait, so they can give advice on what is healthy.)
To this end, I thought I would share this simple activity for two reasons: 1) it's very easy to implement; and 2) many of us do not know how cool it is that a pie chart is called a camembert. This second reason brings in a cross-disciplinary element, giving you a chance to review numbers and to use them to talk about statistics.
The first thing I do is to project the INSEE website so that the students have a chance to look at it and guess what INSEE is. In case you do not know, click here. I write the question QU'EST-CE QU'ON FAIT SUR CE SITE? on the board. Once they have looked at the site's homepage on the screen, I may ask them to go to the site on their phones or computers to explore it for a couple of minutes.
Then, they turn to a partner and try to say what you do on this site; after they've reported out, if they don't know what it is, I tell them. I then show them camembert cheese and a pie chart and tell them that it's the same word, pointing out the cultural significance of cheese in France.
Once this is done, we review the numbers from 1-100 and talk about how to say percentages. I may use info graphics on the family or other topics we have covered to have them practice using these numbers with percents.
Then, I give them the survey and let them go. Sometimes we do this in class, but often I let them take it home and ask 5 friends or family members.
Once they are finished with the survey, they must make a simple pie chart saying what percentage of the people they interviewed ate healthy vs. not. Some of them use computer generated charts and others draw them. They bring the pie charts to class and present informally. We then discuss whether we think this data (ces données) is representative or not of the US in general and why or why not.
Bon sondage!
Here is the survey:
To this end, I thought I would share this simple activity for two reasons: 1) it's very easy to implement; and 2) many of us do not know how cool it is that a pie chart is called a camembert. This second reason brings in a cross-disciplinary element, giving you a chance to review numbers and to use them to talk about statistics.
The first thing I do is to project the INSEE website so that the students have a chance to look at it and guess what INSEE is. In case you do not know, click here. I write the question QU'EST-CE QU'ON FAIT SUR CE SITE? on the board. Once they have looked at the site's homepage on the screen, I may ask them to go to the site on their phones or computers to explore it for a couple of minutes.
Then, they turn to a partner and try to say what you do on this site; after they've reported out, if they don't know what it is, I tell them. I then show them camembert cheese and a pie chart and tell them that it's the same word, pointing out the cultural significance of cheese in France.
Once this is done, we review the numbers from 1-100 and talk about how to say percentages. I may use info graphics on the family or other topics we have covered to have them practice using these numbers with percents.
Then, I give them the survey and let them go. Sometimes we do this in class, but often I let them take it home and ask 5 friends or family members.
Once they are finished with the survey, they must make a simple pie chart saying what percentage of the people they interviewed ate healthy vs. not. Some of them use computer generated charts and others draw them. They bring the pie charts to class and present informally. We then discuss whether we think this data (ces données) is representative or not of the US in general and why or why not.
Bon sondage!
Here is the survey:
Le régime de mon / ma partenaire :
Demande à 5 personnes ce qu’elles ont mangé et
ce qu’elles ont bu cette semaine. Après,
marque S pour sain et M pour malsain à côté.
Exemple :
Marc
|
Poulet frit M
|
Poulet au four S
|
Du coca M
|
De l’eau S
|
NOM
|
Ce qu’il/elle a
mangé
|
Ce qu’il/elle devrait manger
|
Ce qu’il/ elle a bu
|
Ce qu’il / elle devrait boire
|
1.
|
||||
2.
|
||||
3.
|
||||
4.
|
||||
5.
|
Faites un camembert (pie chart) indiquant quel pourcentage des gens interviewés mangent sain et malsain.
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