III. Typical Teaching Situations

Modern Foreign Language Courses

Like courses in other disciplines, modern foreign language courses treat an academic subject: in order to master grammatical structures, vocabulary, principles of literary analysis, and knowledge of the people who speak the language, students conceptualize, memorize, and analyze information. In addition, students use different mental operations to acquire communication skills. And to understand and respect another culture, they must integrate intellectual and emotional responses. Such differences are implicit in the objectives of the College foreign language requirement:

• To provide students with basic language skills;
• To develop multicultural knowledge and awareness;
• To develop understanding of languages.

In some courses, students learn mostly from reading and from attending class; language students, like science lab students, must practice in order to learn. Language learning is, moreover, a cumulative, step-by-step process: complex grammatical points build on basic ones, and skills grow as students practice different aspects of them. Understanding what one hears, for instance, depends on knowing pronunciation rules, hearing sounds correctly, recognizing words from sounds, knowing the meaning of those words, fitting the words into recognized patterns of grammar and vocabulary, discerning the significance of the tone used, and understanding the cultural situation in which the words were spoken.
To sustain interest and to keep up with the necessary work, your language students need motivation and immediate, frequent feedback. They need more short quizzes, papers, and interviews than in most other courses; you also need to make clear why they cannot successfully cram for language tests. As in other courses, what you test reveals what you consider important. Balance your tests with items confirming students' reading, listening, and writing skills, as well as their mastery of vocabulary, grammatical structures, and cultural knowledge. Test authentic language use in realistic contexts, and ask students to communicate their own meaning as much as possible. When the speaking skill is one of your goals, evaluate its development with oral proficiency tests. For general testing recommendations, see "Evaluating Students' Work."
Certainly, in class, students must participate individually in a wide variety of activities. Thus the Modern Language Association of Departments of Foreign Languages recommends 12 as the ideal enrollment to maximize student participation and recommends no more than 20 students in any language course. Finally, because of language study's multifaceted nature and demand for student participation, specific learning disabilities are more visible in language courses than in many other courses. For tips on spotting and accommodating learning disabilities, see "Teaching Students with Disabilities" and the TRC handbook Teaching a Diverse Student Body; for information about treating individual cases, check with your supervisor or departmental chair.

There are dangerous consequences to teaching students that learning must take place within four cinder-block walls. And so I have taken my students to parking lots to study car vocabulary, to a local vineyard for a French tour, to France through videos and realia from my travels. I hope that my students will realize through these activities that learning is a process that can take place anywhere.

—Candace Cone, French

Class Activities

Details about organizing and teaching your language classes should come from your supervisor or course chair. We offer here, however, a few initial tips and insights into language teaching:

• Plan a variety of activities for each class both to develop different skills and to tap students' individual strengths (see "Learning Styles"). To maximize students' attention, vary the length of activities usually between two and fifteen minutes.
  
  
• Begin with a conversational warm-up to reaccustom students to the target language and immerse them in your course. Discuss a current event, discover what your students have been doing, find out more about their lives and opinions, and so on. Integrate grammar, vocabulary, culture, or important information into the warm-up in a natural manner.
  
  
• Then review a point from the previous lesson or material basic to the new information that you will present during class. In the best reviews, students practice again and demonstrate their level of mastery. You may also preview or outline the upcoming lesson.
  
  
• Practice new material: vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, skills activities, and cultural units.
  
  
  • If you introduce new vocabulary early in the class, you can review it later with grammar, culture, or pronunciation activities.
    
  • Rapid pronunciation drills can wake up lethargic students.
    
  • Grammar activities usually work best when students have studied textbook explanations before class. It is usually best to keep your explanations to a minimum and ask students specific questions about what they have studied.
  • Integrate cultural information through web sites, readings, video and audio tapes, slide shows, and conversation. Resist the temptation to talk too much about your time abroad and, rather, involve students in analyzing their own culture as well as the target culture. You may choose to use English at times to encourage students to comment.
    
    
• Finally, integrate the parts of the class into a coherent whole with a closing activity that encourages students to use new material to communicate. They might use new vocabulary to create dialogues about future plans; play "Wheel of Fortune" to practice vocabulary, letters, pronunciation; discuss a reading and brainstorm ideas for a composition comparing their experiences with what they've read. Students leave more excited and more confident in their learning when they've used what they've practiced.

General Tips

• Require students to prepare before class. Know what they should have understood from the textbook, and ask questions to verify their preparedness and comprehension. Choose students who don't raise their hand to answer most questions; you know the volunteers are prepared.
  
  
• Distinguish between what you can do best in class and what the textbook offers. For example, you can explain grammar differently than the textbook, with more, personalized examples. The textbook may provide written grammar rules and mechanical practice activities that you need not cover in class. The textbook lists and defines vocabulary; you need to show students at elementary and intermediate levels how to pronounce it and help them make it their own. The text and manual provide reading and listening activities; you may need to give students the appropriate context in which to read or listen.
  
  
• Use the target language to communicate, not merely to instruct. Give assignments in the target language; don't lapse into English when you have something really important to say. Use the target language whenever you think students will be able to understand it.
  
  
• Remember that communicating with language means more than using the four language skills; it also entails understanding culture well enough to communicate with speakers from a different background. Integrate skill areas and culture in lessons and in the overall curriculum in order to replicate language use in the "real world."
  
  
• Develop students' cognitive, comprehension, and language-learning strategies. Pre-reading and pre-writing activities, as well as work on how to understand a spoken or written text, are ideal class activities. If you prepare students well to work with written texts, they can read and write effectively beyond your course.
  
  
• Stress oral-aural skills in class. Besides language laboratory work, students do not practice speaking and listening much outside class unless you require it.
  
  
• Use accompanying workbooks, lab manuals, audio and video lab programs, test banks, and computer software to reinforce material in the main textbook, following the recommendations of the course supervisor. These are ideal for self-study when answers are provided for immediate feedback.
  

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

—Margaret Mead, Coming of Age
   in Samoa, introduction, 1928.