This is a picture of my adorable little house, here in St. Paul. As I was walking home from class today, it occurred to me how different city streets look here versus city streets in Paris or France in general. In both situations, I lived in a metropolitan city. Paris, however, has a larger population in a smaller area. Despite it's large population, Paris is a small city. Anyway, when teaching a foreign language, almost everything has to do with literacy. In most foreign language settings, students will learn vocabulary having to do with cities. They will not only learn words for specific things, like grocery stores and towers and houses and school, etc. But they will also learn how to describe the city: the closeness of the houses or buildings, the traffic, the business of the streets. Students also learn vocabulary to give directions: north, south, east, west, right, left, etc. This also seems like a clear way to incorporate culture into the vocabulary. One of the ACTFL national standards is about Comparisons. Why not use the new vocabulary that you're teaching your students to discuss how an American city is organized versus how a French (or even just European) cities are organized? This would make the vocabulary have a real life purpose. In foreign languages, teaching the vocabulary doesn't mean that the students will remember it. If you give them a real life situation or a connection to their own lives, your students are much more likely to remember what they learned. This can also help with getting your students to talk in class and use the speaking part of language learning. Plus, such comparisons are fun.
This post reminds me of one day in my French class when we walked to a local doughnut shop from our high school. We had to be our own French GPS as we walked from the classroom on the second floor of the school all the way to the shop about a mile away. At each turn we had to stop and call out, en Francais, which direction we were going. We even had to call out if we were going "tout droit" across a crosswalk. While Madame Voss had a lot of fun lesons for us to do, this was one of the most fun. Everyone loved the opportunity to get out of the classroom, practice their French, and get a doughnut!!
ReplyDeleteAnother experience in a language class that I enjoyed was a mercado we created in my 6th grade Spanish class. My class consisted of 20 kids and we used the lunch room in the basement of our school. In pairs we all were assigned and had to run a different shop in the market. Being in sixth grade we didn't have to use ALL Spanish, but we did have to use as much Spanish as possible. We all learned and reviewed vocabulary associated with all of our respective shops as well as money and numbers in the days before we set up the market. Then on the day we took a couple of class periods to set up and run the markets. Everyone took turns with their co-owners to go browse everyone else's "shops" and buy what they were selling. I no longer remember much of what I learned (it was a decade ago!), but I remember that we all used quite a bit of Spanish that day and we all had a lot of fun doing it.
Any time you integrate a language into your life experiences and immerse yourslef in the language, you will learn so much more and far more fully. Learning a language is so much more than just learning the words, it is about being literate in both your culteur and the culture of the language you are speaking.