Standards for Foreign Language Learning, Essay Example

This professional development plan contains information pertaining to a field-observation project conducted in a classroom setting.  The primary scope of this project involved observations of a teacher and her students in Spanish language classes at … Middle School in Long Branch, New Jersey.  The time devoted to observation in the field served as a valuable addition to the theoretical and practical components involved in being an educator.  The field observation context allows for consideration of theoretical concepts and ideas, while contextualizing them in practical, real-world ways.

To begin, let’s discuss some of the pedagogical, linguistic, academic, and political issues.

Pedagogical: Teachers play different roles and manage varying temperaments.  There are numerous courses in which an instructor can be both inventive and efficient. Every teacher will draw on a mixed bag of emotions and different styles of learning all through their profession as an instructor. A teacher may find that their personality changes from year to year, school to school, class to class.  Every teacher’s style may change with experience and individual life changes.  The teacher I observed…

Linguistic: Linguistics research has suggestions for a scope of instructive issues influencing the school educational program, especially concerning dialect learning. To address these issues, a Committee on Language in the School Curriculum (LiSC) has been dynamic in adding to a guide of projects and assets for educators, policy leaders, students, and parents.  Some of those issues include:

• Issues with describing grammar and depicting sentence structure. A distinct way to deal with grammar may seem like a basic matter, yet it is to a degree more muddled than it might first appear. The result will be diverse relying on which parts of grammar are in use and on what the center of focus is.  Choices on what to incorporate can be settled on the premise of the target group.  There are different issues that rely on a specific perspective of what language structure is and on what sort of depiction concurs with the particular perspective.
• Issues in articulation. Another level at which we can break down talking is pronunciation, and the part it plays in communicating our needs. Pronunciation is a term we use to catch all parts of how we utilize sounds for conveying our message.  We can tell students about the development of our organs for pronunciation and how a sound is delivered by the collaboration of the organs.  We can also help students understand how to arrange the vowel and consonant and how to create a sound precisely with the right position of the tongue.  However, only have master of pronunciation can teach students pronunciation well.

In our class, the teacher helped students with learn language by…

Political: Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt of Freakonomics show us the profit reward for an American who takes in an outside dialect is only 2%.  In the event, that a college graduate makes $45,000 a year.  Expect our college graduate, who in America is likelier to utilize a foreign language than somebody without college.  Envision that our graduate saves her “language reward”.  Accumulating funds is the most motivating factor in the universe.  Expecting simply a 1% genuine pay increment every year and a 2% normal genuine return more than 40 years, a 2% dialect extra transforms into an additional $67,000 (at 2014 quality) in your retirement account.  It has to be noted thought that there are different premiums for diverse languages: only 1.5% for Spanish, 2.3% for French and 3.8% for German. This interprets into enormous contrasts in the dialect account: your Spanish is worth $51,000, yet French, $77,000, and German, $128,000.  Basically, diverse dialects offer such varying returns.  It has nothing to do with the characteristics of Spanish, obviously.  The undeniable answer is the transaction of supply and demand.  An essential component is financial openness.  Germany is an exchange powerhouse, so its dialect will be more monetarily important for an outsider than the language of a generally more closed economy.

While a middle school student may not be concerned with these numbers today, I believe if the teacher in our class showed the students this check, it would quickly become more popular.

Academic: Opportunities to find out about different dialects and societies are seriously ailing in numerous low wage, minority, and urban schools.  Foreign language classes are offered in one-quarter of urban state funded schools in contrast to around 66% of rural tuition based schools.

At the middle-school level, 78% of private (non-parochial) schools report that more than 50% of their students study outside dialects, comparatively 51% of students in public middle schools.  In 2003, 29% of state funded school principals in primary minority school regions foresee future reductions in instructional time for outside dialects.  African-American, Hispanic, and American Indian students procure less credits in foreign languages than their white peers.

Expanding access to and enlistments in foreign language courses in basic level schools may not be sufficient to enhance foreign language learning.  The everyday secondary school student gets around 150 hours of dialect study every year.  Experience has demonstrated that 300 hours of guideline spread more than two years is woefully insufficient for secondary school students to add to any usable level of capability.  Grade school students, who get just 30-60 minutes of guidance every week, are much more distraught.  Schools might likewise need to change the way language is taught.  Time dedicated to the task is imperative.  In 2002, just 29 states offered language-immersion programs.

As we have read in our text and course material, the reasons and uses of foreign language are as different as the students who study them.  Some students study another dialect in with expectations of discovering a career in the international marketplace or with the government.  Other students seek a greater understanding of people and cultures or the intellectual challenge, and of course, students take different courses to satisfy a graduation prerequisite.  No matter the reason, it is clear that foreign language has something to offer everybody.  Hence the development of the five goal areas that encompass all of these reasons: Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparison, and Communities.  The big question is how we address the aforementioned issues to foreign language study so that our peers can obtain their goals.

There are many methodologies of teaching language.  I am only going to highlight a few of the methods that could have helped the middle school classroom I observed.

Structural methods:  We are going to look at two structural approaches, grammar-translation method and audio-lingual method.  Structural methods treat language as a system of structurally related elements to code meaning.

Grammar-Translation Method:  In grammar-translation classes, students learn grammatical rules and then apply those principles by interpreting sentences between the target dialect and their native dialect.  Advanced students may be obliged to decipher entire writings word-for-word.  The grammar-translation method has two principle objectives: to empower students to peruse and interpret writing written in the target language, and to further students’ general scholarly improvement.  In this manner, this approach concentrates on reading and writing.  Talking and listening are ignored.

Grammar-translation classes are normally led in the students’ local dialect.  Sentence structure principles are discovered deductively; students learn linguistic rules through repetition, and practice the rules by doing grammar drills and translating sentences to and from the target language.  More consideration is paid to the type of the sentences being made an interpretation of than to their substance. At the point when understudies achieve more propelled levels of accomplishment, they may decipher whole messages from the target dialect. Tests regularly comprise of the interpretation of traditional writings.

This would be useful to the class I observed… but it could be used with other methods to give students a more well-rounded understanding of the target language.

Audio-Lingual Method: The audio-lingual method, also known as the Army Method, is a style of teaching through a system of reinforcement. The right use of a trait would get positive input while inaccurate use of that trait would get criticism.  The audio-lingual method exhorts that students be taught a dialect straightforwardly, without utilizing the students’ native language to clarify new words or sentence structure in the target dialect.  The audio-lingual method doesn’t concentrate on instructing vocabulary.  The teacher introduces the right model of a sentence and the students repeat it. The instructor would then proceed by showing new words for the students in the same structure to compare.  In audio-lingual method, there is no explicit grammar instruction—everything is simply memorized in form.  The thought is for the students to practice the specific build until they can utilize it without thought.

This would be useful to the class I observed…

Functional methods: Functional methods treats language as a vehicle to express or accomplish a certain function, such as representing something.  There are two types of functional methods as well, the oral approach and situational language teaching and directed practice.

Oral approach and situational language teaching: The approach of oral approach and situational language teaching can be portrayed as a kind of British structuralism.  Speech was viewed as the premise of dialect, and structure was seen as being at the heart of our ability to speak.  Oral approach and situational language teaching addresses the processes instead of the states of learning.  This technique accentuates three methods in taking in a dialect receiving the knowledge or materials, fixing it in the memory by repetition, and using it in actual practice until it becomes a personal skill.

This would be useful to the class I observed…

Directed practice: Directed practice is that moment of learning promptly after direction.  While receiving direction, the student is getting a handle on the idea of language and adding it somewhere in their memory bank.  Direction essentially ends when the student can repeat it back to you.  This doesn’t mean the student knows the language of course.  Further instruction and practice must follow.

There are two types of practice, directed and independent. Directed practice happens under the watchful eye of the educator.

This would be useful to the class I observed…