After three days of teaching relative pronouns (who, whom, which, etc. in English) to one of her classes, Director of International Programs and French teacher Shannon Swann opted to mix things up.
“It was right before Spring Break,” Swann explained. “I told the class we were going to do something really low key. I said, ‘I want you to come up with your own sentence [using the relative pronouns], but I want it to be something you can make a visual representation of.’”
Students had all the supplies they needed to make this happen – construction paper, markers, and their brains.
“Drawing those pictures, I’m telling you, I’ve never seen people care more about how their picture looked,” said Swann. “They were writing their sentence really nicely and deciding where they wanted to hang it up [on the classroom walls]. It was silly stuff, but it took ten more minutes than it would have to just write the sentences up on the board. And I think they’re going to remember it in a different way.”
Methods like these, making learning visible for students, have been of particular interest to Swann for a while. But in the year since she took over as Director of International Programs, she’s studied the current thinking behind foreign language instruction – which includes the teaching of English to international students – more intently.
The Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in Chicago last month was one valuable opportunity for Swann to pick up some ideas from schools in the region.
“I went to a lot of sessions focused on how to align your instruction from level to level, because that’s something that really interests me,” said Swann. “There were two workshops on designing curriculum that were awesome. I got some great handouts that I’ve already shared with other people in the department because they help you identify your essential question and your themes. You decide where you want to go, and you design the instruction to get there.”
The approach of starting with the end in mind is a key tenet of standards-based assessment, which many University teachers, including Swann, have explored in recent years. In foreign language instruction, though, it is Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) that’s been all the rage.
“There has been a movement in language teaching in the last five to ten years away from things like grammar and conjugation – all of the traditional things people hate about learning a language,” said Swann. “We’ve moved into what are known as the three modes of communication. There’s interpersonal communication, where you have to negotiate meaning as you go, whether writing an email or having a face-to-face conversation. There’s presentational, which is you communicating to an audience but there’s no response. Then there’s interpretive, which is when you just listen and you can’t ask questions.”
“What a lot of language teachers are doing is trying to design instruction that takes into account those three modes and also teaches culture as part of that,” she added.
This approach, teachers believe, better reflects how people use language in the real world.
“You’re immersing students in the material, and then at the end of the unit, you have a day set aside for an activity,” said Swann. “The activity could be having a conversation with a classmate about a topic, which would be interpersonal communication. Or it could be writing a letter to your family. Basically, you put it together for them into a real-life scenario, and it is so much more motivating for the kids.”
Implementing this approach to skill acquisition within thematic units, which could be anything from “family” to “identity,” could be especially effective when designing a curriculum for all levels.
“My dream is that we would have those broad themes,” said Swann, using the theme of “family” as an example. “In a Level 1 class, you might describe your family. In Level 2, maybe you introduce vocabulary for relationships, marriage, and divorce. Maybe students would write an invitation to a marriage. In Level 3, maybe you talk about single parent families, gay marriage, and broader ideas within the greater family theme.”
In addition to the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Swann also recently attended a three-day workshop on International ELLs in the American Classroom. She is also currently enrolled in “Making Learning Visible: The Power of Group Learning and Documentation in Classrooms and Communities” through Harvard College’s Graduate School of Education.
“I love going to these conferences because sometimes it just reminds me of stuff I already know, and other times it crystallizes something that has sort of been in my mind but I haven’t quite gotten yet.”