Avatar Languages Blog

The challenge

A student recently expressed that he wanted greater structure for his Spanish lessons and also wanted to have a clearer sense of what he would be learning when.  He said that he wanted a textbook and practice exercises.  I am reluctant to head too far down the coursebook path for various reasons such as the likely greater focus on grammatical forms than on communicative competencies, the lack of individualization (and therefore relevance to students’ lives) and the limited amount of textbook-like resources for Spanish that are available online.

The solution

To address the student’s concerns, I have developed a kind of syllabus that gives greater structure to the classes and yet is naturally student focused.  This syllabus is based around situations that the student may well find himself in and themes that he is interested in.  There is a tendency for certain communicative skills to be foregrounded according to the situation, but neither specific linguistic skills nor grammatical forms are the driving force behind this syllabus. Instead, there is considerable flexibility with how the student and teacher jointly interpret the activities proposed by the syllabus.

Syllabus contents

The syllabus contains the following sections…

• Subjects for discussion: My World activities are suggested topics of conversation that focus on the students’ own lives.  There are also suggestions of how to ensure that these in-class conversations are pedagogically fruitful.
• Situations for role-play: Practical Simulation activities are unscripted role-plays that allow students to prepare for everyday scenarios that they anticipate encountering in the near future.
• Teacher’s guide to help teachers use the syllabus.  The guide includes support on preparing lessons and on how to teach using the syllabus.
• The student guide helps students understand what their role could and perhaps should be in the learning process.

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CoTESOL has accepted my proposal to give a presentation at the annual convention in November; this is great news. I will be talking about how learners can be supported with their mobile learning, while the lessons themselves need not involve much (if any) technology.

Here is the brief description that is in the program…

How can teachers support mobile learning without using technology during class? The presentation explores how students can bring real-life, linguistic experiences into class and how teachers can help the students learn from these experiences. Through exploring case studies, you will gain both practical suggestions for activities and guiding pedagogical principles.

And here is the longer proposal…

This presentation demonstrates how students can use mobile devices to enhance their language learning without using technology during formal lessons.

The presenter reflects on his own language learning and his English teaching to show how mobile devices (cameras, MP3-players and cell-phones) can be used to record experiences beyond the classroom and then explore them linguistically in-class.

Students bring their everyday experiences to class, such as MP3 recordings of their real-life conversations, photos of menus/signs and videos/photos of everyday events. The lessons use language analysis to help students better understand these out-of-class experiences and simulations to prepare them for similar situations in the future.

This approach supports out-of-class (informal) learning and focuses on “just-in-time” learning. Students gain key skills such as ‘noticing’ new language and they become more autonomous learners.

The presentation focuses on real and practical activities for teachers to easily apply in their own lessons; yet it is also firmly grounded in pedagogy, including Dogme, dialogic learning, PhotoVoice, Task-based learning, and simulations.

The presentation demonstrates how technology can easily be used for language learning without the teacher or student needing to be familiar with any particular technology: the output, the dialogue and the learning take center stage.

My slot is at 1.30pm on Friday November 12 in the “West D” room (hotel plan at bottom of this PDF). The conference program is already online.

CoTESOL (The Colorado Affiliate of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) will hold its 34th Annual Fall Convention and Exhibition on November 12-13, 2010 at the Red Lion Hotel Denver Southeast, 3200 S Parker Rd, Aurora CO 80014.

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If you are going to be at CoTESOL, please do let me know. I am looking forward to getting to know other language educators in Colorado.

One of my students, Federico, uses a car navigation system to find his way around the streets of his own country in English.  Over the last few weeks he has been using the sat nav in English to help him improve his foreign language skills.  Sat navs are GPS controlled devices that read aloud navigational instructions to the driver.  The device references satellites to track where the car is and so is able to give directions according to the car’s exact location.  Some allow you to change the language and Federico has changed his to English even though he is using it in his native Italy.  Interestingly, he is able to recall the exact phrases he had learned, such as “bear right” and “take the third exit at the roundabout”.  Clearly this approach has worked well, so it is worth pondering on why using a sat nav system seems to help learn a foreign language.

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