Foreign Language Student Motivation

My paper for this class will be on motivation in foreign language learners and how knowing what motivates US students to learn a foreign language and reach advanced-level proficiency or higher can be used to improve future L2 teaching practices. I will be comparing the results of two online surveys I have been giving to UNH language students during the past few weeks. While each of the surveys contain the same questions about what motivates them to pursue proficiency foreign language, the first survey was given only to students currently taking a language at the 631 level or above and the second survey was given to beginning (401) level students.

I am curious to see how the two groups compare, and I have my own predictions about how the data might look, but I'd like to ask you guys what you think motivates FLLs at the beginning level vs at the advanced level. Are they motivated by the same factors by the time they get to 631 as they were when they began? Would their motivation levels change over time? How might the teacher be able affect student motivation?

Teaching/Learning gender of nouns

Right from the beginning in French 1 I had to memorize the gender of nouns for every test and quiz. Later on, my teachers tried to teach us how you can often tell what gender based off of things like suffixes, but I never memorized any of the rules they told us. However I do really well knowing what words are what gender when I speak and write getting it right about 95% of the time. I have no clue how I compare with my peers; perhaps everybody just figures it out without realizing it or thinking about it. I think my brain has probably just figured out the rules on its own, maybe partly through the forced memorization in the beginning of my French instruction. 

I wonder how exactly we learn and memorize the gender of nouns; there are a ton of them. How should we as teachers teach it? When I first had to learn gender it was hard for me to memorize, just like verb conjugations, now I have no problem with either of them and have not had a problem for a very long time. Did that mandatory memorization in the beginning set me up to establish a system of rules in my head that I do not think about, or was it a waste of time and I would have figured it all out eventually without that tough memorization?

Knowing gender is really important in French and as I can see in German and Spanish as well. It would be interesting to see if there are any scholarly articles on it, any research. But I definitely do not have time to research it now! J

Making Connections with Foreign Students

The first topic that I have questions on that I could think of was setting up a pen pal system. I never did this in school, but liked the idea of it. I have friends that did this in high school and loved it, but I do not know much about it. I know we have talked about this before briefly, but some of the logistics are interesting. Mainly as teachers, how do we monitor if the exchanges are happening, and how do we base a grade on it? Do we grade it on participation? Or do we grade on the level of discourse that is being had? If so how do we create a criteria since the discourse depends on both people that are involved. Also, at what level is it appropriate to try an exchange like this? Plus just finding a group to exchange with sounds like it could be very difficult. I don't know if anyone here has had any experience with this type of exchange, but I would like to hear your input.

Flipped learning in the foreign language classroom

For my final paper for this class I will be writing about flipped learning in the foreign language learning environment.  Flipped learning is the idea that students learn the concepts on their own outside of class so that class time can be used for skill application.  Usually instructors assign their own video lectures or already made ones for homework.   Students may have to answer comprehension questions to show they've done the work outside of class.  Then class time is free to put the new concepts to use.

I went to a workshop on flipped learning last spring led by my former AP biology teacher who has now flipped her classes and is having a lot of success with it.  I would like to know how this would go in the foreign language classroom.  From the brief and less-than-adequate description I gave above, do you have any initial feelings about how this would work for language learning?  Advantages?  Disadvantages?

Online Learning at a Local Middle School

I decided to write the blog post in order to solicit your help/input in relation to a group of middle school students that I just started working with. Just a disclaimer: I am not trying to bash the school, but am simply looking for input. Last week was my first week working with seventh and eighth graders from a K-8 public school with 80 students total. Due to the very small number of students, the seventh and eighth graders (there are only 12 of them) have, beginning this year, enrolled in an online middle-school Spanish course via the Virtual Learning Academy (Vlacs), which is an online charter school for New Hampshire middle and high school students. The students spend three 40-minute periods per week working towards the completion of their year-long Spanish course in the school’s computer lab. Although all students are enrolled in the same course and are more or less working at the same pace, they are expected to work individually and in some cases actually get in trouble for working together and/or sharing information.

The course was created and is currently organized by a teacher from the Holderness School in Plymouth, NH, who acts as the “teacher” and evaluates student work. The curriculum incorporates reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills, making use of technology to do all student evaluation online. It is structured so that students read “lessons” related to different thematic units, and then complete a series of evaluations that test their comprehension of what they have reviewed. The “teacher” never actually “teaches,” but simply writes the lessons and creates course materials. Unlike many UNH courses that are taught online, the Vlacs course does not include any audio or video of the instructor; students are expected to learn the language simply by reading the lessons.

The school recently hired me to tutor the students three times a week, as students and parents had voiced strong frustrations with the online Spanish course. The students are accustomed to having “real teachers,” and so do not like having to learn online without being able to work directly with a live instructor. This past week I conferenced individually with the students to see how each is doing, and realized that their online course has been a complete disaster. Students generally do not understand the material, and simply fill in answers without actually retaining any language skills. They want to learn Spanish, but struggle immensely with online learning and the independence that it solicits. Beyond the students’ lack of personal motivation to make use of the online program, the course itself is not well structured. The lessons are extremely confusing, and assignments often do not relate to what students are learning. My SPAN 401 students would not be able to understand the lessons, let alone a group of seventh and eighth graders.

I am not entirely sure as to how I should approach the task of the working with these students, as it seems to me that the course itself is not appropriate for them. The school’s principal had envisioned that I work with students one-on-one, in order to answer questions and help them with things like pronunciation, but I’m not sure how effective this strategy will actually be given the fact that most students are completely lost. I am thinking of potentially working with small groups of students, in order to conserve time and target major issues (like verb conjugation), but am generally just overwhelmed by the task at hand. It is obviously not my job to fix the situation or teach the class, as I was hired simply to tutor the students, but I feel as though my work will be like simply putting a Band-Aid over a massive problem.         

Bilingualism and language aptitude

I thought that I would take the opportunity to share my final project for my ESL Methods class that you might find interesting.  It focuses on the effects of early bilingualism (before the age of 10) on future language learning experiences. Many cognitive studies have been conducted in this area of interest, studying the executive function (mostly with word recognition tasks) of early bilinguals compared to monolinguals. The results show a clear advantage for the bilinguals, though not a drastic one (sometimes a difference of .10 of a second). Nevertheless, it does have statistical significance.

I used these cognitive studies a basis for my personal question: how do early bilinguals perceive their aptitude in language learning? I conducted a basic survey with 16 participants that analyses their thoughts on the importance of bilingualism/language learning and their ability/ease of learning in past FLL experiences. As expected, most of the participants felt that learning language was relatively easy for them, and that being bilingual was a beneficial life skill for them.

This research has really imprinted in me the importance of learning a second language at an early age: the advantages are clear and strong. I am truly an advocate for FL education in elementary school.

Have you taught or known any early bilinguals and found them to be particularly proficient in LL? Do you support early FL instruction based on this research?

Movies in a Foreign Language Classroom

I have been thinking about this a little bit as I have been going through my internship:what is the role that movies should play in a foreign language classroom?

I believe that playing movies is an important, and necessary, part of a foreign language classroom. However, in my personal experience as a student, I remember my teachers playing the movies and then they just had a worksheet at the end of the movie. Is that enough to test the comprehension of the students? We have played a couple of movies so far this year, and for each movie, we have stopped the film at certain parts to ask comprehension questions and explain what is going on, if necessary. I think that a lot of the time (and maybe this is more prevalent in high school than in college), teachers use movies as more of a break than as a helpful teaching tool. I do not think that that is the case all of the time, but I think that that is a factor.

Also, when playing movies, what do you think about the use of subtitles? Thus far, when we have played a movie in class, it has been in French with English subtitles. My concern in that case is that the students are reading the dialogue rather than listening to it. However, if you do not add the subtitles, I fear that they would be lost and they wouldn't understand. Something we haven't yet tried is playing the movie in French with French subtitles, which would be interesting. When you play movies in class, what do you think are the ways you would go about teaching the material during, or after the movie?

I think that movies can be an extremely useful tool to teach culture and language, but sometimes I think that the students do not see watching a French movie as learning. Rather the students see it as a day off from learning.