Current Question
May Question: How do you integrate global awareness with standards based teaching?
April Question: How do you prepare your students to enter a language related career?
Reader Responses:
Connect students' language learning to as many other disciplines during their school day. after school, and on the weekends as possible. Enlist the support of colleagues, parents, administrators, community members to help you with this challenge.
March Question: How has being bilingual impacted your life?
Reader Responses:
- I am bilingual in Spanish-English. I became bilingual due to marriage and moved later to the USA where I earned a Master in Public Communication. My bilingual experience has been very interesting and happened in stages. First, I discovered the advantage of reaching more people and being able to understand their culture.
There were difficult experiences in the process - my heavy accent, the lack of feedback in some life situations that native English speakers share, the sense of control in one language more than the other, including changes in personality - more confident and outgoing in my native language and more cautious and reserved in the other.
The great bilingual impact in my life is the knowledge about other cultures, my understanding and sensitivity for others and my sense of pride for my culture. It is to see the world from a wider perspective and feel that I belong to more than one community or country.
- I can enter two different worlds freely. I get double courage from the world created by two different languages. I can think in the box and out of the box. I can always interpret life in two different perspectives. I feel I am kind of person who can swing into two worlds.
February Question: At what point did you feel that you were really a professional in language teaching?
Reader Responses:
- Not with my first job, as Assistant d'anglais in a school in France; not when I became a TA in a University in the United States; not even after becoming a full-time high school French teacher. In my fourteenth year of teaching, I went abroad as a Fulbright Exchange Teacher, and it was there and then that I felt like a real professional language teacher. In the seventeen years since then, everything I do has reinforced the feeling.
- After 20 years.
- After I studied and lived abroad and felt very confident with the language and culture I was teaching.
- When I studied language learning theory.
January Question: Do you think that the terminology used to refer to languages matters? How or why?
Reader Response: Yes, because the word foreign has a pejorative connotation.
December Question: What technology innovations have you found successful in your teaching?
Reader Response:
Digital stories have been successful!
YouTube
November Question: In what ways have Millennials challenged you and how have you met the challenge?
Reader Response: Millennials have definitely challenged me in using the internet, technology and other different high tech means. IPod and voice thread too. Text books are no longer THE teaching method. I am trying to learn all the new methods to communicate with my students through the methods they use to communicate with their peers. Recently I am using my face book to connect with them too and keep up with the new era of fast technology learners.
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