InTASC STANDARD Eight: Instructional Strategies: The teacher understands and uses a

variety of instructional strategies to encourage learners to develop deep understanding of content

areas and their connections, and to build skills to apply knowledge in meaningful ways.

Name of Artifact: FL 561 Video Reflections

Course: FL 561 Teaching Second Languages: Theory into Practice

Date: 23 June 2017

ACTFL Standards Addressed: Interpersonal Communication: Learners interact and negotiate

meaning in spoken, signed, or written conversations to share information, reactions, feelings, and

opinions.

Rationale:

Many of the videos use the target language as a vehicle to a subject matter. Focusing on

content instead of language provided an opportunity to use the language for real communication.

Sometimes the students do not know words they need. In one of the videos, a student asked the

teacher for an English translation. The teacher refused and gave the student examples in the

target language. In this video both the teacher and the students spoke in the target language

when working in whole group and in small group. In an elementary classroom in one of the

videos, this is not the case. The teacher speaks in the target language the entire class. This

students speak the target language in whole group instruction, but they switch to English when

they are working small groups. Both videos are content based. The high school class is learning

about different countries through the guise of preparing to travel to those countries. The

elementary class is learning about geography. They are learning about food they did not know

existed (Shrum & Glisan, 2015).

 In one of the videos, an English as a Second Language class was using a story that the

students wrote together as part of the classroom activities. The teacher had rewrote the sentences

and cut them into pieces in order to allow the students to work with the parts of the sentences.

The story included the phrase washing machine soap. This phrase does not sound natural.

Using student generated content can increase motivation. Increasing motivation can yield large

gains in language acquisition. Not all students are equally motivated. The teacher may need to

plan activities to increase his or her students motivation (Gass, Behney, & Plonsky, 2013).

It is important to also include authentic texts as well. Authentic texts expose students to

natural language. They also allow students to work with the target language in context. Some

authentic materials are not comprehensible to beginner or intermediate students. One option is

simplifying the text to make it comprehensible for the students level. If students are given

simplified texts, they should have a mixture of both simplified and original texts (Nassaji &

Fotos, 2011). Teachers may have to modify what they do with the texts to ensure

comprehensibility. Teachers can use authentic texts to teach skills to help students read texts

when they do not know all of the words since there will be occasions when they encounter words

that they do not know.

References

Gass, S. M., Behney, J., & Plonsky, L. (2013). Second language acquisition An introductory

course (4th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Nassaji, H., & Fotos, S. (2011). Teaching grammar in second language classrooms. New York,

NY: Routledge.
Shrum, J. L., & Glisan, E. W. (2015). Teachers handbook (5th ed.). United States of America:

Cengage Learning.