InTASC STANDARD 4:​ The teacher understands the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and

structures of the discipline(s) he or she teaches or creates learning experiences that make these
aspects of the discipline accessible and meaningful for learners to assure mastery of the content.
Name of Artifact: ​Review and Relevance (R&R) report 2
Course:​ FL 663 H001 Appl Ling Sec Lang
​ all 2018
Date: F
ACTFL Standards Addressed: ​4.2
TESOL Standards Addressed: ​1.a, 1.b, 1.c
Rationale:
The first artifact that represents my understanding of central concepts, tools of inquiry,
and structures of the discipline I teach is my second R&R report.
Recent empirical educational research has started to assess teacher knowledge directly
and provides evidence that subject-specific knowledge and skills on the part of teachers
are decisive factors with respect to the achievement of their students (e.g., Baumert et al.,
2010; Hill, Rowan, & Ball, 2005; Sadler, Sonnert, Coyle, Cook-Smith, & Miller, 2013).
Teacher education effectiveness research has established the importance of measuring
teacher knowledge as an outcome at various stages of teacher education (p.321).
For this assignment, I found a journal article located within specified journals approved by the
MATL committee and related to sociolinguistics. The article I chose was on a topic encompassed
by the overarching linguistic themes in the class. In the report, I comment on how the article is
related to what I know about language teaching and how I would use the implications to further
develop my teaching practices. An overview of and reflection on the article is included in my
write-up, as well.
The article I chose to read centered on phonetics. The topic of discussion was the
comparison of the trilled and tapped ​r’s ​in Spanish. These sounds were isolated to assess if they
were actually different phonemes or if the trilled ​r​ was just a repetition of the tapped ​r. T
​ he
article discussed the manner of articulation and the motor skills necessary to produce both
sounds, in addition to the data that spectrographs and other tools show when the the sounds are
made. I thought that gaining insight on this topic would allow me to peer into the minds of
novice learners. Most of my students have been native speakers of English. The tap can be
compared to the English flap, but of course the trilled ​r ​doesn’t exist in English. I thought that by
looking into the experimental phonetics of how this sound is made that I could better explain it to
my L2 students.
 Reading this article did, in fact, remind me of the difficulty I first had when attempting to
mimic these sounds. I thus realized that I needed to begin each of my Spanish I classes with an
overview of the phonetics of the language. To make the language more accessible, I have done
just that. I begin each Spanish I class with the sounds that are most different from students’
native languages, the relationships between the names of phonemes and the sounds that they
make, and the sounds that these phonemes make in isolation, in syllables, and as lexical items. I
have also been able to use the information in this article to explain to my students why certain
phonetic sounds seem to sound differently in different words, namely because of the semantic or
syntactic context and the influence that these environments have on the sounds. The ability to
make phonemic distinctions also helps students to begin to mark word boundaries. My
implementation in the classroom shows my understanding of the interdependent and interrelated
systems of language and my ability to interpret and relay these to others.

References

König, Johannes, Lammerding, Sandra, Nold, Günter, Rohde, Andreas, Strauß, Sarah, &
Tachtsoglou, Sarantis. (2016). Teachers' Professional Knowledge for Teaching English as
a Foreign Language: Assessing the Outcomes of Teacher Education. ​Journal of Teacher
Education,​ ​67​(4), 320-337.

Shelton, M. (2013). Spanish Rhotics: More Evidence of Gradience in the System. ​Hispania,
96​(1), 135-152. Retrieved from​ ​http://www.jstor.org.lynx.lib.usm.edu/stable/23608459