Our current school year is dominated by figuring out how to teach in a pandemic, and thoughts about improving practice or exploring possibilities may not be top of mind. Now that we are edging towards the spring of 2021 and vaccinations are rolling out, I'm hopeful that teaching can return to "normal" within the next … Continue reading
When I first started learning my second language, vocabulary was its own exercise and not strongly connected to the unit content. Learning vocabulary often meant studying large banks of words and trying to memorize them for a quiz. And shortly after the quiz, many of those words would be forgotten because I wasn't using them … Continue reading
In a second language environment, one of the most challenging skills is listening. I've heard anecdotal evidence in my school district to confirm that this is the area of greatest challenge for most of our secondary level language students, and I've seen firsthand in my classes that it can lead to high levels of frustration. … Continue reading
I'm currently in the final portion of a course on collaborative inquiry, and wrapping up a 4 member group collaboration that dug into an inquiry question that evolved to end up here: What supports will benefit teachers and students in an L2 (second language) learning environment so that students can engage in collaboration and inquiry? … Continue reading
As I've gone through course work this summer I've dug deep into my own thinking behind learning maps and developed a better understanding of what they are and how I will be integrating them into my instruction. My students, however, were not along for that ride. Some of them have not used learning maps before, … Continue reading
As I've been documenting on this blog, I spent 7 weeks of my summer completing the first two of 10 courses towards earning an MEd degree from Queen's University. One of those courses, PME 800 or Self-Regulated Inquiry and Learning, required me to complete an inquiry project and to learn how self-regulated learning facilitates and … Continue reading
I recently wrote a blog post about the new books I was able to take home after participating in a resource review. New books have always been exciting to me, but once they hit my bookshelf, my main goal is to not let them gather dust. My biggest wish after each of the reviews I've … Continue reading
For teachers, finding opportunities to get involved in one's school district is usually not difficult at all. The challenge often comes in deciding which opportunities to choose, because it's impossible to participate in all of them. For the past few years, I have chosen to participate in LRS (Learning Resources Services) reviews of French books. … Continue reading
It's one of the standard forms of human interaction - ask a question, give (or get) an answer. We do it thousands of times a day, but it can be deceptively simple for second language students. The best thing to help students learn how to ask and answer questions is practice. Repetition. Lots and lots … Continue reading
This post is about a resource I developed in about 2017, and it allowed me to align the way that I teach reading in my second language classes with a series of beliefs that I've held for a long time: Reading is NOT translation. For years, every time I asked students to read something in … Continue reading
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