By Carmen Granda, Amherst College. Around the halfway point of the semester, the classroom dynamic often changes with the arrival of midterm season. Many students, and if we are being honest, teachers, fall victim to “the midterm slump.” Students
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By Theresa Schenker, PhD, Language Program Director & Senior Lector II at Yale University. One of the primary goals of foreign language instruction apart from the acquisition of target language skills is the development of cultural awareness and
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By Amy Burden, MATL. Instructor in Modern Languages at Mississippi College Part of preparing any student for the mainstream classroom or English-medium college classroom is helping them decipher meaning from long academic texts. While there are various
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by Shannon Donnally Spasova, Michigan State University. There are many reasons to use visuals in your classroom. They can help you stay in the target language. They can help you to create a context or a story for
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Emily Beeman, Spanish teacher at Pioneer Valley Regional School in Northfield, MA. [Note: This article was written in November 2017] I came to Gimnasio Los Caobos, a Project-Based Learning (PBL) school outside of Bogotá Colombia, at the end of September.
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Fabrizio Fornara, Ph.D. candidate in Instructional Systems and Learning Technologies; Italian and Spanish language instructor at the Florida State University; Center for the Advancement of Teaching. Every day, hundreds of thousands of users worldwide publish snapshots of their daily
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By Felix Kronenberg, Associate Professor at Rhodes College and President of IALLT (International Association for Language Learning Technology). In a multi-year project at Rhodes College, beginning, intermediate, and advanced students of German have created the virtual city of “Pfefferhausen.” Utilizing
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By Todd Bryant, Language Technology Specialist, Dickinson College. The Mixxer website (www.language-exchanges.org) is a social networking site designed to help language learners find a language partner. The idea is that each user can provide practice and feedback in
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By Lisa Frumkes, PhD, Senior Director for Content Development at Rosetta Stone. You may think you know what Rosetta Stone is all about: what products we provide and how we teach. You may be so sure that you know
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Angelika Kraemer, Center for Language Teaching Advancement, East Lansing, MI. Luca Giupponi, Center for Language Teaching Advancement, East Lansing, MI. One of the perennial problems plaguing language departments in higher education has to do with student recruitment, enrollment, and retention. Nationally,
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Joan Palmiter Bajorek, Doctoral Student at the University of Arizona, Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) Program. “I want to be fluent.” “I want to practice speaking.” “How do you say that?” “My pronunciation is terrible.” My students
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By Shannon Spasova, Assistant Professor of Russian and Technology Specialist in the Center for Language Teaching Advancement, Michigan State University. One of the complaints that people tend to have about elementary language textbooks is their separation from real life. Dialogues
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By Dr. Dan Nickolai, Director of the Language Resource Center, Assistant Professor of French, Saint Louis University. Introduction & Background VoiceThread is well-known to tech-savvy educators as being a reliable and intuitive platform for creating multimedia-rich learning activities. Its core functionality enables
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By Leigh Sapp, Spanish teacher at Prospect High School, IL. In the Fall of 2015, Christie Sylvester, Head Librarian at Prospect High School (IL), approached me about my level of interest in inviting our upper level Spanish language students
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