Free Resources for Foreign Language Teachers
The Language Shaping Team offers workshops on designing your own thematic units. Both the presentations and the resources are available here for attendees to review and for new teachers to discover. Download these files for your own use. If you share them with colleagues please send them to our website www.languageshaping.com. Video presentations require the flash plugin. and the documents require Microsoft Word, Publisher or Adobe Acrobat. The workshops are organized by topic:
Literature-based Thematic Units
Priscilla Russel and Paris Granville have trained teachers at regional and national conferences. They also give workshops for school districts on request. You will find a narrated presenation, teacher handouts and print resources. Use authentic literature as a base for creating language rich lessons that are accessible to novice-level learners.
Culture-centered Thematic Units
Paris Granville has trained teachers at national conferences and the national NNELL institute on creating culture-centered thematic units that focus on culture woven into communication.
Reading Strategies
This shorter presentation highlights the reading strategies from our larger workshop in literature-based units. It showcases ways that the foreign language classroom can reinforce literacy skills from English language arts. It includes quick tips for impressing your principal and collaborating with other subject areas.
Interpersonal Templates
Teachers often tell us that they have difficulty creating, managing, and assessing interpersonal tasks for novice and intermediate learners. This presentation offers several quick ideas for using provided templates to generate student-centered interpersonal tasks. We also offer rubrics based on the ACTFL Performance Guidelines for assessing novice and intermediate students.
Presentational Templates
We offer several rubics based on the ACTFL performance guidelines to evaluate novice and intermediate performances. There are also suggestions for managing performances in the classroom. Finally we list some examples of presentational assessments that you can adapt to your classes.
Tips for Filming in Class
We have a page of tips for filming in your class.
Kirikou
As published in the spring 2007 Learning Languages, these templates for download will help you show the film, Kirikou et la sorcière to your novice learners. There is a sample permission slip and a listening guide.
