Posts

Dawning

-
Robins voraciously sing outside my living room window. The blinding spring sun plays hide-and-seek behind the fluffiest of white clouds. Daffodils yawn from a long sleep as a row of pink hyacinths peeks for assurance that it is indeed time to bloom. It is in fact the dawning of spring, and it is truly the dawning of an inevitable twist in learning that most K-12 educators have yet to experience. It is a digital dawning. My alerts overflowed this week with articles offering free resources, tools, and subscriptions for remote learning: Storylineonline, Khan Academy, PBS Kids, Rosetta Stone, Scholastic, Duolingo, Discovery K-12, Readworks, to name just a few. School districts in different spots across the country were featured in writings to not only prepare the public with their instructional plans but to also inform of the uncertainty of what we as teachers and students will all face in the upcoming weeks as we navigate distance learning. I have been using Schoology as my classroo...
Post a Comment
Read more

#LanguageEvolution

-
"Beyond Local: What if emojis and hashtags should be part of language learning?"  Professor Heather Lotherington, Multilingual Education and Associate Dean at York University in Canada, asks: "Why don't we teach languages the way we actually use them?" As an experienced secondary English teacher and certified reading and ELD specialist, I shake my head both north and south and east and west in response to this question. In her article, Lotherington points her finger at "free or cheap" second language learning apps - particularly Duolingo, Busuu, Babbel, and Memrise - of "focusing on old-school grammar." According to Lotherington, these app push too much skill-and-drill, particularly with syntax and morphology. Instead, Lotherington wants a greater focus to be placed on other components of digital literacy, identified as "cross-linguistic elements" and otherwise known as hashtags, emojis, and SMS (short message service abbreviati...
2 comments
Read more

And then there were more.

-
"Tired of Duolingo? Here are 5 more apps to help you learn a new language" by Lindsay Hoffman of FOX17 https://www.fox17online.com/morning-mix/tired-of-duolingo-here-are-5-more-apps-to-help-you-learn-a-new-language Strangely coincidental. While combing through my alerts, I heard the echo of Student A from my first period ELA class today: "I'll just use Duolingo. I am soooooooo tired of Duolingo." My class and I had been discussing the question: "Should foreign language courses be offered in middle school?" This was one of 15 questions that I had generated in order to introduce The Argument module, and students were learning how to write claims based on their personal opinions. Student A happened to sit right beside me, and upon hearing his distress, I asked, "Why are you soooooooo tired of Duolingo?" He replied, "Because my mom makes me do it allllllll the timmmmmmmme." About ten years ago when my district was in the thr...
3 comments
Read more

App$ 2020

-
App$ 2020 I was immediately enthralled when I read the subtitle, "Learn a New Language No Matter Your Style with These 10 Apps." Just imagine these 10 apps in an ELD classroom with different learning styles, diverse background knowledge, and varying levels of English proficiency. A win-win, right?! Unfortunately, no. Although Shelly Brown supplies us with "The Best Language Learning Apps of 2020," these apps come at a cost: a cost. Duolingo, a very popular second language learning app, is game-oriented and overall fun, allowing users to partake in conversation and vocabulary drills and to earn streaks toward usage goals. There are even short stories that users can read and check their comprehension. However, if users want to download valuable lessons and fresh practice sessions without being bombarded with ads or the threat of losing lives and streaks, then the Premium membership will cost users each $10 a month. Another vocabulary-building app is Busuu. This ...
2 comments
Read more

Is there an app for that?

-
Is there an app for that? My initial entire focus of this blog adventure was to discover valuable apps that would truly benefit my middle school ELs' second language learning. This year my ELs were provided iPads to use throughout their day. However, they were given neither instruction nor recommendations, and the devices have become mere tools of translation. An alert this week produced "Using Mobile Apps for Teaching ESL in Higher Education Settings" by Sangeeta Johri, and I was stopped in my tracks and forced to reflect upon reading. Although Johri focuses on MALL (rather than CALL) and ELs at the post-secondary level (rather than the secondary level), Johri penned several points that readjusted my position regarding the use of technology and second language acquisition. I realized that I was focusing too much on the app itself as being the silver bullet for second language learning. Johri discusses how apps can limit human contact. In addition, many second languag...
Post a Comment
Read more

What do you mean I have an accent?

-
Second Language Learning: Pronunciation vs. Accent  In reflecting upon the results of my Google alerts this week, I have discovered that second language does NOT necessarily mean English, Spanish, or French. In fact, I received more information regarding second language in terms of coding language.  While I initially thought that maintaining a blog might be a challenge, perhaps figuring out the science required to pen a functional Google alert might be my ultimate goal! Despite this speed bump, one particular delivered article spun my ELD wheels. “Foreign Language Learnings have a Paradox in Pronunciation” discusses the difficulty in achieving “the correct pronunciation” while learning a second language. Stemming from a study of 24 subjects using various recordings, the finding is that speakers of a second language can easily detect mistakes in pronunciation in others but cannot detect mistakes in their own speaking, even after many years of speakin...
1 comment
Read more