Bonjour!

Hello, everyone! My name is Raquelle Bostow, and this is my third year serving as a Graduate Student Affiliate in the Center for Second Language Studies. I am a graduate student in the Department of French and Italian, where I work on French feminism. While this is only my second year teaching, I have already fallen in love with the experience of generating relationships and conversation within the foreign language classroom. Currently, I teach introductory French courses, which cover everything from the present to subjunctive tenses and incredible amounts of vocabulary and culture.

 Inside my classroom, I like to create a relaxed and respectful atmosphere where all classroom participants speak almost uniquely in the target language. Everyday students are engaged in writing, listening, reading and speaking activities and are required to move around, converse with classmates as well as the teacher, and practice structures. This year, my department is implementing the “Flipped Classroom” method of teaching, which requires students to teach the material to themselves at home in order to come to class and practice vocabulary and structures. Thus, there is a huge emphasis on communication. I have already noticed an increase in the amount of verbal exchange in my classroom!

 Culture finds its way into my classroom in various ways. Each class starts out with a YouTube video of a francophone artist, allowing the students to jump right into the target language mindset. In order to discover more about French culture, I have students use Twitter, Google maps, and various French websites. In addition to these technologies, I love the Prezi platform as a way to put together cultural and linguistic presentations for my students. Overall, my largest goals for my students are that they become motivated, empowered and enthusiastic about their language acquisition experience, that they discover how using a foreign language is relevant to their own life, either through personal or professional interests, and that they understand and appreciate francophone sociocultural norms while acquiring cultural literacy in the target language.

 So, bonjour and bienvenue, and I look forward to the conversations that this CSLS blog engenders!

Welcome/Bienvenidos/Bem-vindos to our readers!

Welcome to our new CSLS blog! My name is Megan, and I am one of the Graduate Student Affiliates here at the Center for Second Language Studies. I can hardly believe this is my fourth year working in the Center. A little about me: I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department working on a dissertation on the representation of Haiti and Haitians in Dominican and Dominican American literature. Although in the past I have taught Spanish courses here at Vanderbilt, this fall I am teaching Portuguese (PORT 102). Regardless of the language, I love teaching. I stress the communicative aspect of my language classrooms and my students are constantly moving around the room and speaking with different classmates. If you want to sit in the same chair every class and not get out of it until class ends, my class is probably going to be a wake-up-call for you (quite literally)! An important part of my language classroom is engaging the students with authentic material – you can expect to walk into my classroom and hear a video clip playing, a music video blaring, or a Skype conversation with a native speaker/classroom taking place. The incorporation of technology into the language classroom is also important to me. I am very interested in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). I have worked on projects using programs such as WeVideo, Google Earth, and Skype (a form of Oral Computer Mediated Communication or OCMC). This past summer I taught Spanish 101 and used Pinterest in the classroom for the first time to make virtual dictionaries and create a space for students to interact digitally with one another to practice different grammar concepts learned in class. My hope is that students walk away from my class with not only improved speaking, listening, and writing skills, but also an understanding of the culture(s) related to the language and a more in-depth sense of inter-cultural competence. Once again, bloggers, Welcome! Bienvenidos! Bem-vindos! Thanks for reading!

Introducing Myself

I’m Rebecca Panter, a seventh-year in the German department and CSLS Graduate Student Affiliate for 2014–2015. My first experiences with teaching were as an English Teaching Assistant at a vocational school in Germany, where, among other things, I taught a conversation course to a group of high school students learning to be carpenters. In the years since this introduction to pedagogy, I have gone on to teach all of the beginner and intermediate German language courses at Vanderbilt, some of them multiple times.

A recurring feature in my classroom teaching is the use of games or game-like activities for language instruction. Uncertain outcomes, goal-orientedness, and a degree of competition bring elements of suspense and fun into the activities. One of my aims as a teacher is to facilitate an energetic atmosphere in class that encourages everyone to show their most talkative side.

As a language instructor, I see my role as more than just a conductor of exercises. I believe that students learn best when they can form an emotional connection to what they are learning, so I strive to create situations that involve, for example, curiosity, suspense, humor, or surprise. In the attempt to realize this goal, I am continually looking for ways to incorporate narrative into my classes – be it in the form of literature, film, other media, or student-generated narratives. In the past, I have also enjoyed experimenting with using social media such as YouTube and Twitter for class assignments. At the moment, I am hoping to combine three of my fascinations – narrative, games, and technology – by using the game engine Unity 3D to build a virtual world based on a literary text.

I look forward to blogging more on this topic as my project develops!

 

Welcome!

Welcome to the Center for Second Language Studies blog!  On a monthly basis, our Graduate Student Assistants (GSA’s) will report on a variety of topics related to classroom teaching, Second Language Studies and Digital Humanities.  Feel free to comment!  I will moderate comments, in order to keep out the spam, but I hope that we might develop an active online learning community!  If you teach language at Vanderbilt, and are interested in becoming a blog writer, let me know!

Todd

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