Back to School: Tips for Language Teachers

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. If you want to learn a language or you teach a language, you’ve come to the right place, join Janina each week for tips, resources, and advice for making engaging language learning happen anytime, anywhere.

[Spanish 00:00:26]. Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. This week, I wanted to talk about essentials for starting the school year as a language teacher. Teaching languages is hard work. It’s also fun, rewarding, and essential for raising global citizens. When I started teaching languages, I worked at a private school in New England and then taught at a university in Seoul, South Korea, and they were both amazing experiences, lots of hard work. But they’re really different to my career teaching languages overseas at a K through 12 American school system.

Each year I have the goal of improving just a few parts of my practice. Early on in my career, I tried to do all the things and I realized that that’s just not realistic for anybody, and I think that there’s lots of expectations for teachers, that we’re super human, and I think that so many of you really just are, if that existed, but none of us are, we’re only human. So I want to share with you some of my shortcuts and from all of the years, 20, 25 years, I’ve been teaching, 26 years I’ve been teaching languages, and I hope that you guys can benefit from my experience.

So the very first thing is thinking about setting up your classroom. And I like to think about my classroom as my target language country, my language lab, and my classroom and my theater, my cinema all at once. And when they step into my room, they’re going to be learning new words, new ways of seeing the world, new places, geography, and meeting new people, and my classroom needs to be conducive to that, to teaching languages. And with regard to everything that’s visual, a word wall or survival wall is absolutely essential for beginners, and it’s really helpful for advanced students. So think all your survival language, and then for more advanced students, I would have connectors. I would use lots of connectors, things that transition words, openers, things like that, that they can quickly look at.

I love that visual culture. This helps fit my room, a place where they can see and experience the products, practices, and perspectives of the new culture that they’re enter, they’re starting to learn about. And for me, the thing that’s most essential about the physical environment is that it can be quickly adapted into circles, rows, tables, and that all of the desks can be pushed out of the way. And while I do lecture for short periods of time, I need students to be able to have dynamic and flexible groupings. Room for projects, games, role-plays, and ways to change the room easily and quickly.

And one thing I wish I knew about a little bit more about when I was a young teacher was about basic classroom organization, and my older wiser self now has a table where I have everything students could possibly need. Markers, crayons, colored pencils, stapler, extra copies, so everything can be easily found. I even have a basket where I place abandoned pens and pencil,. So tissues, tape, recycling paper, students can go there for anything that they need without needing to ask me. And it’s been really interested teaching online, that classroom setting up your classroom. What does that look like? That physical classroom?

I thought it was really nice that in Google Classroom, you could put pictures of the target language and save lots of announcements. I really want to use it in the future.