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Teaching online? Here is an engaging activity for language classes that will get your students speaking your target language.

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Teaching Online: Using Google Apps to Host Guest Speakers

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.

Using Google Apps to host guest speakers from anywhere in the world. In this presentation, you’re going to learn how to plan and organize a guest speaker session in your target language. Very useful now that so many of us are teaching online.

For your students, you’re going to learn how to host a session using Google Apps. You’re going to learn how to record the session to use later as a listening comprehension exercise, and you’re gonna learn how to find guest speakers to invite to your classroom. I’m Janina Klimas. I’ve a B.A. in Theater Arts and Foreign Languages and an M.A. in the Teaching of Languages. I’ve had wonderful opportunities to be able to work with lots of teachers all over the world through ACTFL at their annual convention,  and through publishing on The Language Educator.

I have another side to me that’s also a polyglot who loves languages, and try to learn what I can from people learning and teaching online. So I spend a lot of time studying languages on my own because it’s a passion, but also because I find my best language learning or teaching activities for my students.

The most engaging ones come from my own personal engagement in language study, and this activity is one of them. So why have guest speakers you students will get to have authentic communication with people outside of the classroom community. They’ll gain confidence in the target language. They’ll have exposure to different accents and dialects. They’ll get an opportunity for true immersion using the knowledge and language of a native speaker of the language you’re teaching. And it will show students ways to build skills without necessarily going abroad. It’s going to show them that what they’re learning works. And you don’t need.

To have this huge life disrupting experience, you can do this with just a little bit of time every day and become perfectly proficient in a language.

So this is a level novice speaker session clip. This person’s from Argentina. We’re not actually going to watch the clip, but essentially my students had to prepare the questions in advance.

And I’ll show you exactly how they did that later, but they were really prepared with their questions.

Which they prepared beforehand because their novice level speakers, they speak in words and phrases are not really creating with language so much yet. So they had to really kind of load on the front end in preparing their questions. So your step one, you’re going to select a theme based on your learning objectives and also the level of the students. Obviously, the basic personal information, nature and the environment, education, travel, health, fun and leisure time are just a few.

It’s great teaching languages because really you can make so many things.