Teaching World Languages

This is a three-part series designed for teachers of world languages.  Each section stands alone as a course of ten hours and is awarded one credit by Seattle Pacific University.  The central objective of language instruction is to teach students to communicate in grammatically correct forms and to know when, where and to whom to apply those forms.  This objective is also known as communicative competence. The first course focuses on how people learn a second language and how this theory can be applied to various age groups in the classroom; practical applications will be a large part of the course.  The second course focuses on effective language-specific strategies and activities for teaching Spanish, French and Chinese.  The third course will address the topic of assessing student knowledge.

Principles and Practice

This course introduces participants to effective second language teaching.  A focus will be on demonstrations relating theory to classroom practice.  Participants will work with various learning styles, the cultural aspects of language learning and effective materials.  Participants will have opportunities to create syllabi and lesson plans consistent with the objective of creating communicatively competent students.  Most importantly, participants will learn how to assess their own teaching effectiveness.

Assessment Techniques

Effective teaching involves knowing if students are learning what they are taught and if that learning is aligned with course objectives.  Modern language teaching methodology aims for communicative competence.  As a teaching objective, communicative competence involves assessing at the discourse level.  This course will teach participants how to elicit various types of discourse for evaluation.  A variety of assessment instruments will be reviewed.  Most language tests follow traditional patterns and are often developed by large corporations. Effective teaching involves learning how to assess a student’s communicative competence without corporate help.

Teaching French/Mandarin Chinese/Spanish

This course provides teachers of French/Mandarin Chinese/Spanish with a wealth of techniques and materials that relate theory to classroom practice.  Teachers will work with a variety of disciplines such as drama and literature, state-of-the-art media, realia and culture-specific situations to create activities and materials that are effective in actively engaging students in genuine communicative exercises.  Discussion about topics of interest will include bringing wider communities into the classroom for exchange, pairing cultural learning with language learning, creating lesson plans for specific age groups and assessing one’s own teaching effectiveness.

Please click here to register. For more information, please call us at (206) 682-4463.