Tips for Foreign Language Courses

Overview

Foreign language courses and programs are designed to build familiarity and proficiency with languages other than English, such as Spanish, French, Chinese, ASL, or Arabic. These courses focus on developing language skills through speaking, listening, reading, and writing as well as the social and cultural history of the people who speak the language. A significant element of learning a new language is authentic talk through numerous practice opportunities for oral output.

Given this, language courses present unique design considerations when delivered online. While the language and objective ultimately drive design, this document offers some general guidance and best practices. This document is organized around three key ideas for language instruction and how to leverage those key ideas in the online environment.

1. Oral proficiency is a critical component for successful online language learning.

2. Learners interact with language through hearing the language (input), practicing the language (negotiation and sociocultural contexts), and producing the language (output)

3. Interleave speaking, listening, reading, and writing to encourage holistic language development and the development of each skill.

Oral proficiency is a critical component in successful online language learning.

Practicing oral skills leads to increased linguistic dexterity, interactive competence, and confidence in the new language. Providing multiple and varied opportunities to practice and self-correct oral skills in an online environment is achievable and essential.

• Model oral proficiency in target language. Record video demonstrations of you and others authentically using the target language with proficiency. Students will have the opportunity to hear the language used in an exemplary manner. Isolate these from your lecture content—if there is lecture—as these should be modeled in an authentic context. Isolating these demonstrations allows students to refer back to them easily.

• Create asynchronous opportunities for oral practice. Prompt students to video or audio record themselves speaking with the target language. Ask students to respond to demonstrations, converse asynchronously through a discussion forum, or connect them with native speakers. Ensure these opportunities are authentic by guiding the context of these conversations and framing them around real life conversation.

• Create synchronous opportunities for oral practice. Whether during whole group sessions, break out groups, or partner meet-ups outside of class time, live discussion provides authentic oral practice for students.

• Provide formative feedback. Set up a feedback plan that includes targeted feedback to individual students, whole group feedback, peer to peer feedback, and validated feedback. Each layer of feedback will ensure that all practice opportunities are strengthening skill development.

Use external resources to provide additional practice opportunities. Find and share pre-existing resources that provide students with additional practice opportunities. Resources such as computer-assisted “Cued Pronunciation Readings” or language apps provide students with oral practice opportunities and immediate feedback, enriching their learning without demanding additional instructional time.

Learners interact with language through hearing the language (input), practicing the language (negotiation and sociocultural contexts), and producing the language (output).

Student interaction with content, other students, the instructor, and the digital learning interface can provide a social-cultural experience of learning the language that is similar to the way in which a person acquired their first language.

• Create immersive spontaneous spaces. Design the course to have spaces that require immersion, especially informal spaces such as the course message board, emails, and discussion forms. Using the target language solely in these informal spaces builds ensures non-academic use of the language and normalizes speaking, reading, and writing in the target language. Additionally, there are a plethora of resources, such as movies, TV shows, podcasts, and audiobooks to be found on the internet. Require that students watch or listen to media in the target language.

• Interact with advanced and native speakers. Invite additional advanced or native speakers to the class to join class discussions and contribute. These interactions are more authentic than simply interaction with other classmates. These can be done asynchronously or during live sessions.

• Facilitate student-to-student interaction. Assign tasks that require peer-to-peer interaction, collaboration, and feedback. For example, have students introduce themselves and pose questions to other students in the target language. Or, have students share their writing with each other and ask students to provide feedback to each other. Requiring that students meet outside of live class time can also encourage authentic interaction.

• Interleave cultural learning with language learning. Engage with cultural images, artifacts, and artwork. Understanding culture allows students to understand language, and vice-versa. Deepening cultural understanding can support students in expressing themselves in their new language. Require students to research artists, writers, and important figures and consume media produced in countries where the target language is spoken. There are a number of effective resources that students can use asynchronously, such as watching movies in the target language, reading or listening to audio books, or reading news in other languages. Students can then share and discuss these resources asynchronously or during live sessions.

• Vary means of output. Ensure that students read, write, speak, and multiple times each week. This might look like posting audio or video recordings of themselves responding to the professor’s demonstration or a reading. In addition, creative visual output can provide students with a creative outlet to demonstrate proficiency. Creating a website, comic strip, or children’s book can be effective consolidation and synthesizing activities while reflecting more authentic use of the language. Asynchronously sharing these with peers or engaging in live session peer revision is an effective way to practice authentic reading or the target language.

• Consider section sizes or small group work. To provide students with quality practice opportunities and formative feedback on all practice, consider smaller section sizes and small group breakouts during live sessions.

Interleave speaking, listening, reading, and writing to encourage holistic language development and the development of each skill.

Speaking, listening, reading, and writing are considered the foundations of language learning. Explicitly connecting the four modes of language learning allows students to make connections between the modes, such as allowing them to leverage their strength in one mode to support their struggles in another. For example, if a student struggles with writing, they can rely on their strength in speaking to build their writing skills. The focus on all four of the modes also encourages well-rounded proficiency.

• Align and identify multiple weekly objectives. Plan your weeks around speaking, listening, reading, and writing objectives. This helps to ensure that you are covering each mode each week and providing practice opportunities for each mode. When writing weekly objectives, ensure that the four modes focus on using the same skill, vocabulary, and language structures.

• Revisit and spiral skills. Prime students through revisiting previously learned skills to lay the groundwork for new learning. Students will continue to use previous learning as they continue to build their language proficiency.

• Vary input and output mode. Have students respond with output modes that are different from the input mode. For example, have students speak about something they read, write about a conversation they have, etc. Varying these input and output modes supports students with connecting the different modes of communication. Asynchronously, students can watch a short video in the target language and then write a response summarizing and asking questions about what they read. This might also look like students reading an article asynchronously and then discussing it in the target language during a live session.

Additional Resources

2U has not endorsed these resources, and is not responsible for the content within the links. We share them in the hope that they might be useful.

• ACTFL High Leverage Teaching Practices

• ACTFL 21st Century Skills Map

• DELE Requirements - A2 DELE Requirements and test

• ACTFL Webinar - Developing Proficiency While Teaching Remotely

• ACTFL Webinar - Now that you're working remotely - what are your questions?