MAFLT

My experience

While researching career options during my undergraduate language studies, I found out that the main requirement to teach Spanish at a community college or university was to hold Master’s degree with at least 18 credit hours in Spanish. For that reason, I decided to continue my studies with a Master of Arts in Spanish with the intention of teaching the language at the community college level. When I got my first job as an adjunct instructor at a local community college, I realized that my lack of pedagogical preparation left me incompetent and oblivious as a language teacher.

My studies with MSU’s MAFLT program have not only pushed me to be a new teacher, but they have helped me to view and consider what it means to actually learn a new language. The course in Second Language Acquisition, as well as the course in Interlanguage Analysis, encouraged me to consider the perspective of the student and their role not just as a student, but as a language learner. While we didn’t necessarily focus our studies in these courses on pedagogical strategies, the concepts learned influence the way I make certain decisions in the classroom. SLA concepts like noticing and affective filter, among many others, have pushed me to make certain changes in the way I present information to my students or even manage my classroom. Reflecting on concepts of interlanguage studies, like error analysis and u-shaped learning have helped shape my realistic expectations for my students and gain insight from the patterns that I see in their language output.

The majority of the program courses focused more on language pedagogy than general language acquisition, especially Language Teaching Methods, FL Assessment, and Teaching FL with Technology. The Teaching Methods course was an exploration in different teaching methods, with an emphasis on communicative and task-based teaching, and the principles that guided each approach. This gave us an opportunity to reflect on our current teaching practices and consider what principles we were using to guide our lesson plans. In some cases, I found that decisions I was making in the classroom were fairly baseless, but I began making new lessons and modifying old ones based on the theories explored in class readings. This course helped shape my view of foreign language teaching, which is reflected in my teaching philosophy.

The Assessment and Technology courses were especially useful, as they focused not only on theory, but on practice as well. The Assessment course got me to take a deeper look at Task-Based Language Teaching and ways to assess language skills through tasks. I felt especially proud of the speaking assessment that I created and piloted with my beginning Spanish course. This was the first time I focused on creating an assessment task that was contextualized and focused on proficiency rather than grammar, mechanics, or memorization. The Technology course (taken at Old Dominion University, not Michigan State University) not only introduced me to a range of technology tools to use in the classroom, but practical and pedagogically-sound ways of incorporating them into lessons to foster student collaboration and task creation.

My most rewarding courses in this program were those that put language learning into larger overall contexts, specifically those of general literacy and intercultural competence. The Literacy course brought many issues to my attention, such as vocabulary teaching, writing as a process, genre-based writing, among many other topics. I appreciated the fact that this course relied heavily on reading numerous scholarly articles related to the issue of literacy as it relates to second language learning. Applying specific acquisition and pedagogical principles from the research we read, we created a final lesson plan to pilot with our students. I implemented my final lesson plan with the class I was teaching at the time, having students create their own websites to advertise a hotel from a Spanish-speaking country.

The course on intercultural competence encouraged me to consider the idea of culture in a non-traditional manner. Instead of reducing the idea of culture to a list of facts and figures, I began to think of the concept as a process of interaction with different groups of people and discovering different ways of thinking, using a second language. The final investigative project allowed me to contemplate the types of intercultural experiences one goes through in real life that may affect their development of intercultural competence (or lack thereof). I was proud of the activities that I created for my classroom during this course, which inspired my cumulative project for the Master’s program: a set of activities focused on developing students’ communicative and intercultural competencies. My goal in creating these activities was to produce contextualized classroom tasks using authentic materials that fit the current curriculum of my beginning Spanish courses.

The MAFLT program at MSU pushed me to reflect on my teaching practices and use research-based principles in creating new lessons and making decisions about the curriculum for my courses. The professors are extremely knowledgeable in their specializations and treat their students professionally and to a very high standard. I am extremely grateful for my experience with the program and would recommend to any foreign language teacher looking to develop their pedagogical skills and understanding of language acquisition.

ANDREW R. SEWICK - sewickan@gmail.com - MAFLT PORTFOLIO