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. I think it’s been a great place to organize work that kids can find really easily, they can download it, I can share it right out of my drive. I want to do a little bit more with that, with setting up Google Classroom, I might even do something on Canva where you put your email address or some ways people can get in touch with you.

It’s a great tool, whether you’re teaching online or not. Routines. Early in my teaching career, I was able to spend a day with Harry Wong, he spoke at my school district. And if you’ve ever seen him or read his book, what he talks about is just, it’s really simple, common sense and I think those are even the words that he used. Most of what he teaches is simple, common sense, but we get so overwhelmed with so many other things as teachers, I think we forget some of the simple things. And that is not to knock teachers trust me, I’m told that teachers make more decisions than air traffic controllers, one of the highest stress jobs in the world. I can tell you, none of that surprises me because there’s a constant adding onto teacher’s plates that I see. There’s more and more things that we’re responsible for, more and reports we have to fill out, more and more and more and more and more and not less and less and less and less and less.

So he said a few things that really resonated with me and they’ve really been impactful. So the thing that really resonated was that first and foremost, Wong says, “Don’t worry about any content instruction for the first two weeks.” And he’s not saying that you should sit around and do nothing. However, we should think more about the routines and procedures in our classrooms and how things are done and making sure that students know how to ask where things are, how to do things, et cetera. And train them in the way our classroom runs, how we do things. And I’m not going to lie to you, I find this hard every year. I’m probably more nervous than the kids when they come to school. Like what kind of year is it going to be? And I know that that beginning of school, I’m setting up how it’s going to go, so I know that’s really important.

But I saw this amazing opportunity as a language teacher. This is brilliant because we can spend the first couple of weeks working on all of these class routines while teaching languages, right, just using the target language. Classroom commands, teaching kids how to do things in your classroom. So some of the routines that I do every day is, go into the calendar and learn lots of commands, learn how to ask go to the bathroom, drink, nurse. And I write them specifically into my lesson plans every day, because I really value them and I want the kids to value them when they see them. This is an important part of what we do. And what’s really great about it is that you can basically skip over some of the… or really gloss over really quickly some of these units in your textbooks.

So if you teach a year one language, you’re going to find yourself doing a lot of, weather, numbers and seasons. Well, you know what, just do your calendar every day, using comprehensible input, talk about it every day, you’re going to hear them starting to talk about it. And then if you need to be out for some reason, leaving a couple of projects, make some great sub plans and I’ll leave some projects for you to check out if you want to do that in your class. And one thing I thought was really interesting is that Harry Wong say that he’s never asked students how they are. And I thought that’s something I asked all the time as a language teacher.

How are you? [foreign language 00:08:36]. Don’t do it. And I even got a little bit defensive though, why is he telling me not to do this? And he says, students have problems with their friends and they don’t need any more friends problems so never asked how they are. What they just need for you to know is that it’s nice to see them. Now, I know that you’re going to do some [foreign language 00:09:06] to teach that in your class, if you teach Spanish or the equivalent, [foreign language 00:09:10] or whatever that means because it’s just part of your content, right, and they’re not going to have the language skills to be able to express back. But I think it’s a really interesting idea that’s really resonated with me. It’s also nice because then it reminded me, I can say something nice to each one of them and comprehensible input every day, [foreign language 00:09:33], for example, And then they can use that word wall to answer you, right, so it has to have a big cheat sheet up there.

Find your tribe. I so wish social media even existed. I don’t even think it existed when it started teaching, to be honest with you. There are all these wonderful teachers on Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest and they’re sharing their classrooms, their ideas, and supporting each other. Pinterest has been one of my very favorites for content and finding these tribes. So it’s one of the biggest search engines in the world, I learned a couple of years ago. So you can find lots of ideas and inspiration and see other classrooms. It’s been one of my most valuable resources for teaching languages. And you could make a lot of great projects out of it too.

Games. I highly recommend having at least 10 or 15 games that are super fun and take little prep because you don’t need more to do, you’re a teacher, right, you’re you’re changing the world. You don’t need more work. I think it’s really important because we need to maximize the time that we have with our students. So for many, it’s only time when kids are with us, that they’re getting exposure to the target language. And what we also teach can be perceived as really hard by some people, and I think having fun ways to let students practice the content that we teach really kind of takes the edge off. I’m going to link to some games for you, so different guides. I love Teachers Pay Teachers. I have shared a lot right. During the summers, I don’t know about you, but I work at a school where I’ve taught multiple things. I’ve taught as many as seven different courses before. Over a couple of subject areas so I mainly am a foreign language teacher, but I’ve also taught English and drama and doing all that together is hard.

And I’ve spent a lot of time during the summer investing in making projects and materials so that my school year goes much easier. I think it’s really important. Maybe you want to spend all your time in your classroom, but I don’t. And I don’t hate it, but I don’t want to spend all my time there either because I think the only way to get through this, to do this and to enjoy your life is to have an oxygen mask, which means if you got to reach for help, reach for help, and there’s plenty of times that I’m on Teachers Pay Teachers to find resources that are going to make my life easier when my kids are still learning and enjoying themselves.

Fun, relevant professional development. So early on in my career, my Spanish wasn’t nearly as strong as it is now. And we didn’t have all the great resources that you could improve your skills from anywhere in the world. And I’m a really passionate linguist. I love teaching and learning languages and, even as much as I love it, there are so many rough spots and teaching languages and not all of my students are all the people that we come across are going to share our passion for being able to speak more than one language, much less a few. And living in different countries and having lived with people who speak different languages and learning languages beyond the ones I teach has been a real necessity for me. And one unexpected benefit that has come out of my learning languages and studying languages on my own is having a richer understanding of how languages are learned and acquired and how that can translate to the classroom and finding fun, engaging resources to bring back to my classroom.

And one of my very favorite tools that I’m sure you know about is Netflix. They’re producing content globally and their library of content in different languages is growing. And there’s even an extension called Netflix for language learners and it’s the ultimate tool to have fun and learn a language at the same time. It’s a Chrome extension and it makes everything really comprehensible. And there are some organizations I’ll link to, ACTFL, ATSP, TCL, AATF, I’m so disappointed that there was no conference this July. I was supposed to go to Puerto Rico.

And of course that’s small in comparison to so much of what’s happened in the world, but I really do find these conferences a real lifeline. You meet other language teachers that really inspire you and language teachers were so generous, we share so many things and I was really looking forward to connecting to my colleagues at there. And there’s a couple of things online, Ditch That Textbook and MFL Twitterati podcast two, they do a great job of curating ideas and sharing their ideas. Italki, this is great professional development. I discovered this a few years ago and it’s amazing. So Italki, you can connect with native speakers and it’s not language exchange. So if you’re like me, I love the idea of language exchange and I love language exchange when it’s done right, I’ve done it before. But I’m too busy, I have to go to the lesson.

I don’t have time to do language exchange right now in my life. So Italki you could find a teacher or what they call a community tutor, who is not a credentialed teacher. And you connect with them. You go to FaceTime or Skype or Google Hangouts or whatever their methods of communication are, and you talk to them. It’s brilliant. And I’ve done a lot of activities with that in my classroom, adapted it to my classroom with native speakers of Spanish. So my students can talk to people from Spain, from Argentina. It’s really brilliant. So all of these things, I think in a digital environment, or even are even more critical.

Finding games to play online, I’ll link 100 plus activities that you can do out of your Google Drive. There are also some brilliant teachers out there who share a lot. I love Angie Torre and all of her, she has great comprehensible input activities and Google Drive activities. I want to say that they do a lot of things with escape rooms, digital escape rooms, which I’m really unfamiliar with, but I think I’m going to try this year. So I want to wish you a wonderful school year teaching languages.

Thank you for listening to the 5-Week Linguist Show with Janina Klimas. Join us each week here and visit us at reallifelanguage.com/reallifelanguageblog for more resources, for learning and teaching languages.

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