Teaching+Across+the+Curriculum

Teaching Across the Curriculum

One of the challenges in teaching today is to //teach across the curriculum//. It is no longer considered enough to teach basic language skills alone. Students must be taught things that are age-appropriate and meet their developmental needs. They should be asked to think about their newly acquire knowledge or skill-set in the foreign language and employ these, as in any other academic context, in a way that will reinforce their emerging language skills and encourage higher order thinking. What better way to do that than to use what is being taught in their core content areas in a foreign language? Teaching across the curriculum provides opportunities to teach content that otherwise often goes ignored, reinforces core area content, and provides a richer language experience not only for the student, but also the teacher. The ideas I had about teaching across the curriculum were heavily influenced by the Annenberg Learner series (click on sign below and scroll to bottom of page to connect to many fabulous videos about foreign language teaching in the practice!).

The following video was made after teaching 4 Spanish lessons //across the curriculum// to a mixed-age group of 1st and 2nd graders in an informal program. My plan was to mirror what the teacher was teaching. I used this knowledge to determine what basic language skills would be most useful in teaching content; similarly, I analyzed the content to determine how it could be used to best teach basic structures. At the time, the students were learning numbers, shapes and colors. First, I made an informal assessment of students' prior knowledge of Spanish and found that many had a very superficial understanding of numbers 1-10 in Spanish (due primarily to watching //Dora the Explorer//). Believing it would make it easier for most students to achieve a degree of success immediately, I made the decision to start my first lesson with the numbers. This choice also allowed me to teach a very basic and useful grammatical structure (//"I have/ you have")// in the form of a functional chunk. Further, in the initial lesson I planned to teach some commands (look, listen, repeat, etc) in the context of teaching numbers. This determined, I designed series of lessons around the use of the grammatical functions (//"I have/ you have", "it is", and "there is/are")// with numbers, colors, and shapes. This made it possible to also teach yes/no questions, and questions with how many as well as teach the question word "what".

media type="vimeo" key="34810565" height="331" width="500" align="center" (Sorry about the quality of the first few clips...   the video does get much better...I promise!)