Last week I visited Nebraska for the first time :) I had really looked forward to the Museo Latino in Omaha to expand my Hispanic knowledge but sadly that museum fell short of my expectations. However, two days before I had a learning experience in the Durham Museum--in French.
I studied French in high school and reviewed a little bit of it this past spring. However, my skills are very weak. When I went to the information desk in the museum to ask a question, a man buying his entrance started speaking to the French clerk in her native tongue. I realized that by paying attention to the WHOLE exchange not focusing on one sentence at a time, I could follow along with the basic conversation. Did I know every word? Not at all. Did I understand what was going on? Yes. Could I produce sentences to respond when the man turned and asked me a question in French? No but I could give a short answer that got my point across.
The experience did not teach me brand new head knowledge but it gave me the chance to reflect on language learning, on what it's like to be starting to develop proficiency.
So what does this mean for my classroom? First of all, I need to keep pushing my beginning students to respond even if it's not in whole sentences. I want them to get to that point of fluency but a short response is better than no response. Second, I need to integrate more and more listening activities. Along with that, I want to try a few activities earlier in the year where I only let them listen to one sentence, think about it, and then the second sentence. Then I will give them a listening with the whole conversation in one chunk. I will use this type of an activity to promote the idea that it's the overall idea that is important, the little details come later.
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