Blog

Hello everyone and welcome back to #langchat! This past Thursday’s discussion led us through a challenging topic in language education—listening strategies that improve comprehension of native speakers. Even some of the most fluent speakers can still have trouble with this, so how do we best nurture our students’ comprehension? Participants shared many awesome ideas that […]

Do you need some fresh ideas to motivate your students to write more in the target language? Your colleagues at #LangChat shared many wonderful ideas, as usual. Read on to discover fresh ideas, links to inspiring sites and even see some work samples from students. Blogs are a great way to get your students writing […]

Thanks to all our dedicated #LangChat twitter participants who shared great ideas and resources to help encourage and increase student use of target language (TL) in class. Thanks especially to the moderator, Elle_Spanish, also known as Elvira Deyamport. While the focus of our conversation was TL use in the classroom, it was noted that it […]

Our #LangChat on “Games in the language classroom” was full of great ideas and discussion. I’ll try to summarize most of the ideas here. Pull up a chair and grab a cup of coffee, there are so many great ideas to share! Thanks to Diego Ojeda and Elvira Deyamport for moderating and for all the […]

Here at Calico Spanish and Kids Immersion, we are increasingly interested in facilitating teacher collaboration. To that end, we are co-moderating a Twitter chat focused on topics related to world language learning. How does a Twitter Chat work? Each week the chat moderators will post a poll with the possible topics for discussion. We tweet […]

The #LangChat discussion on Feb 3rd was full of ideas and discussion on “Rethinking the ‘teaching’ of vocabulary.” We had a great group of participants sharing ideas, links and insights. After all, this is a group of language educators and “they” have a lot to say (as noted by @tmsaue1.) – Follow the blog on […]

The results of this week’s poll are in! Language teachers across the globe are rethinking the way vocabulary is taught in foreign language classes. Join our conversation on Twitter at 8 pm ET using the hashtag #langchat to hear from your colleagues and gain new strategies to effectively “teach” vocabulary. It is sure to be […]

February is Discover Languages month. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages does a great job of promoting language learning in the USA. The ACTFL website has excellent resources to help you in your quest to expand language learning and appreciation in your community. You will also find links to interesting sites that […]

We teach languages to give students opportunities to go out into the world and communicate. This week during our #LangChat on Twitter (8 pm Eastern Thursdays), we’ll discuss ideas for task-oriented activities that give students skills they can use in the real world. I am excited to discuss this topic because I have often found […]

Our first #LangChat on Twitter was a great success. Participants discussed the importance of communicative competence and the need to use effective research-based techniques to move students towards increased accuracy over time. Accuracy becomes more important in presentational situations, whereas the rest of the time, communication is the goal of language usage. Giving our students […]