Ever wish you could match your students with actual native-speakers for outside-of-class practice? Jae, our Korean tutor, is using Facebook to do just that. Jae has a Facebook profile for his Korean classes (which he keeps professional), and gives his students assignments to post comments in Korean on the main page. His Korean friends then comment back in Korean, and correct mistakes.
For example, the assignment might be for students to give directions in Korean to their favorite Korean restaurant, using GPC Dunwoody as the starting point. Students log-on to Facebook, post their directions, and then get responses from native-speakers of Korean. The assignments often spark long conversations, and many of the students have become real-life friends with their Facebook friends.
This is a wonderful way to get the students involved and using their language skills outside of class to actually engage in a new community and make new friends. Great work, Jae!
For anyone looking to hone their language skills by listening to authentic news casts, the BBC can be a great resource. The BBC has news services for several of our languages, including: Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, and Russian. For each of these languages, you'll be able to find short videos on a diversity of topics - all narrated by native-speakers of the language of study. Since the news casts are short, students can watch them several times in order to get a general understanding of the topic discussed, or to listen for specific information and answer comprehension questions designed for their level. For example, students of Portuguese 1001 might watch the following video:
As students watch and listen, they might try to answer the following questions (to be written and answered in Portuguese, of course):
1. What is the crocodile's name?
2. What country is he from?
3. How much does he weigh?
4. What is the name of his human best friend?
5. How old is the crocodile?
6. Where are the residents of the village going to put the crocodile's body?
A class of 1002 students might watch the same video, but answer more complex questions and use the past tense (a useful modification to the practice, since the poor crocodile has passed away).
For our Category IV languages, short news videos can still be useful. We can design simple listening tasks for these students, like 'listen five times and write down all the numbers you hear', or 'describe all the people shown using at least seven different adjectives.'
If you have any other ideas of how short news casts might be used in class, or if you have a specific video you'd like to share, leave a note in the comments!
A nice (and easy) way to include some culture into a language practice can be to have students simply discuss a photo or advertisement from one of your countries of study. Russian tutors can bring photos of Moscow, for example, and give a different photo to each student. Beginning-level students can describe the photograph with simple sentences, while more advanced students can either use the photos to invent travel advertisements or as a jumping-off point for fictional stories they invent about the people and places pictured. Of course, this gives the tutor an excellent opportunity to discuss the real places or traditions shown, and hopefully encourages interest from students to learn more.
If you are looking for an easy way to get photos to use in class, The Realia Project is a good resource. Typing "Moscow" into the quick search on their site provided 150 images, each with a brief description. Of course, Google Images works well too...
How else have you used photographs in your classes?
