World Languages - Developing and Assessing Interpersonal Communication: Guiding Learners to Maintain Conversations and Discussions
Connect & Engage
How can language teachers best support learners to move from merely reacting to questions to taking on increasing responsibility to maintain conversations, successfully negotiate meaning, and sustain discussions with peers?
Identify the challenges to engage learners in conversations and discussions. Examine the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements to identify the communication strategies and language functions that learners need to develop to move from Novice to Intermediate to Advanced levels of proficiency in the Interpersonal Mode of Communication. Explore how the Modes of Communication integrate to support development of all three (Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational), as learners investigate, explain, and reflect on critical content that is of importance to them.
Learn
How can language teachers guide learners to develop the skills to sustain student-to-student conversations in which they negotiate meaning and exchange ideas, information, and opinions?
Experience and analyze specific tasks that develop higher levels of proficiency in the Interpersonal Mode. By looking at data from heritage language learners (HLLs), identify the unique needs to develop HLLs’ discussion skills. Learn to use backward design to identify and plan the learning of the Interpersonal Communication strategies that learners need to be successful on the summative assessment of a unit of instruction. Build your repertoire of high leverage teaching practices to facilitate target language comprehensibility, support pair and small group conversations, and guide learners to discuss authentic texts.
Reflect & Apply
Come with a unit of instruction you teach that will serve as the example to which we will apply each concept. You will design a variety of tasks to develop learners’ Interpersonal Communication skills and strategies, create formative assessments to gauge learners’ progress, and finalize a summative assessment of Interpersonal Communication for your unit. Examine a variety of tools and rubrics to provide feedback that will help learners self-reflect, set learning targets, and focus on the elements that will improve their proficiency in Interpersonal Communication.
Outcomes
• I can describe the elements of Interpersonal Communication that lead to improvement for learners to move across the continuum of proficiency (from Novice to Intermediate to Advanced);
• I can create effective tasks for developing and practicing Interpersonal Communication in one unit of instruction;
• I can design the formative and summative assessments for one unit of instruction to provide evidence of learners’ progress to a higher level of proficiency in the Interpersonal Mode;
• I can provide feedback to help all learners improve their Interpersonal Communication.
Advance Preparation/Prerequisites
This workshop will build on the previous three years of NESA Fall/Winter Training Institutes focused on best practices for teaching and assessing languages; however, prior participation is not required.
Activities will activate participants' prior knowledge on each topic, create shared understanding, and allow time to reflect on how they have or how they plan to apply key concepts in their support for language learners.
*Please bring a laptop/tablet to this workshop.
