Event Date
Location: Olson 53A
Time: 2:00-4:00 PM
Description: This two-hour workshop aims to show first year language instructors how to encourage their students to exercise their critical thinking skills even if they are at the very beginning of learning a language. The instructors of the workshop believe that students can start thinking about the language and culture at a level beyond the basic exposure to grammar, vocabulary and a few cultural tidbits. In the first part of the workshop, the instructors will demonstrate how a basic set of vocabulary can be taught while actively promoting critical thinking about why the target culture views the vocabulary as it does. For example, the food section in every language textbook it different and instructors should be helping students notice that ‘bread’ in the target language is different from ‘bread ‘ in English and in some cultures there may be no bread at all. This is an intellectual leap forward for the students instead of learning the food vocabulary from the target culture and then being asked to tell what they had for breakfast in Davis (where the vocabulary is different from that of the target culture).
After short demonstrations, participants will create their own lesson that teaching a grammatical structure or a vocabulary set. The goal of the workshop is to mentor the participants through the process of creating a lesson, so that they have a lesson at the end and are able to create others.
Workshop instructors:
Carlee Arnett, Department of German and Russian
Kirsten Harjes, Department of German and Russian
Poonam Chauhan, Department of Classics (Hindi)
Gabriel Guillén, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (Spanish)