The Italian Language Advisory Committee and The John D. Calandra Italian American Institute cordially invite you to attend the workshop

 Evolving Pedagogies in the Modern Language Classroom

Dear Fellow CUNY Foreign Language Teachers,

Please join us for a half-day workshop on language teaching at CUNY’s Calandra Institute on Jan. 25th from 10:00-2:30. Several professors from various CUNY schools have put together the following program in the hopes that it will help us improve our teaching as we reflect on and share our language-teaching practices.

As you can see in the brief program below, it is a relatively casual affair but we do need to know if you intend to come. Please RSVP to giulia.guarnieri@bcc.cuny.edu if you plan on coming. We hope to have at least a dozen attendees, and we are inviting all foreign language teacher in the CUNY system. Even though some of the examples will be in Italian, the presentations will be in English. Please spread the word and RSVP by January 15th. 

10:00-10:30 Coffee

10:30-11:00 Teaching Foreign Languages at CUNY
An open discussion of what we all find to be our strengths and areas for improvement while teaching in the CUNY system (led by Tom Means, BMCC, and Morena Corradi, Queens College)

11:00-11:30, Lesson Planning, Mary Refling, BCC
Planning a Lesson in Four Easy Steps.  We will review how to write more effective, performance-based objectives, plan your classroom activities for varying time segments, and avoid over-reliance on textbook exercises and worksheets.  The last ten minutes will be devoted to games and props that make learning vocabulary and doing verb drills much, much more fun.

11:30-12:00 Traditional Instruction and Task-based Instruction, Tom Means, BMCC
This talk will present what is commonly referred to as Traditional Instruction (TI) or PPP (Presentation, Practice, Produce) of foreign languages, and why it is still the dominant method of teaching languages in the US. We will then discuss one emerging methodology that has some empirical support for its efficacy: Task-based instruction (TBI). The presenter will walk through one “cycle” of TBI, illustrating its most promising features to foster fluency and accuracy in our students.

12:00-12:30 Lunch break (pizza offered by Calandra Institute)

12:30-1:00 Culture through Language and Language through Culture, Samuel Ghelli, York College
A discussion of how a study of the bones of the (Italian) language–lexicon, morphology, syntax–can represent/teach the culture of the (Italian) people. Such a grammatical analysis can help students see culture through language.

1:00-1:30 Harnessing technology to help deliver pedagogically sound lessons, Antonietta D’Amelio, Baruch College

Technology plays a crucial role in exposing learners to authentic language and culture but it can also be used to deliver highly effective lessons.  The presenter will demonstrate and discuss some proven strategies that will help you create highly interactive learning modules that boost learning and promote target language fluency.

·       Learning the present indicative tense using PowerPoint
·       Expanding vocabulary through music and YouTube
·       Speaking meaningfully by incorporating short films

The presenter will discuss and demonstrate effective ways to achieve your objective and how to effectively utilize available media resources in order to support and expand in-class instruction.

1:30-2:00 Introduction to Blackboard and Web. 2.0 tools, Giulia Guarnieri, BCC

This session will provide a pedagogical framework on how to meaningfully integrate technology into your courses. We will begin by exploring some of the basics of Blackboard and then present several Web 2.0 tools that will stimulate interest in the subject matter and generate a passion for learning foreign languages.

2:00-2:30 Q&A session with all presenters