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Those Pesky Native Speakers....AGAIN!

The question I most frequently get asked - probably because I grew up speaking English myself and my daughters went through the Swiss public school system - is “how do I deal with native speakers in my classroom?” I will discuss this below starting with my own experiences and then generalize those points to some more practical tips. First of all, I would like to state that I get irritated by the question. Teachers in Switzerland have a 3-year degree in education and a lot of fieldwork. In every subject there will be learners who are more or less motivated, more or less interested, and have had more or fewer experiences in a subject. So when I get asked about native speakers, I think “have they not learned how to differentiate instruction?” and that they have it wrong. Teachers are not responsible for teaching native-level English (they cannot), but they ARE responsible that every child has an active, positive experience where they make progress. They ARE responsible for not just “follo...
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Who said no more vocabulary tests? Dear Parents, Your teacher asked me to write to you because there seems to be a modern misconception that good principles of modern foreign language teaching encourage your child’s teacher to purposefully neglect to provide you with a list of vocabulary and grammar items that your child can study at home. Your teacher is often asked “which grammar should my child know, which vocabulary?” Just because language aims are not spelled out in terms of structures and words does not mean that these structures and words are not there, otherwise volumes of respectable academic literature (Bablyonia 4/08) would not be dedicated to these topics! Moreover, the new curriculum does provide some suggestions for vocabulary and structures, but generally, how well you know a language is generally more and more defined by what you can DO in a language and this links more to reading, writing, speaking and listening. Grammar and vocabulary fall under the skills. Let’s take...
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Problem based learning

Last night I was wondering about two things: working interdisciplinarily and also problem based learning. About interdisciplinarity : On a superficial level, most things are interdisciplinary. If you teach English, you are also teaching things related to culture, to "self" and to many other topics. If you teach M&U, you are also teaching language, you are also teaching math, etc. However, if the school system is based on specific subjects having 45 minute blocks and there is this concept of teachers having a profile (some do English, some do art, some do French - but not all), on a feasibility level, this interdisciplinarity remains on this superficial level unless teachers really make an effort to network. So on the level of strategies, how do you have a strategy-based approach with the children in one subject and then ensure that they are transferring the strategies that they "train" to other subjects? Of course it's possible, but it's more complex due...
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