Trying to Make Non-communicative Topics Communicative

Hola:

As you may know if you have spoken with me or read my earlier blog posts, I have really had a tough time with the curriculum for the eighth graders at my school. There's a lot in there that does not necessarily relate to a classroom. Let me explain what I mean by that:

Something with which I have been struggling a lot is the topic that I think appears in nearly every world language classroom: the restaurant. This is tough for me because I really want my class to always be real and, unfortunately for me, my classroom is not a restaurant. I really struggled with this from the get-go this year. We were pretending that the classroom was a restaurant.  The problem I now see with that is that the students know the classroom is not a restaurant, and they start to view it as language practice; "my teacher wants us to pretend that the classroom is a restaurant so that we can learn this vocabulary/grammar." That really goes against my desire to make the language real and have as communicative of a classroom as possible.

I have been thinking about it, though, and I believe that there are ways to give the students the skills to be successful in places like a restaurant without pretending like the classroom is a restaurant. Phrases like "may I have...?" are phrases that can be used in the class without having to pretend to order something. One thing that I did this year that I liked was having the students guess each other's food preferences. That was fun because we were learning about each other, but next year, I will try to make a greater task attached to it.

I was also struggling with the sports vocabulary because it was soooo non-communicative. At the recommendation of a colleague--shoutout to Lauren Hayes--I decided to have the students start doing the best that they could to explain the rules of a sport. What I found was that, when the students tried to explain the rules, they came across vocabulary that they really wanted to use. When they came across something that they couldn't say, I told them to work around it and just jot down what they wanted to say. Toward the end, we worked as a class to communicate the messages they wanted in the target language. As we have continued to do this, I have been really impressed by the students' abilities to circumlocute and explain things using their limited language ability.

If there is one thing I have learned this year, it is the importance of staying up to date on the research in language acquisition and language teaching. Right now, my Amazon wishlist is a bunch of books about language acquisition because I just find it so fascinating! My love of learning about language acquisition has given me an even greater love of teaching. I really look forward to learning more and challenging myself, and hopefully I will soon find more teachers who understand language acquisition and proficiency to help me grow as an educator.