It’s interview time again. All over the country administrative teams are sitting through tedious interviews with world language teacher candidates, smiling benignly and trying to stay awake. But help is here! This handy Buzzword Bingo card makes interviewing fun again. Simply mark every time one of the dubious, outdated or ineffective teaching practices on the card is mentioned or implied to weed out candidates the fun way. The first interviewer that gets a BINGO and works the word “bingo” into a comment or question wins! Hesitation, blank looks or omissions by the interviewee when answering questions also count, so pay close attention, and good luck finding candidates that use effective SLA strategy and practice!
NOTE ON ABSOLUTISM: Using some of these practices occasionally does not mean you are a bad teacher. The trick is to break the cycle of ineffective practice. We want to be moving away from these. I admit to having used some of them when time-crunched, tired, or preparing students to transition to a legacy methods teacher, but that is not the way we should habitually teach. Still… hearty advocacy of some of the least effective of these practices is a red flag.
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I just had my first contracted year of teaching Spanish after several years of long-term subbing Spanish. Reading this list of ineffective practices is really heart-breaking, because it describes pretty much describes the 4 years of Spanish instruction I received as a high school student, as well as some of the instruction I received in college. Unfortunately, these ineffective practices characterized my 1.5 years of long-term subbing, which were done before/while I was in college taking classes in foreign language methodology. These ineffective practices characterize every foreign language teacher I have ever worked among, except for one, who is my role model.
I often thing about the two methods courses in foreign language education I took, both within the last two years. While the class did emphasize the importance of acquisition vs. learning, the importance of input, and staying at least 90% in the target language, it advocated for a communicative approach. TPRS was never mentioned at all, nor was FVR or SSR.
So I feel like although I got a strong theoretical understanding of SLA in college, my education gave me the impression that a typical lesson out to include input, a communicative activity, and then more input.
It is hard being a new teacher and dealing with low-quality materials from a for-profit textbook company that only contain materials that cater to the ineffective practices above. It is tough to know that students’ high school placement tests are so grammar-heavy, even though that’s not best practice.
It’s tough seeing fellow colleagues being rated as “highly effective”, when their instruction consists exclusively of the above ineffective practices.
I’m hoping that I can keep taking steps to eliminating these “fossils” from my teaching and incorporating more and more of the good stuff over time. I wish I could just abandon the thematic textbook units entirely, but I think all have to be on board for doing that.