This IYL Online Seminar will be held at 7.30 pm AEST on 11 June 2008. The first presenter will be Ojar Rugins who teaches French at Eumundi and Cooroy State Primary Schools in Queensland, Australia. Oj will report on his use of the Accelerative Integrated Method (AIM) originating in Canada and the reactions of his upper primary school students during the last year. Jen McKinney from Melbourne and Tim Girard from Brisbane will demonstrate some of the famous "gestures" of this method. Jen's enthusiasm about this approach is enough to make us all rush to enrol in her classes. For a two page explanation of this incredibly successful approach, also called the Gesture Method, see the founder's Theoretical Perspective on the Program The Accelerative Integrated Method - A holistic approach to the teaching of French as a second language by Wendy Maxwell. This method is really winning over parents, not just students. Have a quick read. Languages teachers, teacher educators, pre-service teachers, parents, all interested are welcome to logon and practise the Adobe Connect system before the 11 June via http://callisto.usc.edu.au/languages.
The 11 June AIM archive (Oj Rugins, Jenny McKinney and Tim Girard) http://callisto.usc.edu.au/p63699123/
http://www.mckinsey.com/locations/ukireland/publications/pdf/Education_report.pdf
2 comments:
Thanks Oj for the reminder! I hope to be able to join in. Sadly, I am a frustrated French language teacher at the the moment, after three years of NOT teaching French.
An interesting quote, to add to the list:
"Seek first to understand, then to be understood."
This is from Stephen Covey, a man with a wonderful mind and attitude, at the WA Primary Principals Assn conference last week in Perth. Very valuable thought for Language teachers.
Many, if not most, primary school languages teachers are finding themselves working with classes that they see only once a week, perhaps for one designated hour. Take into account the lessons/time lost by whole classes due to public holidays, sports carnivals, national testing, excursions, floods, evacuation/lockdown drills, Arts Council visits and so on, and the notional figure of 40 hours of language learning in a school year takes a battering. There is further loss of time from languages study among individual students due to illness, family vacations and extraction from the lesson (often without notice to the languages teacher) for student council meetings, various kinds of assessments, maths or writing competitions, behaviour management follow-ups etc. I say ‘designated hour’ because there is even further time lost due to physical movement of students and/or teacher about the school campus, and almost without fail there is some further interruption to the lesson, be it an announcement over the school public address system, a telephone call or students on an errand perhaps collecting ‘free dress’ donations or getting you to sign Mr Smith’s leaving card.
The question is raised, as to what can we hope to achieve in language teaching under these conditions, especially when it has been said that it takes 800 hours of instruction to achieve ‘competence’ in another language (multiply that figure by three for scripted languages). This in itself strengthens the case for using the Accelerative Integrated Method or Gesture Approach. The use of gestures or signing, central to this approach, results in languages being ‘coded’ in separate memory stores. The resulting retention of language by students using this approach has to be seen to be believed
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