I have gained valuable knowledge, insight and experience from all of my MATL courses and the Practicum has been no different. The initial readings in Exploring Classroom Discourse (Walsh, 2011) were eye opening and underscored the critical importance of the language we use as teachers. As a French teacher, my main focus in the areas of learning and professional development have been the French language, French culture and teaching strategies. However, this work by Walsh has made me give serious thought to the language I use in the classroom; the types of questions I ask; the way I ask them and when I ask them; the manner in which I keep a conversation going with a learner, and how and when I correct their errors, if I correct them at all. In short, Walsh is talking about Interactional Competence and from this reading I see how critical a skill it is for a language teacher to possess. It was a great way to start the practicum because as I work my way through class observations, I am able to see how other teachers use discourse and interaction to create speaking opportunities for students and make learning more effective.

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Part of the work in my Practicum required me to research an area of interest to me in the teaching of French. The area I chose was Interpersonal Communication. One of the biggest challenges for me as a language teacher, and I believe, for most language teachers, is helping our students develop effective interpersonal communication skills. A frustration for students and teachers alike, is that after taking a few years of a foreign language program in school, many students reach advanced levels in their knowledge of grammar and language structures but can still struggle to reach a level of competence in their speaking ability and interactional competence. This is not to say that we should be expecting fluency at the end of high school programs, but I do believe we should expect a certain level of conversation skills and the ability to use the language in everyday situations. Work in my MATL courses has led me to understand how important it is to create situations for our students in which they are required to negotiate meaning in order to communicate. But that leaves the question of how do we do that effectively.

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One of the recurring themes in materials I came across during this research was the power of play. Games can be an extremely effective way to teach languages and offer teachers almost limitless possibilities of putting their students into situations where they are required to use spontaneous speech and negotiate meaning, while also being fun. Another area of interest in my readings and one in which there appears to be much research at the moment, is the formal teaching of pragmatics and speech acts. Repetition and proceduralization of speech acts and common expressions until they become faster, more automatic and less error-prone is something that I think is also very doable and would have very effective results in elevating student confidence in their speaking skills but also providing them real conversation skills.

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The final area of the Practicum, and one that I have focused most of my time on, is classroom observations. All in all, I watched twenty-five videos of foreign language classrooms that ranged from kindergarten to AP classes and covered several different languages including French, Spanish, German, Russian, Arab, Japanese, Chinese and Italian. Sometimes I would approach the observations in a specific way by focusing on certain themes, i.e., how does the teacher introduce a new grammar subject, how does the teacher deal with a sensitive subject, how do they create opportunities for speaking, how do they correct errors etc. Sometimes I’d just watch and see what interesting insights came out of it. After twenty-five observations, I found some very interesting recurring themes that I’ll be able to build on to make my teaching more effective.

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First, almost all of the classes were conducting their interaction completely in the target language. Second, every class I observed, no matter the age, started off with a quick warm-up activity that was usually related to the theme of the lesson that day. The warm-ups always seem effective at getting students in the right mindset for language class. I was surprised to see the use of Total Physical Response at the high school level but saw in several instances how it was used very effectively. One teacher had the whole class do a structured danse to help learn new vocabulary. Only once in all the observations did I see a teacher expressly correct an error while a student was speaking. All other times, teachers either stressed fluency over accuracy and did not correct, or simply repeated the student’s comment to them as a question using the correct form. In terms of culture, most teachers were very effective at creating situations in which students needed to do a comparison between what they were studying and the similar situation in the US, whether they were discussing presidential elections or what you have for breakfast. In all classes, teachers were excellent at finding ways to get students speaking spontaneously. Even with the novice classes where much of the speaking was rehearsed, teachers were able to layer on activity that gently pushed students to speak on the fly. As the classes got more advanced, teachers were very effective at using the language to get other things done, whether it was a project or gathering information from a lecture which the students needed to perform another task.

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In sum, the Practicum was of immense value to me in my journey as a language teacher and there are many lessons and insights from the work I have completed in this course that will help me as I advanced in my career as a French teacher.