Reflect on your experiences as a language teacher and learning in this latest speed-dating workshop. What difficulties did you encounter?
I enjoyed the speed-dating workshop to learn other languages because it gave me brief glimpses into the culture of other countries and languages. My favorite language to learn was Amharic because I liked how Berhaun structured her presentation with transitions. This helped me stop to think about the word and its pronunciation before moving on to new vocabulary, which made it less difficult than learning new vocabulary in other presentations.
How did you successfully relay concepts that were foreign to your classmates as your students?
I think my use of images and arrows helped students think of body parts in Quechua. Since I am a visual learner, I thought that this would not only be helpful, but also aid my classmates in first thinking of the body part in English and then reassigning that body part to its Quechua translation. I also think that teaching them why knowing the body parts for Quechua people is important helped my classmates understand the cultural meaning behind it.
If you were eventually granted the opportunity to teach a full semester-long course on the target language, what strategies would you adopt?
I would include many images in my Quechua course and I would couple this with music. This way students could have both a music video and text to incorporate in their language learning. I think modifying the music videos so that they included subtitles would also help because the students could see, hear, and read the language.
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