Saturday, November 21, 2015

My takeaways from the opening session (part 1)

Crowd gathering for the ACTFL opening session
This year's opening session was probably one of the best I've attended at ACTFL. I always love the "rock star" feel of streaming into the big auditorium with some 6,000 colleagues, music filling the room. It's not often that language teachers get to feel like such the center of attention. Now when I say this was one of the best for me, understand that I've always been impressed with the convention opening sessions. The messages this year just resonated with me more.

ACTFL president Jacque Van Houten and CNN correspondent Susan Candioti presented clips from an international panel of professionals addressing questions on the importance of studying languages. My favorite quote from one of the respondents was that she studies language so she "can communicate with 3x more people and have access to 3x more ideas." The professionals spoke about how their language skills have been crucial to their jobs, allowing them to solve problems when their monolingual counterparts would not have been as successful.

Van Houten and Candioti ended their segment posing two questions to the audience that I believe are worth taking some time to consider:

  • What opportunities are we giving students to develop their intercultural skills?
  • Thinking of the time when you came to realize that language study was useful, how could we spark that kind of experience for our students?
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2 comments:

  1. Sidi Hamid BenengeliNovember 23, 2015 at 2:19 PM

    So no Rick Steves, huh?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mar G.November 24, 2015 at 9:16 AM

    The cultural and engagement portfolios that SPA 111 students have to create along the semester are a good example of an opportunity we are giving them to develop their intercultural skills. I can't wait to read all their reflections (the portfolios are due today!). I am sure some of my students realized that studying a foreign language is useful.

    Mar Gutiérrez

    ReplyDelete

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