Week 2 - An update on the proposal and the flipped classroom

For this week's blog entry, I will be dividing my focus between my LL Challenge Proposal and what we have been learning about in class, as I think it's important to link the two together.

The Learning Challenge Proposal...

For starters, this is a bit off topic, but I have decided to change the language of my blog and my Facebook profile to French for the duration of this project. I won't assess how this affects my French during the challenge, but it'll be good to have a little bit of extra exposure through which I hope to gain some vocabulary.

Also... I had my first French oral for the semester, and although it went ok, I realised that the thing I struggled with most was doing verb conjugations when put on the spot. All the more motivation to start this challenge!

As for the progress of my proposal, I have found a list of tenses (France Pub, 2016):

• Présent: The present
• Passé simple: The preterite or simple past
• Passé compose: The past tense / narration tense
• Passé antérieur: The past perfect
• Imparfait: The present subjunctive
• Conditionnel: The conditional
• Futur simple: The future tense
• Futur proche: The near future
• Plus que parfait: The past subjunctive
• Futur Anteriéur: Future perfect (an action that will have been completed before a certain point in the future)

From this list, I will choose 5 tenses to learn. 

More info on my progress on my next post!

The Flipped Classroom

A flipped classroom is a "pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions." Our professor for this course - Dan Stuntz - has done a lot of research on this method and implements in during our class. Therefore I'd like to reflect a bit on what I've been learning both in and out of class.

Lecture
Before the week two workshop, we watched a second lecture at home recorded by Mike Levy (2016) on the topic of the History of Language Teaching. This lecture went through several different points concerning how language teaching approaches have changed and developed over time. I thought it was interesting to learn that in the early days, latin was the main language learnt, and that the only people learning a language were the privileged. In addition, although the grammar-translation method has been proven relatively inefficient, I think it is still very much used in schools. Finally, the 3 P's...
- Presentation
- Practice
- Production
I recognise this approach from university French classes, and agree that the advancement to this teaching approach is very effective with regards to language learning.

Workshop
I would also like to make a note on an activity we did in the workshop - the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL). Below is a photo of my results:

I scored especially highly on "remembering more effectively" and "compensating for missing knowledge", and after re-reading the questions for these criteria I do feel that these reflect my areas of strength. This is something I will try to take into account for the rest of my language learning challenge.

For now this is all, by my next post I hope to have the proposal finalised and ready for peer review :)

À la prochaine!
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References:

o   France Pub. (2016). Conjugating French Verbs. Retrieved from http://www.france-pub.com/dictionary/verbs.php

o   Levy, M. (n.d.). Week 2: History of Language Teaching [Lecture Recording]. Retrieved from SLAT2002, University of Queensland Blackboard Online: https://learn.uq.edu.au/