Project-Based Learning for Foreign Languages
Foreign language students can demonstrate what they have learned in a variety of ways, from tests and quizzes to essays. Projects can also be an effective assessment tool. In project-based learning, foreign language students can demonstrate their understanding of the language and their creative skills by creating projects to display their knowledge of key concepts in the course.
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Family Tree
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Students can demonstrate their knowledge of family vocabulary and expressions by creating a family tree. Have students draw a family tree on large poster board, and include photos or illustrations of their family members. Then they can write sentences in their target language about each person on their family trees. They might explain family relationships, describe personality and appearance, or discuss their family history. This project can be expanded to include any number of vocabulary skills, as students use their own family members as the basis for what they write on the project. If any student feels uncomfortable talking about his own family, you can allow him to invent a fictional family; his language skills will still be the same whether the family is real or not.
Famous People
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Your students can combine language and culture by completing projects on famous people. There are several variations of this project, so it can be different for every level of a language. The basic idea is to have students research a famous person associated with the language culture and create a report on that person. They can use Power Point, poster board or just write an essay. First-year students could complete this assignment in English at the beginning of a course, while more advanced students can do all of their writing in the target language.
Your famous people could be actors and actresses, athletes, artists or people of historical influence. They can be currently popular or they could have died years before. You can adjust the requirements for this project based on what you want your students to learn, or in order to differentiate one project for various years of language instruction. You will grade the students on their accuracy, creativity and language use. When students present their projects to the class, the rest of their classmates can learn something new about a person who was significant to that culture.
Holiday Celebrations
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Foreign language classes can be fun because you can often plan lessons to celebrate holidays, which is generally taboo in other subject areas. Holidays are an important aspect of any culture, so teaching your children about their language culture's holidays is a key element of language learning.
Have students complete projects on the history of the holiday; they can write them as a story book or present them on a website display. Students can also plan a classroom celebration, researching the way that holiday is celebrated in the target culture and re-creating that celebration in their class.
Students can also complete projects that compare and contrast their own cultural celebrations with the ones they are studying in class.
Holiday projects work out well, because they can be fun and creative as well as educational. Students can enjoy making traditional crafts and decorations, learning traditional music and baking traditional foods to go with this project.
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