a place i call home - annenberg learner - teacher ... foreign languages k–12: a library of...

Teaching Foreign Languages K–12: A Library of Classroom Practices 1

A Place I Call Home Video Summary In this lesson, students learn vocabulary used to describe the rooms and exterior features of houses, including their own dream houses. Ms. Mayalah introduces the day’s lesson by playing music for the class in which Lebanese singer SabaaH sings about her “dear little house.” After reviewing the class agenda with the students, Ms. Mayalah shows videos of a traditional house in Syria and Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram’s modern house in Lebanon, and introduces vocabulary to describe the features of each house. Next, students work in pairs to complete a sentence-strip activity, choosing whether a written description describes the traditional house or the modern one. Students use worksheets to write descriptions of their own dream houses and interview one another about their dream houses. They then present their descriptions orally and without using their notes to the entire class.

Classroom at a Glance Teacher: Manar Mayalah

Language: Arabic II and III

Grades: 9 and 10

School: Granada Hills Charter School, Los Angeles, California

Lesson Date: March 10

Class Size: 22 (filmed with 12)

Schedule: 55 minutes daily


Standards Addressed • Communication: Interpersonal Communication

• Communication: Presentational Communication

• Cultures: Relating Cultural Products to Perspectives

• Comparisons: Cultural Comparisons

Read about these standards at the end of this lesson. Key Terms

• heritage speaker

• realia

• thematic units

Definitions for these terms can be found in the Glossary located in the Appendix.


Class Context “Around 95 percent of the time I speak Arabic. I feel it’s really important to speak in Arabic all the time. This is the only access for the students to hear Arabic and to practice and to communicate.”—Manar Mayalah School Profile Manar Mayalah teaches six levels of Arabic at Granada Hills Charter High School, a top-ranked independent charter high school in Granada Hills, California. Granada Hills is an ethnically diverse section of Los Angeles with more than 50,000 residents. Of the nearly 4,500 students enrolled at the school, 38 percent are Hispanic, 27 percent Asian, 27 percent white, and 4 percent African American. Granada Hills offers the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program, a preuniversity course of study for students in grades 11 and 12; the AP Capstone Program, a flexible, rigorous two-year program also for juniors and seniors designed to help students develop research, critical-thinking, and communication skills; and a STEM program, a four-year curriculum designed for students interested in postsecondary courses and careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The school has offered Arabic as a foreign language for six years. In addition to three levels of Arabic for nonheritage speakers, two levels of Arabic for Arabic Speakers accommodate the school’s relatively large number of heritage speakers.

Year at a Glance Getting to Know E-Pals from

Various Arab Countries Life of Arab High School Students Arabic Cuisine: A Way for Healthy

Living Fashion, Traditional Clothes, and

Shopping in the Arabic-Speaking World

A Place I Call Home Taking a Virtual Tour in the

Arabic-Speaking World


Class Context, cont’d. Lesson Design Ms. Mayalah creates the curriculum and assessments herself, and incorporates authentic materials she locates through online sources. She uses backward design to plan each lesson and, before that, each unit. She identifies the language needs, the culture, the vocabulary, and the structures she needs students to learn and then divides the unit into small lessons or segments of lessons. Ms. Mayalah works to incorporate the Five C goal areas into each lesson and prioritizes Interpersonal, Interpretive, and Presentational communication and the Cultures standards. She differentiates instruction in various ways. At times, she groups students by shared interests. At others, she mixes stronger students with weaker ones to provide additional support within the group. For particular projects or tasks, she encourages creativity. For example, if students are talented in music, they can write a song about the home and different rooms in the home. If they are talented in drawing, they can draw a house. To stay in the target language, she provides comprehensible input using a variety of strategies. “I try to help them understand by using gestures, drawing on the board, acting, and Total Physical Response (TPR),” she says. She encourages open questions and discussion among students. To help build their confidence, Ms. Mayalah has students practice speaking in small groups before they share information with the entire class. Some of Ms. Mayalah’s students are English Language Learners. Others have grown up with parents of Arab descent, but may or may not speak Arabic in their household. She gives a placement test to any student with exposure to Arabic, whether it has been through his or her family, religious background, or prior study.


Class Context, cont’d. The Lesson In this lesson, Ms. Mayalah’s class consisted of 12 students. Normally, her classroom has 22 students. Arabic II and Arabic III classes are taught together. Students typically enter these classes with one to two years of experience with the language and progress to Novice Mid to Intermediate Low performance levels. At the start of class, Ms. Mayalah played SabaaH’s song Ya Bayti (“O, My Home!”), a well-known song from the 1970s that tied in with the unit theme and provided the students with exposure to colloquial Arabic. Consistent with her usual practice, Ms. Mayalah projected the lesson agenda for the class and reviewed it with her students. For this lesson, the goals were:

• I can share information about my dream house with my classmates.

• I can ask questions about houses.

• I can describe my dream house. In this part of the unit, Ms. Mayalah wanted the students, who had been taught the names of the rooms in a house and of furniture in the previous lesson, to learn how to describe different houses, including their dream house. She also wanted them to learn about culture, showing students examples of different styles of houses in the Arab world: an older, traditional house in Damascus (referred to as Ms. Mayalah’s house in the video) and a modern one owned by Nancy Ajram, a celebrity singer who lives in Lebanon. Ms. Mayalah’s lesson moved from guided practice to independent practice, and this is reflected in the sequence of activities. Students developed confidence with new vocabulary, learning words first through listening, and building familiarity with them in the reading/matching and writing activities. They then demonstrated their learning in conversation, first with a partner and then in presenting to the class. This lesson was followed by one about traditional and modern roles of family members, with a particular focus on household chores.


Class Context, cont’d. Key Teaching Strategies

● Creating Cultural Experiences: The teacher designs activities in which students can see, hear, or touch a cultural artifact, create their own cultural artifact, and/or observe or engage in cultural practices in or beyond the classroom. These direct or simulated experiences lead students to discover the perspectives of the culture being studied.

● Scaffolding: Scaffolding is a method of structuring an instructional task in a way that helps learners gradually advance through the process. Initial portions of the task are designed to be within learners' competency so that they can complete them on their own. As students' confidence, skill, and knowledge increase, the teacher provides less and less scaffolding for that task in a gradual release of responsibility.

● Theme-Based Curriculum: The teacher chooses themes as the organizing principle for a series of instructional activities in a unit, providing a meaningful context to explore through all three modes of communication.

● Visual Support for Learning: The teacher uses illustrations, models, or other visual elements to promote conversation and cultural learning.


Analyze the Video As you reflect on these questions, write down your responses or discuss them as a group. Before You Watch Respond to the following questions:

● When teaching vocabulary, how do you sequence and vary activities to promote student learning?

● What are some different ways that technology can be used to provide students with a wide range of authentic cultural materials?

● How many different ways do you reinforce meaning? How do you help

students adopt numerous strategies to get their meaning across? Watch the Video As you watch "A Place I Call Home," take notes on Ms. Mayalah’s instructional strategies, particularly how she sequences activities, how they relate to the objectives for the day, and what techniques she uses to remain in the target language. Write down what you find interesting, surprising, or especially important about the teaching and learning in this lesson. Reflect on the Video Review your notes, and then respond to the following questions:

● What were some of the strategies Ms. Mayalah used to make her language comprehensible to the students?

● What did you observe about how the students interacted during group work? What did Ms. Mayalah do to establish an environment in which the students communicate solely in the target language?

● How did Ms. Mayalah vary activities to provide students with different

types of practice for the same core content?


Analyze the Video, cont’d. Take a Second Look Watch the video again, but this time, focus on the following teaching practices: scaffolding and visual support for learning.

Practice: Scaffolding

Ms. Mayalah carefully sequences activities to build student competencies.

● How did Ms. Mayalah sequence activities to take students smoothly from guided practice to independent language production?

● What was the purpose of the matching activity? How did it lay the groundwork for the writing activity?

Practice: Visual Support for Learning

Ms. Mayalah uses visual elements to promote cultural learning and teach new vocabulary while staying in the target language.

● How did the visuals used in the lesson promote cultural knowledge of homes in the Arab world?

● How did the visuals aid in vocabulary acquisition and retention?


Connect to Your Teaching Reflect on Your Practice As you reflect on these questions, write down your responses or discuss them as a group.

● What strategies can you employ to ensure maximum comprehensible input in the target language during class?

● What kind of vocabulary learning activities do you use to take students from word-level discourse to producing sentence- and paragraph-level discourse?

● Do you teach dual-level classes? How can you use a common thematic

focus to engage all learners in various activities across all three modes of communication, mixing students of both levels? Then, how do you plan so all learners are being challenged to use and understand language that stretches them to the level they are trying to reach? What are some strategies you might use to plan for such a course?

Watch Other Videos Watch other videos in the Teaching Foreign Languages K–12 library for more examples of teaching methodologies like those you've just seen. Note: All videos in this series are subtitled in English.

● U.S. and Italian Homes (Italian) illustrates a sequence of activities that builds vocabulary and prepares students for real-life situations.

● Touring a French City (French) illustrates how the teacher organizes activities that promote cultural knowledge.

● Hearing Authentic Voices (Spanish) shows students interacting with

the products of a culture.


Connect to Your Teaching, cont’d. Put It Into Practice Try these ideas in your classroom. Where it’s not already evident, reflect on how to adapt an idea that targets one performance range for application to other performance ranges.

● For homework, have students draw and label their house with appropriate vocabulary words to use throughout the unit as a study tool. In class, students work in pairs: one student describes his or her house without showing the partner the drawing, while the partner draws what is being described. After they finish, the students compare the two drawings using the target language. Then partners swap roles and repeat the activity.

● Have students read authentic apartment ads or house-for-sale listings

and write their own ad. Students could then do a role-play activity in pairs in which one person is looking for a house and the other is a realtor who is showing the apartments or houses. This is also a great opportunity for a cultural discussion about how people go about renting or buying a house in different cultures. For Arabic classrooms: highlight the role of the bawwaab (doorman) or simsaar (realtor) in finding a place to live, and show students authentic clips of the bawwaab or simsaar in popular culture and film. You may also ask students to compare ads from different parts of an Arab city or ads from across the Arab world. What similarities and differences do the students notice?

● Have students make a final film or multimedia presentation in which

they describe both a traditional house of their culture and a traditional house from an Arab country, and then compare the two.

● An Arab foreign exchange student has just arrived at your house and

will reside with you for the summer. Give him or her a tour of where he or she will be staying, noting any differences in furnishings or other features from what the student may be used to. For this activity, students may use either their real house or a typical house in your region.


Resources Lesson Materials Your Dream House* A worksheet used to accompany the speaking and writing activity in which students discuss with a partner and then draw their dream house “Damascus's Beauty” https://youtu.be/tZkAsL5t15Q A YouTube video showing the interior of a traditional house in Damascus “Nancy Ajram’s House in Lebanon” https://youtu.be/P2hQbGZ6DvA A YouTube video showing the interior and exterior of singer Nancy Ajram’s house in Lebanon Sentence Strip Activity* Comparison questions and sentence strips used in the matching activity * These lesson materials can be found in the Appendix. Manar Mayalah’s Additional Resources Web Resources:

Aswaat cArabiyya http://www.laits.utexas.edu/aswaat/video_s.php Listening materials for the various levels of proficiency

Al-Hakawati http://al-hakawati.la.utexas.edu/ Reading materials on a wide variety of themes, including Arab countries and cities, and famous writers throughout Arab history


Standards World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages The World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages create a roadmap to guide learners to develop competence to communicate effectively and interact with cultural understanding. This lesson correlates to the following Standards: Communication: Communicate effectively in more than one language in order to function in a variety of situations and for multiple purposes Standard: Interpersonal Communication Learners interact and negotiate meaning in spoken, signed, or written conversations to share information, reactions, feelings, and opinions. Standard: Presentational Communication Learners present information, concepts, and ideas to inform, explain, persuade, and narrate on a variety of topics using appropriate media and adapting to various audiences of listeners, readers, or viewers Cultures: Interact with cultural competence and understanding Standard: Relating Cultural Products to Perspectives Learners use the language to investigate, explain, and reflect on the relationship between the products and perspectives of the cultures studied. Comparisons: Develop insight into the nature of language and culture in order to interact with cultural competence Standard: Cultural Comparisons Learners use the language to investigate, explain, and reflect on the concept of culture through comparisons of the cultures studied and their own.

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