Standard 8: Instructional Strategies
The teacher understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage
learners to develop deep understanding of content areas and their connections, and to
build skills to apply knowledge in meaningful ways.
Name of Artifact: Chapter Enhancement Activity
Course/Source: SPA 612 – Options in the Teaching of Grammar
ACTFL Standards Addressed:
Standard 1.1: Students engage in conversations, provide and
obtain information, express feelings and emotions, and exchange
opinions.
Standard 1.2: Students understand and interpret written and
spoken language on a variety of topics.
Standard 1.3: Students present information, concepts, and ideas
to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics.
Standard 4.1: Students demonstrate understanding of the nature
of language through comparisons of the language studied and
their own.
Rationale:
The second artifact I chose to represent Standard Eight, Instructional Strategies, is a chapter
enhancement project, my final project for SPA 612-Options in the Teaching of Grammar. For
this assignment, I had to take a grammar concept presented in the textbook and enhance it with at
least original eight activities, incorporating at least three different grammatical concepts that will
improve how I teach the concept and how my students learn it. Each activity had to include a
rationale, teacher and student instructions, and the materials needed to implement the activity.
This assignment required me to take a look at the way I was teaching grammar in my classroom
and what I could do to improve upon it to ensure that my students understood the material and
retained the information for the future. For my chapter enhancement project, I chose to use a
chapter about School and Student Life and focus on the grammatical concepts of the verb tener,
ir, and er/ir verbs in the present tense.
This artifact contains two portions. The first nine pages contain a discussion of my own beliefs
about grammar instruction in conjunction with current research. It provided an explanation of
how to incorporate grammar instruction into a foreign language classroom and in what capacity.
The remainder of the document contains the activities I used to enhance the current grammar
instruction in the textbook I use, Expresete. This portion begins with an introduction to the
chapter including an overview, student objectives, target vocabulary, and target grammatical
concepts. Following the introduction are the eight activities that I created to enhance the chapter.
Each activity is prefaced with a cover page including the activity title, target grammatical
concepts, skills needed, teacher and student instructions, and a rationale for why it was included
in the project. Following each cover page is the worksheet or materials necessary to implement
the activity in the classroom. The activities include partner communicative, partner information
gap, individual writing, individual grammar practice, group work, and direct instruction.
Grammar is a part of foreign language instruction that students and teacher often find boring and
difficult because of the dry, static, and out-of-context methods used to teach it (Pennington,
2002). This assignment, however, demonstrates other, more engaging ways to introduce and
reinforce grammatical concepts. This artifact has many parts, containing numerous activities, all
which require different skills and instructional strategies. I understand the importance of
implementing activities that allow for students with varying learning styles, whatever their
preferences may be (Lightbrown, 2006). It is for this reason that I chose this artifact to represent
Standard Eight, Instructional Strategies. This artifact demonstrates my commitment to designing
activities and developing lessons that will appeal to students with diverse strengths and needs. It
is filled with different activities, all which require students to utilize various skills such as
reading, writing, speaking, listening, predicting, conjugating, and thinking in the target language.
It also requires me as a teacher to assume different roles in the classroom as a leader of direct
instruction, facilitator of small group work, a listener as an audience member during sharing, and
an evaluator of writing activities.
This assignment was extremely beneficial because it gave me practice in a skill that we as
teachers need to do each day, enhance what our textbook and curriculum give us. This
assignment made me look at how I teach grammar, how research says grammar should be taught,
and what I believe my students need in order to learn the grammatical concepts and create
activities to support all of these ideas. By completing this project, I learned how important it is
to incorporate grammar into the classroom using both implicit and explicit instructional
strategies so that all students will be able to understand the material and build a solid foundation
of basic grammar functions. Students need to learn how to actually use the grammatical
concepts in real-life situation so that they see the motivation to learn the material and can make
the connections to possible situations in their own lives.
References
Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N. (2006). How language are learned. Oxford: University Press.
Pennington, M. (2002). Grammar and Communication: New Directions in Theory and Practice.
In E. Hinkel, & S. Fotos (Eds.), New perspectives on grammar teaching in second
language classrooms (pp. 77-98). New York, NY: Routledge.