Helping Spanish Language Students at Home

Hello dear Parents,

My name is Ms. Aline and I am delighted to be your child's Spanish teacher.

Much of my student's success in learning Spanish comes from their motivation, the activities and learning that take place at school and of course the energy they allocate to Spanish learning once they reach home.

In my humble experience, there are three important areas where parental guidance truly makes a difference in my student's learning:

ñ  Self-Monitoring

ñ  Flexible Thinking

ñ  Organized Learning

I thought I might write to all of you about these areas to give all of us the opportunity to contribute to your child's progress in their foreign language. Please find more details in the following pages.

If you have any concerns or queries, please do not hesitate to contact the school.

I thank all parents and students in advance for the two years we will be sharing together, collaborating to achieve a positive and meaningful experience for all.

Yours sincerely,

Aline Ranc

1. SPANISH and SELF MONITORING

Self-monitoring in the skill of checking or correcting our own work efficiently. It is an important component of independent learning. Students often encounter a challenge when they are self-monitoring, despite this being paramount in the following areas of foreign language learning:

Reading Comprehension

·         If a student is experiencing difficulty in understanding a text or question, parents may wish to encourage a child to divide the text into single short sentences or to divide sentences into small chunks of text (the teacher will give them a method to do this) and check for understanding. Google Translate is unfortunately not a good training option for reading comprehension, given that it does not create a direct incentive to reflect upon the meaning of foreign words and connections.

·         If you wish, do not hesitate to help your child to identify parts of speech (nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) in their mother tongue and Spanish. This will truly help them to understand the lessons, take efficient notes and make progress in the language.

Writing

·         Helping your child review assignments and grading rubrics provided to school or by the teacher on a regular basis will assist him/her in tracking his or her own progress.

·         Establish with your child a list of his or her most common errors. Please encourage him or her to review and improve these errors.

·         Suggest that your child use colored pens or outliners to help shift from the role of writer to the role of self-checker and editor.

·         Encourage your child to check sentence structure and grammar by reading aloud or checking the grammar formulas provided during class (students normally will have taken notes).

Homework

·         Encourage your child to give completed homework a “once over” to promote the development of self-checking routines.

·         If possible, ask your child to monitor how much time he/she has spent on an assignment or task.

Studying and Test Taking

·         Help your child set up a “study plan” with breaks built in for exercise and enjoyment.

·         The teacher encourages students to create a note of “don’t forget” items or a syllabus to review before tests. Please encourage them to use their card when reviewing.

As mentioned before, students who self-monitor effectively may become more independent and efficient learners. This may prove very useful in college, both inside and outside the classroom.

2. FLEXIBLE THINKING FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING

·     Flexible thinking allows students to view things and concepts from various perspectives.

·     Flexible thinking supposes the ability to “unlearn” old habits.

·     Flexible thinking plays a key role in learning a new language and in developing international mindedness.

Imagine you have planned a picnic on a sunny day but once you have all the delicious food ready and have invited all your friends to the picnic, a storm breaks out. It will be difficult to enjoy the picnic that day but you may come up with an alternative such as watching a movie with your friends at home while you all enjoy the delicious meal you had all prepared for the picnic. This is a basic example of flexible thinking and quick problem solving.

Flexible thinking is the skill students use to learn the rules of a new language. A foreign student of English for example, will learn that the way to put most words into the plural is to add an “-s” at the end. However, there are exceptions (mouse → mice). Flexible thinkers can use both rules and exceptions of a new language more easily.

If your child finds flexible thinking challenging, it may be difficult for him or her to learn the rules and exceptions that make up a second language. In a foreign language, letters can be pronounced differently than in his mother tongue. Words are put in a different order to make sentences.

Learning a foreign language at school implies a balanced mix of listening and grammar activities. Sometimes students who are finding flexible thinking challenging might prefer listening to how people speak the language rather than focusing on rules and exceptions.  If your child likes to learn through listening, I highly recommend he/she finds a topic of interest (music, film, sport, etc.) and contacts me so that I may provide material in Spanish for him/her to listen to or view at home. He/she might also benefit from making friends with Spanish speaking

youngsters on the Internet. A good and safe site to find a teenage pen pal is: http://www.studentsoftheworld.info/menu_penpals.php

3. SPANISH and ORGANIZED LEARNING

Key areas in which students might face organizational challenges include:

·      Time management: Homework and long-term projects will usually require students to write down assignments correctly, to reflect upon how they would like to segment their long-term projects into a schedule that suits their learning style and to remember to submit work on time.

·         Regular studying: Learning a new language is a “building block” process. Regular reviewing of everything we have learnt in class might become a less daunting task if the student organizes class notes, homework and other materials for review and if he/she also reviews any areas that need improvement as pointed out by teacher feedback.

How May Parents Contribute to their Child's Organized Learning?

·         Complex or long-term assignments may be divided into smaller tasks for which a student can set progressive deadlines. Discussing with your child a list of steps needed to complete long-term  assignments and visualizing these steps in a calendar or in a flow chart can help maintain or spark a student's motivation.

·         You may help your child to prioritize homework tasks based on due dates, difficulty level or the level of stress he or she is experiencing with the task.

·         Help your child to organize tasks in a sequence. For instance, before looking up vocabulary words in the dictionary, he or she might wish to alphabetize the list first.

Source: Kalyani Krishnan and Lynn Meltzer (Specialists in Learning and Development)