French Pedagogy Class

REFLECTIONS ON PEER-TEACHING

We often forget what it means to be a second language learner. Since the majority of language instructors speaks at least two languages proficiently, it is hard to remember to be a frightened student who does not he/she will need time to absorb the language and find out a study method that works for him/her. The institution of UT, though, encourages its instructors to deeply think about wearing the students’ shoes in order to become aware, and thus better, teachers. In the class of Pedagogy offered by the Department of French and Italian held by Professor Patricia Kyle we did exactly this by peer-teaching our colleagues.

On one hand we all prepared a lesson plan—counting objectives, teaching material, and a script of the lesson—for an ordinary class of 50 minuets. The real challenge was not teaching this 50 minutes class to our peers in 20 minutes giving only a sample of the taste of the lesson, but reinventing the book’s material by adding our personal touch. I personally chose to work with pop-culture’s material, exploring at the levels the video and the text of a song. The reason why I thought to approach a list of vocabulary through a video clip is to make students pay attention to all the codes of communication deployed on a daily basis. From the cloths of a person we can draw an incredible amount of conclusions about class, gender, political view, and so on. It has been a challenging experience to teach my French colleagues, who do not speak Italian, few basic things in order to perform my class. However, their lost eyes made me understand that for them it was sometimes difficult to follow me. Their situation was not so different than the one of my students, even if the former have a better understanding of the mechanics of general linguistics they lack the context that the latter will have when daily attending an Italian language course.

On the other hand, I really enjoyed being a student again. I have to admit, I have not always been an excellent student in my high-school years, and the way language is taught in the American University makes me think about how English is taught in ‘liceo’. So I enjoyed asking my colleagues those annoying and unprepared questions I used to ask because I did not study for the class. Who can blame me? I tried, by applying the Stanislavski method, to remember how sometimes student’s questions disrupt the instructor’s plans. The result for me was a lot of fun, and for my colleagues a good chance to practice handling this kind of students, maybe during office hours ;)