I have learned a lot in this 100% immersion program. It is amazing to see the increase in students’ language output from novice low to novice high in a mere 24 hour immersion program (3 hours a day, 5 days a week). At the beginning of STARTALK, I doubted whether the students would be able to grasp so much information and approppriate so much language output in such a short time. Looking back on the past two weeks of teaching, I realize the benefit of research-supported best practices, including teaching a target language in the target language, applying authentic materials, creating student-centered learning environment, designing meaningful and communicative activities, and assessing students in a task-based performance. All of these are powerful ways to help students excel in a foreign language classroom. These great practices will help me improve my teaching skills in my own classroom in the coming school year. After this STARTALK training, I'll apply the teacher-lead "solo" and "sing together" strategies to correct students' pronunciation and help them learn vocabulary and sentence structure. I'll also reduce teacher-centered insturction time and increase more meanful and communicative student-centered activty time. Authentic material application and authentic tasks are other goals I will to pursue in my future teaching.
