Instructing Higher Level Classes

When the material that a instructor is teaching becomes harder it can also become more difficult to incorporate interesting and captivating activities in the classroom. For language educators Señora Hitz provides an example of what she does with her students who have 4+ years of Spanish experience. She selects 3 short fiction or non-fiction books for the students to read in the beginning of class. Then she will allow them to share their thoughts and opinions about the readings. This struck   such a discussion among the students that a 20 minute activity took the entire class time. Hitz mentions that this is because we communicate through sharing and having conversations flow naturally in our native language, making it a great way for using a second language. Then she explains that high frequency words can be used to strength the students' vocabulary. In this post the example she gives is the word "crecer" over time this word was used in a variety of different ways to demonstrate all the possible manners to use this word, and sure enough the students began to integrate this term. Using this many be a better manner to teach students vocabulary rather than giving them a list of vocabulary words.