Help Them Learn a Language Deeply - Francois Victor Tochon's Deep Approach to World Languages and Cultures - Softcover

Tochon, Francois Victor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1939755026 ISBN 13: 9781939755025

Publisher: Deep University Press, 2014

Synopsis

The author proposes a revolution in the way we teach world languages. The book presents what is tomorrow's mainstream as regards language teaching methods. It indicates severe limits in the standardization of outcomes defined through backward planning, and moves on with project-based, forward planning on the basis of flexible instructional organizers. The focus is on cultural pragmatics and assisted, self-directed learning. Text acquires primacy. Extensive reading, intensive writing and recording take the fore to support communication progress and depth. A large part of what is done in classrooms is blended and self-determined by the student or groups of students who choose their pacing and personalized productions. Such apprenticeship becomes meaningful through transdisciplinary aims. Compatible with content-based and literacy-based approaches, the deep approach creates a situation in which students are the curriculum builders.

About this title

About the Author

In his latest book, Help Them Learn a Language Deeply:  The Deep Approach to World Languages and Cultures, Professor Francois V. Tochon once again provides practicing language teachers, and, indeed, the profession-at-large, invaluable perspectives on the nature of the language learning process and beyond. In articulating the Deep Approach, it reflects the powerful dynamic potential that mastering language and cultivating cultural understanding represent to the world today, namely the hopeful prospect of "what a self-determined apprenticeship of languages could change in terms of the resources we provide to students, the way we consider evaluation, proficiency, and the role our discipline can play for internationalizing the mind and building peace" -- an aspiration truly to be pursued with energy, resourcefulness and commitment.  
Gina Lewandowski, Middle School Teacher of French Spanish and ESL, Madison Metropolitan School District, Wisconsin, USA

From the Back Cover

The Deep Approach has shown hundreds of teachers the better, surer way to lead language learners to proficiency and cultural understanding.

You will discover how easy it is to:
· Go by the best advice from motivation research.
· Help students scaffold their project with templates.
· Posit your students as curriculum builders.
· Create thematic resources for deep language learning.
· Propose instructional contracts to your students.

From the Inside Flap

Language learning in the contemporary era is complex, globally situated, and mediated by a wide array of fluid social practices, hybrid cultural environments, and emerging communicative modalities. Tochon's incisively argued volume acknowledges all of this and does a number of things very well: It highlights opportunities for the articulation of agency, is sophisticated in its treatment of culture and motivation, and relativizes historically constructed barriers between first and additional language learning. This book is innovative, insightful and an invaluable resource for students and teachers engaged in any aspect of language learning and teaching, applied linguistics, and world languages education.
Steven L. Thorne, Department of World Languages and Literatures, Portland State University (USA), and Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Groningen (Netherlands)

Edition details

• Publisher: Deep University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1939755026
• ISBN 13: 9781939755025
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448