Introduction

Dr. Nancy Guilloteau teaches the Vocabulary Module
Dr. Nancy Guilloteau, Vocabulary Module Instructor

Introduction to the Vocabulary Module

Duration: 02:55

Transcript-

Hi. My name is Nancy Guilloteau. I am a lecturer in the Dept. of French and Italian. I have been teaching here since 1998, and have been the Language Program Director since 2006. During my tenure at UT, I have taught classes at all levels. At the undergraduate level, I have taught beginning language courses, advanced conversation, French phonetics, advanced grammar and composition, French business culture, and a French and American cultural values course. At the graduate level, I teach a course titled Supervised Teaching in French. This is a required pedagogy and teacher training course for our graduate students who wish to teach in our program.

As Language Program Director, my job includes training and supervising our graduate students who are funded as TAs and AIs. We have a very structured approach to training in our dept. Our TAs spend two years observing beginning classes, and are gradually phased into grading and teaching small segments of classes under supervision. After two years of training, as well as 30 graduate hours and the graduate course, Supervised Teaching in French, our students are qualified to teach their own first-semester class. Most of these grad students come into my Supervised Teaching in French class with a clear picture of how they think grammar should be taught, often based on how they were taught, but few (if any) have any idea how to teach vocabulary. They might have ideas about how students should learn vocabulary (flash cards, labeled pictures, etc.), but they do not realize that they need to teach it, in part because they were never taught vocabulary as second language learners. Langauge teachers often assume that their primary role is to teach grammar, and that vocabulary will somehow take care of itself; this is simply not the case.

In this module, I will begin by addressing the importance of actively teaching vocabulary in the second language classroom. I will then take you through the development of Français interactif, and the rationale behind it. We will then explore the vocabulary learning strategies used throughout Français interactif,. We will also review two progressions of vocabulary activities in this first-year program: input to output, and decontexualized lists to more richly contextualized speech samples. Finally, in the "Portfolio" section, we will see what types of vocabulary exercises the graduate students created for the assignment given to them in class.

Another of my duties, and perhaps the most rewarding, has been the ongoing development of our first-year curriculum, Français interactif,. This first-year program is open access (no fees or passwords). You will see parts of this curriculum throughout the vocabulary module.

Lessons

1 The Importance of Vocabulary
The importance of actively teaching vocabulary.
2 Rethinking the Place of Vocabulary
Developing a new approach to vocabulary instruction.
3 Vocabulary in Français interactif
From decontextualized lists to contextualized speech samples.
4 From Input to Output
A look at in-class activities used to teach vocabulary.