This is Jennifer González welcoming you to episode 131 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode, we're going to talk about how the teaching of world languages looks

different than it did when you were in school and why.

I took French for three years, but I can't speak any French.

Some version of this is expressed by so many of us who took a language class in school.

The lack of connection between school-based language classes and actually learning how to

speak that language seems to be something we have just accepted.

This is probably due to the way languages have traditionally been taught.

It's a vocabulary and book work, verb conjugations, occasional bite-sized culture studies, and

scripted dialogues that don't give students much real-life practice using the language

in authentic situations.

But if you stopped by a world language class today, you might be surprised to find that

a lot of those traditional practices are disappearing.

Textbooks are being replaced with more authentic resources.

Literature is integrated in a more authentic way across all activities, and there's a much

bigger emphasis on helping kids learn to actually communicate in the whole language rather

than just master parts of it.

I first became aware of these shifts when I met Rebecca Bluewolf, a French teacher in

Boston who interviewed me for the We Teach Languages Podcast this past spring.

Getting to know Rebecca, I could see how excited she was about some of the changes she had

made to her practice in recent years.

And she mentioned how different things were getting across the board in the world language

...