REVISTA is designed to get students talking, and for you to act as a facilitator rather than lecturer. Your focus shifts to ensuring that the conversations maintain their momentum and intervening momentarily whenever that momentum wavers. The students can then be allowed to express opinions entirely their own, prompted by the engaging, student-relevant material, while you provide support and answer questions as they arise. You may also want to provide students with conversational techniques to help their Spanish sound more fluent. Speakers in their native language exploit techniques such as using rejoinders and asking follow-up questions. Likewise, your conversation students can improve their fluency and comprehension in Spanish when they become aware that they can take advantage of a variety of such conversational strategies, just as they would in their native language. Thanks to REVISTA’s engaging material, oral practice can take place primarily among the students. This interaction with their peers will help to maximize speaking opportunities. While you can always support students in keeping conversations flowing, it may also be effective to encourage students to assist each other and answer each other’s questions whenever possible, in order to keep the talking comfortable, casual, and natural. To ensure that all students maximize their conversational experience in the class, it may be helpful to encourage them to change groups, and group types, often. This prevents one or a handful of students from dominating any discussion. For example, to ensure a successful communicative progression, have students start off the class period working in pairs, then shift to larger groups, and finally have discussions involving the entire class. This allows them to assemble the bigger picture after practicing with its component parts. The Tertulia sections that finish every REVISTA lesson are designed to synthesize everything the class learned and discussed, making them ideal for group discussions. We hope that you and your students will enjoy the experience of communicating in Spanish and that REVISTA will support and enhance that experience. As an instructor, you can trust that your efforts to stimulate ongoing, lively discussion will make for confident, satisfied language learners who will ultimately feel better prepared to communicate in Spanish. And REVISTA will pave the way. IAE-20 INSTRUCTOR ORIENTATION S20
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