LILT Annual Conference 2024

Unlock the potential of interactive notebooks in the language classroom to boost student engagement, foster creativity, and enhance language retention. This session will explore ways to integrate interactive notebooks into your teaching practice, providing students with hands-on learning experiences that support vocabulary acquisition, grammar understanding, and cultural exploration. Participants will discover practical strategies for organizing content, assessing student progress, and incorporating multimedia elements.

If the idea of using a comprehensible novel with your students is daunting, this presentation is for you. Spanish teacher and author, Jennifer Degenhardt, will take you through the necessary steps to plan the novel, La chica nueva. You will be awarded a copy of the novel in the session (other languages available, too) and great ideas to use with it, so you can work to bring the story to life right away! If you’ve been toying with the idea to get into the class novel, you need to join Jen. It will be a good time for sure!

The workshop will highlight the events surrounding the Olympic games in Paris this summer. The history of the modern Olympic competition is directly relevant to the history of Modern France. The annual competitions have connotations beyond the simple winner/ loser appearance of the games. They embody the pride of each state/country. Many are politically motivated to participate and win the games to bring a sense of unity, peace, and healing for their war-torn countries, as was the case for the first modern Olympic games.

“Vocabulary knowledge is the single best predictor of an English language learner’s academic achievement.” (White, Graves, & Slater, 1990). How can we teach vocabulary to students so that the words really stick?! This workshop will look at ways to successfully teach vocabulary in any language classroom. We will explore the three-tiered model of vocabulary development (Beck, McKeown, and Kucan 2013) to guide which words to explicitly teach students, along with vocabulary activities that have proven successful in the K-12 classrooms. Teachers of all ages and languages are encouraged to participate in this workshop which aims to provide resources and strategies that can be immediately implemented in the language classroom.