My middle school students love it when they can actually converse with someone in Spanish. At first they're a little afraid they'll embarrass themselves but with enough in-class practice students end up confident enough to speak Spanish with native Spanish-speakers when the need arises.
Some students learn really quickly and are able to do independent activities to build their vocabularies at even faster rates than the class.
Others struggle to retain the core set of words we set out to learn. Overall, though, I can say that they see the practicality of (and potential for enjoyment in) learning Spanish. My students are really open-minded and want to be able to talk to their neighbors and friends in Spanish. They want to one day be able to get jobs only offer to bilingual applicants. They want to travel the world.
My Project
In order to allow fast learners to continue at their own rapid pace I'd like 9 sets of headphones for students to use with our in-class computers so that students can use the laptops while blocking out what the rest of the class is doing. Or, on the other hand, struggling learners could do practice activities independently on the computers in order to catch up. Sometimes the whole class is asked to use the computers to practice a specific skill. In any of these scenarios it is crucial in a foreign language class that students be able to hear and speak the language and these headsets would allow students to get more practice with that.
Some students own their own headsets and bring them to class but others do not and I'd like to remove this barrier to their learning.
My classes love using websites like Duolingo to supplement what we do in class. These headsets would give all students access to these sorts of activities that are catered toward kids learning languages.
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