In 2015, I decided that I wanted to become a teacher. My primary reason for wanting to teach French came from the  personal and  life-altering experiences that learning another language afforded me. Before taking French 101 when I was in college, I never could have imagined how learning another language could enrich my life. Not only was I able to live near the  "City of Love" for over a year and travel all around Europe, I met and married a non-English speaking Frenchman, with whom I would have 2 beautiful sons. Along my journey, I have been presented with opportunities to meet and talk to people from Canada, Africa, and France. Once, I was able to help a Haitian family at a pharmacy communicate important information to the pharmacist because they didn't speak English well. For me, French serves the purpose of opening doors to meet and communicate with awesome people from all over the world and to broaden my understanding of myself and the world around me. My wish is to spark the desire in my students to open these doors for themselves.

     The center of my teaching philosophy is active learning. One of my ultimate goals is to facilitate learning by guiding my students to become active participants in their own language-learning experience. I strive to engage students in activities that will be useful in their own lives because meaningful activities usually lead to greater understanding and long-term memory retention. I use visual, auditory, and tactile exercises because learning a language effectively uses all 3 learning preferences. In addition, immersion is vital to keeping a student in the language learning mode; therefore, French is spoken around 90% of the time in my classroom. However, in order to ease the stress of learning a new language, I do start my beginner class in English and slowly transition into the 90% target language. Lastly, the most important reason for learning a language is simply to communicate. For this reason, comprehensibility and the ability to communicate in French is the primary focus in my classroom. Students learn to communicate both orally and in writing, but also learn to listen actively and interpret meaning from the spoken language.

​

​

Below are links that help explain some of my teaching strategies:

​

Meaningful activities and learning: Scroll below

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Speaking target language 90%:

 https://www.actfl.org/news/position-statements/use-the-target-language-the-classroom