NEWS RELEASE
ALGOMA DISTRICT SCHOOL BOARD
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Algoma District School Board’s Nancy Rancourt (FSL System Administrator) and Aurélia Pécheux, (Monitrice de langues et du CECR) provided Trustees information about a new French Second Language (FSL) resource that Algoma District School Board (ADSB) is helping to develop to support FSL educators in Ontario.
The Ministry of Education, in partnership with ADSB, the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board and Learnography, will engage in a collaborative professional learning model with a selected group of FSL educators to create and produce a professional learning resource which will be published on the Transforming FSL website.
This provincial project will focus on identifying elements related to teaching grammar in context that will support the incorporation of effective grammar instruction into an action-oriented approach.
Dr. Katherine Rehner, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, conducted research that examined the correlation between students' proficiency and confidence from all FSL programs. Her research highlighted the importance for FSL educators to contextualize the use of grammar and vocabulary.
Algoma District School Board has selected eight FSL teachers from throughout the district (Wawa, Sault Ste. Marie, Desbarats, and Elliot Lake) to take part in the project. They represent both Core French and French Immersion programs in Grades 7-12.
These FSL teachers will participate in three sessions from now through to June 2018. One of the first activities is assessing student work in order to determine the most common grammatical errors.
Next, in a face to face meeting with the provincial group, participants will bring student work as well as a summary of the most common grammatical errors for discussion. Here, participants will learn about research related to effective practices for teaching grammar.
They will choose one or two strategies from a list of research developed strategies and will be asked to apply these in their classroom. Eventually they will present the results of their findings and share artifacts (student work samples, examples of teaching strategies, etc) with their colleagues to reflect on the effectiveness of strategies.
The final goal of this project is to produce a resource for Ontario FSL teachers and the anticipated date of release is June 2018.
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