Hear from Foreign Languages Prof. Mike Dettinger

Transcript

At the beginning and prior to getting into any assignment students have to work on, I use a number of rubrics for writing guidelines and expectations—expectations of what I anticipate for them and what they should anticipate. Also maybe a short video if we're doing something on a mini lecture or presentation, maybe showing them an example of a good strong presentation. One thing I do is I might pull an example of a scholarly article, something in a journal, okay, an abstract from a journal, so that they can see what a good example of this might be, or maybe even a literature review, so they have an example of what to follow using we use APA in my classes, so that, so that they can see an example of that.

As far as spoken, I like to find examples of good presentations, perhaps from a TED talk. I think those are really good examples of how students can kind of try to emulate what to mimic or what to speak about or how to speak to people. And then another example, and what I do, and this is always anonymous but after they submit a paper, I will pull examples, maybe a sentence or two or a paragraph or a section of students, what they submitted. it's always anonymous And I'll share that with the class and will say, or I might pull it from a different class, so that we don't embarrass any students or even from a previous semester of the same course content to look at—okay, this was really strong or maybe one that isn't so strong and we can work on it together as a class to say, “okay, how could we correct this” or “what areas of this could we make this a little bit stronger” so we'll do that as a group in class.