3 How to put translation in your classroom in five steps
3 How to put translation in your classroom in five steps
Teachers are busy people. So, while teaching with translation may be an ideal vehicle for navigating new language-teaching terrain, if you already have a road to drive on and a map for finding your way, so much the better. This section will provide both by outlining the steps for implementing translation in your classroom. These include determining if you have a “road” to drive on by ensuring that your students are ready and by determining if you already have content that translation activities can be built around. They also include mapping your activity by establishing learning objectives for your students and then planning it once you have objectives. The final step will be a look back at the road traveled–assessment and reflection.
Step 1: Determine what your students can do
The first step for implementing translation into your classroom is to determine what type of translation activity is appropriate for your students’ level. While translation activities can be implemented at any level, intermediate to advanced proficiency levels provide for the most options. Suggestions for adapting activities to different levels are included in Step 4.
Step 2: Determine if you have content that you can build around
You have students that are ready, so the next step is to think about content. While you can go off-roading and add completely new translation-based content into your curriculum, we need to return to the idea of TABP (Teachers are Busy People). If you are already an in-service teacher, you know that it will be easier to incorporate translation into something that you are already doing. Therefore, determine if there is a project, unit, or other content already in your curriculum that it would make sense to use translation pedagogy with. For example, our teacher was already doing a unit on home remedies in her intermediate high school Spanish course, so she added in the translation activity on bilingual editions of children’s books mentioned in the introduction, utilizing a book on home remedies. You will also want to determine at what point in the lesson it makes sense to incorporate the activity.
If you are working with the previously-mentioned multiliteracies framework, at this point you might want to keep in mind the framework’s transformed practice prong (Kern, 2000). If an activity is incorporated as transformed practice, it would generally come as a followup activity to another component of the framework, such as situated practice (writing to design meaning), overt instruction, and critical framing (attending to how linguistic forms and social contexts are interrelated). In transformed practice, learners apply their knowledge in real-world situations, thus making new meaning and transforming their prior knowledge (2000). For example, if students translate a text after reading it, this is a way of transforming their knowledge (2000).
Step 3: Determine your goals or objectives
As you star