Web Version: Translation as a Generative Construct for Lesson Ideas
This is the online component for the Teacher Workroom Item: "Translation" as a Generative Construct for Lesson Ideas. It is also available as a PDF download, ready for printing.
- Introduction and Overview
- This introduction explains how and why we developed these lessons. We invite teachers to modify these plans to fit their own classroom needs and to give us feedback after you try the lessons.
- Basic Introductory Activities
- These activities are designed to introduce students to the construct of “language brokering” or everyday translation/interpretation: to see and value what they already know about this practice, and to generate a list of their experiences as language brokers that can serve as resources for learning.
- Activities to Deepen the Explorations of the Construct
- These activities may be used to deepen and extend these explorations of everyday language brokering experiences. It can be valuable to spend time exploring students’ language brokering in and of itself, rather than simply using the practice as a stepping-stone to school tasks. Language brokering involves a complex set of linguistic, cultural, and content skills, and you can help students to see and appreciate these complexities. By examining this work in school, you might help to make their future language brokering experiences outside of school into more robust learning opportunities. Your students may reflect more thoughtfully on those experiences and approach them in more conscious ways.
- Connecting Language Brokering to Academic Literacies
- Next, we present a unit plan that is designed to leverage everyday language brokering skills toward the development of academic literacy, specifically the writing of persuasive essays (California Language Arts Standards for 9th/10th grades: Writing Applications 2.4; Speaking Applications 2.5). The goal of the unit is for students to write a persuasive essay on the same topic to two different audiences, and to identify how they change their essays to make their arguments appropriate and convincing for each audience.
- Extending Translation as a Generative Construct
- We suggest a few activities that are designed to connect language brokering experiences to academic language skills across subject matter. We hope these will inspire you to identify other ways to connect to the material you teach.
- Lesson Resources
- The associated files that are a part of the Lesson Plan.
