Abstract

The newly hired teachers at the Missionary Training Center are expected to learn to teach foreign language well enough to prepare students to communicate functionally in that language within 2-3 months. These teachers have very little to no language teaching experience and must tend to the responsibilities of this part-time job while juggling the demands of full-time school work and social lives. This report details the design and development of a prototype training program aimed to initiate young teachers into the culture of methods and tools employed at the MTC by walking them through the process of planning their first language lesson. The Missionary Training Center has a rich culture of language learning practices. While there are specific expectations related to language teaching espoused by MTC administration, there is also a strong community of language teachers who routinely adapt MTC methods and invent practices to best meet the needs of their students. This project is an attempt to balance the request to develop particular competencies with the need for new teachers to be assimilated into the community of language teachers. This is done by infusing an objective training program with constructivist values, including authentic activity, modeling, representing multiple perspectives, generating, and reflecting.

Degree

MS

College and Department

David O. McKay School of Education; Instructional Psychology and Technology

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2009-07-11

Document Type

Selected Project

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd3044

Keywords

instruction, MTC, constructivism, training, elearning, second language acquisition

Language

English

Download

Share

COinS