I was absolutely thrilled by Dr. Lyster’s talk yesterday on proactive and reactive approaches to content-based instruction. The ideas and questions that Dr. Lyster addressed in his presentation are fascinating to me and I appreciate the deeper insight into these issues that I gained yesterday.

Dr. Lyster covered two approaches to content-based instruction. The first is the “proactive” approach to content and language interaction. One of the aspects of this approach that I really appreciated is that he explained how to implement his ideas in a classroom setting and gave examples for how this can be done. Dr. Lyster’s sequence of steps for integrating language and content (noticing activity, awareness activity, guided practice, autonomous practice) helped me to make sense of the research that he focused on early in the presentation and see how the findings can be applied in the classroom. I look forward to reading more about his ideas and implementing them in my own classroom in the future.

The second part of the presentation focused on the “reactive” side of content-based instruction. Interaction and feedback is really important in a language class, so I really liked that Dr. Lyster included this topic in his talk. I now feel like I have a much better grasp on the different types of corrective feedback. Additionally, I really appreciated the distinction that was made between child versus adult learners and the different kinds of corrective feedback that tend to be more effective for each.

One of my favorite parts of the presentation was the description of grammatical gender as a “moon-walking bear.” When Dr. Lyster outlined the patterns for determining the gender of some of the nouns in French with certain endings, I was amazed. In fifteen years of learning French, I have never had an instructor that told me about these patterns. I was always told that it was a part of French grammar that simply needed to be memorized. This has huge implications for my teaching in the future!