SWCOLT 2025

Learn about ChatGPT and other AI platforms. This session will review how AI can assist language teachers with lesson planning, assessment, and provide better feedback to students. We will learn what this tool is, its capabilities, and how it can make our teaching tasks more efficient. Bring a device. Session will be in Spanish.

Teachers will become students, as the presenter guides them through multiple interactive intercultural learning activities, designed to build cultural awareness and understanding in the classroom. Each can be replicated in the target language at the novice level, and all materials will be provided. Prepare for laughs and high levels of engagement.

How do you start your class each day? The first 5 minutes of class are a golden opportunity to build connections. Come learn simple strategies that make kids want to attend, want to use the target language, and want to interact from the very first minute of class. These warm-up strategies support SEL practices, social justice, and help build communicative fluency and accuracy.

Explore practical strategies for teaching culture in dual immersion secondary classes, aligning with the "C" of Culture from the World Readiness Standards. Discover how to guide students in investigating the relationship between cultural practices, products, and perspectives. Empower students to interact with cultural competence and understanding, fostering a deeper appreciation for global diversity.

This presentation showcases a simple and powerful routine writing practice that facilitates to reinforce grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and phonics through daily writing. This writing approach enables teachers to get immediate output from students. The audience will have the opportunity to learn and see how students get engaged to write, speak, and share what they are able to produce daily, in a short period of time. It will show how to build students’ confidence and autonomy in writing, especially when teaching a second language in a dual immersion classroom where it is necessary to counterbalance academic content and language skills.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) practices emphasize the integration of “real-life” or “real-world” tasks inside the classroom. However, CLT strategies tend to highlight tasks that typically cannot be found in the classroom and de-emphasizes the authentic language events that can and do happen inside the classroom. This presentation will highlight the important conversations and contexts that naturally occur in the classroom that language teachers can leverage for added proficiency building opportunities. Participants will experience and learn how to add micro-structures to their existing tasks to provide their students opportunities to acquire social-emotional and communicative skills in the target language.

If you struggle to see (or explain) the difference between the interpretive mode and comprehension, come explore the exciting world of the Interpretive Mode with us: how to maximize it, how it provides opportunities for Gen Z to be critical thinkers and consumers of information, plus examples and tools to take with you, of course. We will also discuss how it all holds up under AI. In this session we will discover how basic comprehension gets a major glow up with the interpretive mode; it just hits different, fam.

Looking for an innovative and engaging way to build and assess learners’ proficiency levels? Come for a fiery session where participants will explore the “Hot Pepper Method” – a creative approach to measuring language skills using the heat levels of hot peppers as a proficiency metaphor. In this learn-by-doing session, participants will discover how to use hot peppers, from the mild bell pepper to the scorching Carolina Reaper, to represent different levels of language proficiency. Then they will dive into how this metaphorical framework can be applied to various assessment tasks, from beginner to advanced levels, preparing to ‘spice’ up instruction and feedback. Prepare for a session that’s equal parts spicy and informative, designed to elevate instruction and assessment strategies to a whole new level!

Presenters: Silvia Juhas & Brandee Mau

Project-Based Learning (PBL) thrives on eight key principles, including posing challenging problems, fostering exploration, and promoting teamwork. Integrating language learning and AI enhances PBL by addressing linguistic diversity and supporting these principles. AI tools create accessible challenges, personalize learning experiences, bring real-world scenarios to life, and support multilingual collaboration. They also facilitate self-reflection, constructive feedback, and showcasing work in multiple languages. This integration creates an inclusive, stimulating environment that nurtures critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration among students.

Learn how language teams in one Utah district are leveraging AAPPL, IPAs, formative assessments, student feedback and reflections to set meaningful learning outcomes for their students.