Specific Goals

• Affective: Develop a sense of safe community in the classroom, for optimal learning about language and about each other as cultural individuals.

Objectives: SWBAT…

1. As a group, develop norms for fostering community.
2. Through regular focused group activities, get to know one another, starting with more neutral topics and moving gradually to deeper personal and cultural memories as appropriate.
3. Find their own learning style from among methods used in classroom, deriving confidence from their ability to learn.
4. Through some form of student “library” (digital? binders?) of student work, evaluate one’s own progress and learn about peers.

To this end, teacher will…

1. Model respect.
2. Ensure adherence to the norms, while being open to revising them as the class evolves.
3. Be sensitive to group cohesion, adjusting the composition of small groups to avoid cliques.
4. Make sure students are adequately engaged with the material by developing creative and varied activities.

• Linguistic: Identify fundamental elements of the structure and grammatical forms embedded in narrative structure, and use them as a means for improving fluency in all four skills.

Objectives: SWBAT…

1. Chart stories on a timeline to identify theme and examine sequence and other story development principles.
2. Use wh- questions to analyze the action in a story and the choices the characters make.
3. Experiment with the form, meaning and use of the past simple and past progressive tenses in declarative mood, and the ways they work together in description.
4. Develop mastery of past simple and progressive in question and negative formation.
5. Using a story’s moral or lesson as a springboard, practice the conditionals “would,” “could” and “should” in present and past simple tenses, and in negative form.
6. Learn when to use simple coordinating conjunctions at the clausal level, and when it’s preferable to create a new sentence.

• Cognitive (analytical) & creative: To dig beneath the surface of a story to discover and articulate cultural, symbolic and moral meaning.

Objectives: SWBAT…

1. Learn ways to find cues to for guessing the general theme of a story, prior to reading.
2. Examine a story at the level of its surface structure and articulate obvious meaning.
3. Slice a story open to see what other possible interpretations exist, entering the realm of the metaphor.
4. Identify “universal” experiences represented by the legends, and relate them to one’s own life.
5. Investigate what aspects of a story reveal the culture it came from: Which require cultural knowledge, and which can be understood independent of culture?
6. Discover ways that this knowledge of analyzing a folktale can be applied to other genres.

• Cultural: To understand oneself and one’s classmates as cultural beings.

Objectives: SWBAT…

Many cultural objectives are embedded in previous goals. Here are restatements of a few key objectives:

1. With folktales, including those from the students’ native cultures, distinguish which themes are culturally shaped and which we share globally as humans.
2. Look at a story’s semantics and pragmatics through two lenses: the culture that gave birth to the legend, and the culture of the reader.
3. Discuss instances where culture is important to the understanding of meaning, where it enhances but not dominate meaning, and where it is it not relevant.