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The Steps to Mastery™ are part of an instructional design system that presents the language in context and eliminates gaps in the learning process.  These steps ensure that students are not asked to perform activities for which they are not prepared.  New material is presented in authentic context and in manageable amounts for language learners.  All activities are sequenced to start out very easy and then get progressively more difficult, incorporating the vocabulary, key phrases, pronunciation, grammar, and cultural information required to perform each language function in real-life conversations. 
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Not every instructor or administrator has the luxury of choosing the language textbook that they use for the classroom.  If you do, it is a wonderful process that allows you to really train your eye on what a “good” textbook looks like.  If you don’t, you at least can identify the pieces that are missing and look to other resources to fill in the gaps.
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As a program administrator, it’s your responsibility to ensure a quality program with top-notch instructors.  But what if you do not speak the target language of instruction or have any background in second language acquisition?  How do you know what your students are getting?  A word of caution – Do NOT rely on the course evaluations alone!

Why You Can’t Rely on Course Evaluations

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You will see that I always avoid saying “giving error correction,” and if you have read some of my previous articles, you’ll know why.  Error correction should begin with self-correction from the student.  If the student cannot correct his or her own errors, then the teacher should facilitate peer correction.  Only when nobody in the class can give the correct answer does the teacher actually give the error correction.
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Teaching grammar in the communicative, integrated-skills language classroom can and should be student centered, but finding ways to ensure the delivery does not turn into a lecture can sometimes be tricky.  Remember that grammar should not be presented as an objective in and of itself.  The objective (or learning outcome) is what you want students to be able to do in the language at the end of the class.  Do you want them to be able to conjugate the verb to be or do you want them to be able to introduce themselves and give personal information?  Of course learning the verb to be is necessary, but grammar instruction should always be done in context.

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If you do not have the luxury of using a language program that has standardized exams for students, then you have to take the time to write your own. Or you might be in a situation where you have a standardized exam, but you need to add a customized component to it. Whatever the case, you should follow a methodology when approaching this task. There should be a lot of thought behind it in order to be effective and truly measure what students have learned from the class.

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Modeling is an extremely important step in any learning environment.  Modeling means that you show the learner what you expect him or her to do, and it takes place after you have outlined the instructions either in writing, visually, or both.  This is a critical step at the beginner level when you are presenting an activity for the first time, but it should still be done when repeating an activity to ensure all students are on the same page.

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To sum it up in two words — that depends.  Some Brazilians consider themselves Hispanic while many others do not, depending on their ancestry.  Brazilians are actually categorized as Lusophones which means “Portuguese-speaking.”  This term specifically refers to people whose cultural background is primarily associated with the Portuguese language, regardless of ethnic or geographical differences, whereas the term Hispanic is primarily associated with Spanish speakers.
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I´m not sure when or why it happened, but somewhere along the line someone decided that language students, especially beginners, needed to be bombarded with hundreds of words and grammar rules in every class.  You’ll see the alphabet, numbers, colors, and other topics in the preliminary chapter of some textbooks on the market today.  Those topics alone can take at least ten hours to get students to really master, so I can´t understand the thought process behind that concept.

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Teaching 100 percent in the target language, even at the beginner level, is critical for students to truly achieve their language learning goals.  This is an extremely important facilitation skill for foreign language teachers to learn, and although it is impossible to learn through a written article, what you can do is use the information presented here to create a complete immersion experience for your students.

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