Nicola Work, OFLA Editor for Electronic Media
Associate Professor of French, University of Dayton
Do you want to make your language class more engaging and fun? Do students seem disengaged and bored? Do you have a hard time getting everyone involved? Would you like to mix up your class routine? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, active learning might be for you.
What is Active Learning?
Active learning is any instructional approach in which all students are asked to engage in the learning process. This offers an opportunity for students in the class to think and engage with the course material and practice skills for learning, applying, synthesizing, or summarizing that material. Meyer and Jones (1993) describe active learning as “providing opportunities for students to meaningfully talk and listen, write, read and reflect on the context, issues, and concerns of an academic subject” (p. 6).
Active learning is student-centered as students take more responsibility for their own learning; the teacher, in turn, assumes the role as facilitator, guide, coach. Active learning often encompasses discovery learning, problem-based learning or inquiry based learning. Students learn by doing rather than by lecture. Research about active learning found higher levels of student achievement and personal development, increased course grades, and increased student motivation (Cavenagh 2016; Freeman et al., 2014; Kuh, O’Donnell, Schneider, 2017; Owens, Sadler, Barlow & Smith Walters, 2017). A look at Dale Edgar’s Cone of Learning indicates that active learning leads to higher levels of retention compared to passive learning such as lectures or watching a video.
The Cardinal 