A New Learning Experience in Teacher Training

Abstract

The idea was simple. The Oklahoma State University Departments of Education and Foreign Language, the State Department of Education, and the Oklahoma Foreign Language Teachers Association pooled their resources to present a conference on the teaching of foreign language for all prospective foreign language teachers in our state. Conferences for practicing teachers are almost commonplace. However, none of the four sponsors nor any of their representatives had previously heard of a statewide conference expressly for the student teachers in a given subject area. The conference was faced with the challenge of being aimed at a very narrow audience. The sponsors used extensive mailings supported by the aid of nearly all the state's methods instructors to attract a crowd of nearly a hundred student teachers. Keeping in mind that Oklahoma is not a heavily populated state, one can see that this figure represents over half of the prospective language teachers in the entire state.