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My name is Elena Artesi Dardar. I was born and raised in Le Touquet Paris Plage, France. I was raised in a bilingual family. My mother is French, and my father is Italian.I started my career as a teacher at 30 years old (I had a few other careers before that). My goal at the time was to help my son to become bilingual French and English and to spend as much time with him as possible. I decided to become a French second language teacher and to move abroad!

 

After a few months in London where I taught Specialty French to lawyers, my son and I moved to Louisiana in 2002.A year after 9-11, tension was palpable and being French was not always easy as the first steps of war were being taken in the war in Iraq. I worked for 5 years in Louisiana where I taught French to K-5 students and met Brent, my husband.

 

After Katrina, my husband and I decided to move to Charleston, South Carolina. Since then, I have been working for an all girls private school where I teach French to very young students (2 to 6 years old). Since the children are very young, they learn quickly but they forget even faster. During childhood, language learning happens almost effortlessly. Learning a second language is easy and natural during the “window of opportunity” of childhood. My goal is long term retention.

 

When I started teaching a foreign language to very young learners, I faced for the first time an extreme lack of methods: there were no manuals for that age group in the publishing market. Nothing had been created to help preliterate students learn another language and help language teachers build a curriculum targeting communicative skills (students were used to vocabulary lists that provided no experiential connection). My goal was to help the children to master content and retain in a communicative way: constructing knowledge, acquiring more year after year, without forgetting what was taught the previous year. A language is about communication and communication only.  I struggled; I had to think as a designer; I had to build units of instruction; I had to develop my planning skills.

 


I have a Masters’ in Teaching French as a Second Language from France and had been looking for an American Masters’ that would match my personality and my teaching style. While reading the description of the Wilkes University online Master of Science degree in Instructional Media to my husband, I realized that I had found it.

I created a curriculum inspired by Bloom’s revised Taxonomy that spirals on over 4 years of learning. I teach the same students 4 years in a row. They know me well and I know them too, more than their homeroom teachers. I think it is a privilege to be able to share that long of a life of a child. I have been focusing on curriculum designing, technology integration, teacher-made formal assessments, multiple intelligence etc.

Click here to download  the song Bonjour by Lillian (4yo)

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