Adapting a Cognitive Apprenticeship Method to Foreign Language Classrooms

  Apprenticeship approaches to education have been used throughout history. They were used in the Greek and Roman Empires, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and they are used in many countries today to teach manual and intellectual skills. Recently, a new form of apprenticeship has emerged in education to teach cognitive skills used in performing classroom tasks. Called “Cognitive Apprenticeship Methods,” they have been used chiefly with native speakers of a language. The purpose of this article is to reconceptualize one of these current methods to provide beginning foreign language learners with the knowledge they need to acquire the four strategies of reciprocal teaching within a “cognitive apprenticeship hamework.” This article gives teachers an example of a set of lesson plans that embed the teaching of prerequisite declarative and procedural knowledge needed to perform higher order cognitive tasks. It has been developed simply as a model for foreign language teachers who may adapt it to fit their own lesson plans for their own textbooks. Translations of the tasks into English allow teachers of other languages and/or using other textbooks to adapt the principles and ideas to their own materials.