Mis Musicuentos

Not going to ACTFL again, but for the best reason ever

2012-01-27T12:48:00.004-05:00

Last year I didn't go to ACTFL because my proposal wasn't accepted and I didn't get to score AP exams to be able to fund the trip.

This year I knew I wasn't even going to try to go, but the reason is much happier. I'll let Zoe tell you:

So, here we go again! :)

The general malaise has lasted a lot longer this time and my blog and my grading have taken the hit for that. I'm feeling pretty good most days now so I hope to pick it up before I drop off the blogosphere again to take care of the new little one (due June 14). But I have a lot of drafts sitting on my dashboard of ideas for upcoming blog posts.

Exciting times for us!

Free Ebook for WL educators

2012-01-06T10:34:00.004-05:00

Our generous friends over at Calico Spanish have put together a free resource for you! Sign up today to receive Web Tools for 21st Century World Language Classrooms. This free e-book is an organized, user-friendly collaboration based on past Twitter #Langchats related to using web tools to enhance and develop all sorts of language acquisition activities and assessments.Enjoy!

Dear novice-learner teacher - love, an AP teacher

2011-11-17T11:56:00.009-05:00

foto Alex Fuentes

Twice for #langchat we've polled the following question:

What activities prepare students for AP from the very beginning?

I confess, I probably wrote this question, maybe with some help from something similar being suggested as a topic. Certainly I've voted for it twice. But for whatever reason--perhaps teachers of lower levels don't think much about AP or the question was polled with others deemed more relevant--this topic has lost both times. So as usual, I'll take my opinion to the blog. Because I can.

I'm currently in my fourth year teaching AP. I know I've learned a lot from it, and I've gotten better at it, but my students are also improving considerably, mostly, I think, from what they get before my class, not from what they get from it. AP is a fourth-year class at my school. My first year, I had just 2 students, scoring 1 and 2. Second year, 6 students scoring one 3 and five 1's (ouch). That year I was so mad at the College Board I won't tell you what I wanted to do with them. Last year I hit some things really hard and actually, I ended up with my eight students scoring one 4, three 3's, two 2's, and two 1's (yay!). This year, I have such a stellar group of kids that I wouldn't be surprised if all six of them pass.

Now, in all seriousness, I hate the AP. I hate the test, and I hate the College Board, and I hate the idea. I can't stand that one three-hour exam thinks it can predict how proficient my students are and will be in college in Spanish. That student my first year that scored a 2, he was conversationally fluent, at least an Advanced Low speaker, after 3 years (he'd skipped Spanish 3) and the most motivated learner I have ever met. Of the two students who scored 1's last year, one is majoring in Middle School Spanish Education and the other is minoring in Spanish.

Really, that's how I feel about all standardized exams (thank you, Alfie Kohn). But the fact is, most of my students care about it. It is our only fourth-year option, and last year they voted on whether to keep it AP (in which they are required to take the exam) or to call it Spanish 4 (in which they'd have the option to take the test). But all but one voted for AP. They want the weighted grade points, and the AP Advantage study hall, and yes, they want the extra focused preparation for the exam. They want the bragging rights, and they want the college credit. So, I'm about pleasing the students, and here we are again.

After four years of watching students struggle and succeed in their fourth-year AP class, here are my requests for you, the elementary teachers (which I also am) through middle school, Spanish 1, 2, and 3 teachers.

Please, please, PLEASE feed them ALL KINDS of authentic audio.
This is my #1 because it's my #1 problem with my students. They get to me (in Spanish 3) and can't understand anything but learner language. The majority of audio on the AP is not learner language. It's stuff like BBC Mundo and Radio ONU (which I couldn't understand until, say, 10 years into my journey). More importantly, the majority of audio in life is not learner language.
The common mistake is to think that novices cannot understand authentic media. The truth is that the difficulty is in the question and not in the source. If you're asking them to hear the word cinco that's a different question than if you're asking them to hear the word aprovechándonos.
Interact with vocabulary in real contexts.
Asking students "what is the word for black? Good! Red? Great!" does almost *nothing* for their language acquisition. Trust me, from day one a novice learner can understand this question:
¿De qué colores es un oso panda? (2)
Context is everything. My current AP students have not had a vocab quiz in four years and their vocabulary is incredible. Yesterday in our novel they were accurately identifying words like solía and lechuza. One of my Spanish 3 students actually asked for vocab quizzes the other day and we had to have a talk about how cramming does not create long-term memory. This is connected with the issue of authentic media - get students listening to and reading real materials and the vocabulary will just be there. I promise.
Ask questions that require critical thinking.
Critical thinking is a life skill. Prepare your students for life by asking them real questions that make a difference. Stop asking 'what' and start asking 'why' and 'how.' To me, the true test of a critical thinking question is if there's no clear-cut answer. Instead of stopping with "what foods do you like?" ask "is a guinea pig food? why or why not? would you try it?" (In Ecuador, guinea pig - 'cuy' or as my dad likes to call it, 'barbecuy' - is a delicacy.)
Do speaking assessments. GET THEM TALKING.
My current Spanish 3 students tell me that last year they had exactly 1 speaking assessment. Now, kids like to complain about teachers, but if it's anywhere close to the truth, it's far too few. They're now facing two speaking assessments each in every unit for sixteen in all and they're dying. They hate it, except for my one who's aptitude leans toward speaking and away from writing.
The AP has a wicked guided conversation activity in which someone says something, then there's a beep, and the student has 20 seconds to think up and say what the test says they need to do. That's repeated about five times and that's the interpersonal speaking section. It's stressful and intense and unrealistic but there you have it. My current AP students are so used to talking back and forth in class that this year they were able to do this for practice without much anxiety much sooner than the students I had last year. Keep students talking -for the AP and for life.
Teach and require idiomatic expressions.
It's a sad fact about general proficiency guidelines and about the AP that the difference between one level and the next can come down to one single phrase - an idiomatic one. Three years ago the one student who passed said she went in determined to use the phrase "vale la pena." Honestly, she was the most proficient student in the class but I wouldn't be surprised if it made the difference between 2 and 3 for her. Keep an idiomatic expression on the wall, once a week or every two weeks. Reward students when they use them. Do an activity that requires a particular one. Point them out in authentic texts. Realize, and help students realize, that language is idiomatic.
Do assessments that require extrapolating and synthesizing main points from multiple sources.
A couple of years ago I did a KWLA presentation called Prompts with Power. It was about finding authentic sources and asking students to answer a question, orally or written, based on the sources. Teach students to draw their own conclusions after comparing and contrasting two other opinions. Or three. Similar or different, it doesn't matter, but it's a life skill -and an important one on the AP- to be able to look critically at what other people think and use those opinions to develop an informed personal one.

Perhaps it's good I had to write this here and not on #langchat - this is certainly more than I could have explained in snippets of 140 characters. Thanks for putting up with it.

Learning from #langchat

2011-10-26T10:49:00.000-04:00

foto por how will i ever

If there's one big principle I've learned over the past 10 years, 8 teaching and 2 in grad school, it's that good teaching isn't magic. Sometimes it looks like magic, but it's not. Sure, some people just don't have the personality or gift of explanation to be a teacher. But some very gifted people have made very bad teachers throughout the history of education (I had some, didn't you?). I wish there were some card trick I could learn that would make everything in my classroom effective and, well, magical, but if there is, I haven't found it yet.

Enter #langchat, which started (and continues) as a Thursday-night professional development that is prompted by and dictated by its participants, all world language teachers, or somehow connected to the profession. Three colleagues on Twitter approached me through email... wow, is it a year ago?... to start the chat, and it's blossomed into a useful hashtag that we use to share questions, answers, and links about teaching world language. The professionals who interact on #langchat have taught me so much more about good world language teaching than any bag of tricks could do.

A couple of recent blog posts made me think, hey, perhaps it would be useful for me to reflect in the blogosphere on why I use #langchat, why we started it, and where it should go from here.

1) Twitter is an unfocused, messy medium, but I love it, and let's make the most of it.

Twitter is anything but focused. Sometimes #langchat is like an open PD forum with pockets of teachers in the room, sitting at different tables, and a lot of chatter because there are seven different conversations going. (I think that's happened at every conference I've ever been to.) I remember a couple of #langchats where we started out with the topic (which participants had chosen) and went off in so many directions I felt like we weren't anywhere near what we were supposed to be talking about, and it was impossible to get back. But you know what? That's okay. Because that's where people were. That's what they needed to talk about that night. And that's what #langchat is about - it's professional development that you need, when you need it, on the subject you need. If it doesn't apply to you, skip it and see what's happening next week.

2) Everyone has learned something from their journey, and everyone has the right to express what they've learned on #langchat. Please share yours with me.
Years ago, I remember telling my Spanish 3 students that I was going to try to speak in Spanish more in class (like, 10 minutes a class instead of nothing) and hearing them groan. I'd never even heard of ACTFL, much less their target input guidelines. That's one thing I love most about teaching: we're continually learning. I've learned so much more since college than I learned in college. I'm pretty sure I've learned more from our Twitter PLN in two years than I did in grad school.

I think all of us have that story - none of us has "arrived" at the final magic trick. Looking back at #langchat, personally that chat last year on authentic assessment picked me up by the collar and dumped me on my tail, so to speak, to show me I was relying too much on technology as assessment without thinking about whether or not the tasks were actually realistic or useful. And the PBL chat that @dr_dmd led - I thought I used PBL, but by the real definition, I almost never did. So I kept hammering him with questions, trying to figure out how PBL, authentic assessment, learner language, and input could interplay in the WL classroom, and came away determined to change up our major fall project in Spanish 3. I still don't know how I feel about PBL in the WL classroom as a major vehicle of learning, but just this last week my students benefited from what I learned from Don in that chat, and that's now part of my journey.

What's your journey? What have you learned? Whatever it is - in whatever format or area - share it, not just on Thursday evenings, but like we all do, throughout the week using the hashtags #langchat, or #flteach, or #spanishteachers, or #apfrench, or any number of others!

3) Everyone deserves respect, face-to-face and online. Respect me, and give me the benefit of the doubt. Bring problems with me, to me.
I am the type of teacher who learns about something and then throws caution to the wind and jumps in head-first. Four years ago I went to a TPRS workshop on a Thursday night and then Monday morning we pretty much threw our textbooks out the window (okay, it was a little slower than that). Then it was like God put me working with people who were the exact opposite: 'okay, let's get my feet wet a little bit here; okay, that worked pretty well, maybe next year I'll go a little deeper.' To balance my personality or something. ;-) What I've learned from working with them is what has been mentioned here--it's a journey and you never know what will motivate someone toward the next step on their path.

From my perspective, many times I'm looking back on my own practices and asking, "Why didn't I see how terrible my idea was?" and I wonder if that comes off on Twitter as sounding like, "Why can't you see your idea is terrible?" if someone is doing something similar. 140 characters of digital type is a tough medium to communicate what we've learned. That shouldn't make us give up; on the contrary, I suggest two responses: 1) I determine to remember that we're all worthy of respect and edifying speech and 2) I determine to remind myself that if I'm offended it's more than likely I've misread what the person was trying to communicate and I should ask for clarification from that person until we've worked it out.

4) Respect is not the same thing as agreeing or affirming everything. I may be wrong, but...

But nothing! Call me out! Well, respectfully, but still, please don't affirm my bad ideas and call it respect, right? I look back and think, what would I have learned if people hadn't questioned what I was doing? There's one colleague in particular who has the mildly annoying habit of consistently asking me why I do a certain activity or assign some work or teach some unit or whatever. But the only reason it's mildly annoying is that frequently I'm just flat wrong, and there's no good pedagogy behind what I've done, and I'm immensely grateful that I have someone like that who keeps me professionally sound.

As one more personal example, it's no secret I try to keep translation out of my classroom as much as possible and that makes me not exactly a TPRS teacher, but it's also no secret that I think TPRS is one of the most revolutionary improvements to come to language learning in the last century, and I think Kristy (@placido) must be an amazing teacher I'd love to live closer to so I could observe her.

5) #langchat is intended to bring together a wide range of educators to foster the best exchange possible.

One of the most popular education chats on Twitter, #edchat, is so large that people blog about it being too large, and has broken up into two separate chats. And lots of area-specific chats have spun off from it. #langchat, so far, has not had the level of participation that would productively produce even more focused chats, in my opinion. That's not to say it couldn't. If educators want to spin off age-level focused chats, they should feel free. If a couple of educators hadn't had the idea to get some language teachers together to chat on Thursday nights, we wouldn't have #langchat. So what's your idea? Where do you want to go - and do you want to lead others there? Go for it!

You can follow me on Twitter at @secottrell. Join us Thursday evenings at 8 Eastern, 7 Central for the best professional development around, #langchat. (Tweetdeck and tweetchat are useful tools for organizing and following #langchat tweets.)

Not your average health unit

2011-10-24T12:15:00.001-04:00

foto por USP Hospitales

A unit on health is common in Spanish class. We have a unit in Spanish 2 on describing ailments and visiting the doctor. Then in AP I have a unit called "Cuidándome a mí" (taking care of myself). It's useful -last year's AP essay was health-related- but for AP I wanted to go beyond the typical reflexive verb, sickness phrases, doctor questions vocabulary and activities. Besides, our principal asked us this year to focus on hands-on learning with our students. So how could I make the learning hands-on, relevant, and connected to communities and culture?

Every unit in AP contains four performance assessments: interpersonal speaking, presentational speaking, interpersonal writing, and presentational writing. I've had a focus in this unit for the past two or three years on healthcare and undocumented immigrants, but this year I wanted it to really matter. Here are the assignments we did for each:

1) Interpersonal speaking

One student played a doctor's receptionist, and the student being assessed was someone in the doctor's office. I was a mother whose child needed a chicken pox vaccine in order to go to school, but didn't have any health insurance or much money. So the receptionist won't let me make an appointment, and the student had to explain to me that I could get the vaccine at the health department. To complete this task my students had to a) get the address and phone number of the health department in our city, b) identify language options at the health department, c) find out what kind of care is offered at the health department, d) find out whether undocumented immigrants can get care at the health department, and e) understand how services are paid for at the health department. And these students had never even heard of the health department!

Here's April completing this task.

2) Presentational speaking

Scenario: The local Latino community is having a town hall meeting to talk about local health care options. Several local political leaders are attending (with translators). Based on an article about undocumented children in the health reform debate and a video about a baby's life being saved at Seattle Children's Hospital, present a 2-minute argument about why undocumented immigrant children should or should not receive healthcare services at health departments and hospitals.

3) Interpersonal writing

Students had to locate a doctor in the city who spoke Spanish. This involved actually calling the offices to verify that they had Spanish-speaking staff and to get their address. Then they wrote a letter to the doctor explaining what they had learned about the undocumented and/or uninsured Spanish-speaking community and encouraging the doctor to get involved in free or low-cost clinics in the area. We are mailing these letters.

4) Presentational writing

Students wrote a lengthy letter to our Congressman, John Yarmuth. Based on a Pew Hispanic Center study, comments by the Republican presidential candidates, and a radio program addressing changes in the California MediCal access laws, students addressed such questions as:

-what is the most reasonable response to the healthcare crisis?

-if we treat everyone indiscriminately, will healthcare costs rise to an unsustainable level?

-how can we control costs for those who can't pay without overburdening society?

-what kinds of healthcare are human rights and what aren't?

-what do we do with undocumented children who had no say in their legal status?

-should undocumented immigrants receive healthcare anywhere, or only in certain places?

-how can we inform undocumented immigrants on their healthcare rights and options?

I am going to write an English-language note to accompany these letters, explaining what we did to Mr. Yarmuth and telling him that my students care enough about the Latino community that they have taken the time to learn their language, and if he will take the time to find someone to translate their letters, he will get some interesting opinions, as well as getting a taste of what language negotiation immigrants have to go through to become informed. Then I'll mail them.

I actually posted about this unit two years ago, but I think now it's become a lot more relevant and service-oriented.

Presentation: Target Language: Expect More, Say Less

2011-10-10T21:50:00.001-04:00

Whoops! I completely forgot to post my Prezi from my second KWLA presentation! Here it is, Target Language: Expect More, Say Less.

Target [Language]: Expect More, Say Less on Prezi

Spanish 3 assessment documents

2011-09-27T12:46:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I feel like I'm reinventing myself every year. Do you ever look back on something you did and think, "Why on earth did I do it that way? What a bad idea! Here we go again." I feel like I do that every year! So even though I completely redesigned my Spanish 3 class last year, this past summer I attended a week-long workshop on using proficiency-based assessments, and here I am again, reinventing Spanish 3.

I give all the credit in the world to @tmsaue1 and the @JCPSWorldLang teachers who welcomed me into their learning community and inspired me to work on authentic, proficiency-based, standards-based assessments. You can view their documents here.

In the spirit of open source I also try to make everything I do available. Here are my Spanish 3 assessment documents, and the rubric I use to "grade" them (you'll notice there's no place for an actual grade). Feel free to comment here with your email if you want an editable version--they looked terrible in Google Docs as Word documents.

For KWLA 2011: Media from Reel to Real

2011-09-22T23:11:00.004-04:00

Here's my Prezi for my Friday a.m. session, Media from Reel to Real.

Media from Reel to Real on Prezi

Accuracy vs. proficiency: an illustration

2011-09-21T08:03:00.003-04:00

photo Steve Mullan

Accuracy refers to grammatical forms that match the standard form of the language. So, a student produces 'yo pensé' instead of 'yo piense' (something my 3's have been doing recently). Proficiency includes an aspect of accuracy, but primarily refers to how well the speaker (or writer) is able to communicate and comprehend meaning. The contrast is what Cathy Doughty (confusingly) refers to as focus on form vs. focus on formS. (The distinction is necessary but this way of referring to it has always driven me up the wall- I can't remember which is which without looking it up. Every.time.)

Next week, Ingrid Betancourt is coming to visit our local library, a super exciting event because every year for the past 3 years my Spanish 3 students have done a project related to her kidnapping and rescue. To prepare for her book talk, I got her book in Spanish and I'm trying to finish it before she comes. It's 700 pages long. I've made it halfway. I just read this morning a perfect example of the importance of proficiency over accuracy. I know that as Spanish teachers it makes us cringe inside every time we hear "Me llamo es..." but read this snippet of Betancourt's story and see which you think is more important.

Betancourt was in the jungle for more than 6 years. Not long after she was kidnapped, three American contractors were also kidnapped, and they ended up with her for a period of time in a type of jail in the jungle. The hostages bickered quite a bit amongst themselves, often targeted at Betancourt, so much so that at one point she was taken out of the jail and housed elsewhere in the camp. Then, the other hostages back in the jail complained so much that her conditions were now better than theirs, that she was transferred back. When she returned, one of the Americans, Marc Gonsalves, whom she says did not participate in all the bickering, approached her. Here's my loose translation:

Marc smiled sadly and told us in broken Spanish, with all the verbs in infinitive form, that he was very happy to see Lucho and I again. His words reached my soul...

"I can't believe it! You're speaking Spanish! I go away for three short weeks and you end up speaking better than me!"

...

Everyone laughed, because Marc answered with the three words of Spanish that he could patch together. He translated literally some English expressions that, miraculously, in Spanish came out hysterical and made us all laugh. Then he bid farewell courteously and went back to the barrack.

So, can verbs in infinitive "reach the soul"?

Fun activity #6: A escribir

2011-09-19T21:41:00.005-04:00

Fun activity #6 is ¡A escribir!, an activity obviously designed to get students spontaneously writing.

foto por Jeffrey Pacres

At first, when our activity chooser landed on "A escribir," students were not thrilled. Writing? Don't we do that all the time? And from my perspective, how do you keep a random, effective writing prompt on hand all the time?

This is where I have to hand all the props to @ZJonesSpanish and his Tírate a escribir writing activities based on comic strips. The chooser lands on A escribir? No problem. I literally have to do -nothing-. I pull up Zambombazo, click on Tiras, and pick the newest one that I think will interest my students and be appropriate for their level. We talk about the tira cómica for about a minute, and then they have 8 minutes to write whatever they can think of about it. It's been a whole lot more interesting for my students than they thought it would be. We even sent some responses to Zachary and he posted them on the tira on his site.

Another offering from Zambombazo great for lower levels too (and incidentally, writing or speaking) is his ebook, ¿Qué le dirías?.

Spontaneous writing gets kids thinking on the spot in the TL, a skill that boosts oral proficiency as well. Go for it!

App review: Tour Wrist

2011-09-12T12:19:00.005-04:00

A couple of weeks ago on #Langchat, the Thursday night (8 ET) chat by and for language teachers on Twitter, we discussed iPad (and other iOS) apps that may be useful in the world language classroom. That night I downloaded something like 25 free apps and since then I've been on a mission to see what they can do in my classroom. In my Spanish 3, we have 2 iPods and 1 iPad, and in AP, we have 2 iPads and 3 iPods. Not ideal, but enough to have a little fun.

Our first unit in Spanish 3 was on things we do with friends and family for fun ("Esparcimiento"), and included some talk about travel, as well as concentrating on expressing opinions with deeper vocabulary than "Sí, me gusta." The interpersonal speaking assessment involved me having a conversation with them (about a sports game) so-- what do the rest do while I'm talking to 1? Enter Tour Wrist.

tour wrist home page

Tour wrist is a free app that lets you do virtual tours of more than 23,000 places all over the world. You can look at the Tour of the Day (or obviously, home, hotel, or photographer of the day) but more useful is the "Browse all tours" function. That takes you to a map of the world.

tour wrist map - Central America

You can use two fingers to enlarge any part of the map to see more of what's there. Now, the offerings in Latin America are not exactly extensive, but the app is a whole lot of fun. As you focus in, more and more green placeholders show up. Tapping on one will tell you what it is, and tapping on the arrow on its title will take you to the tour.

This is where you find the best feature - by holding your device at eye level, you can turn around and see the 360-degree view as if you were there. Really, you can hold it up and look at the sky, or down and look at the floor.

Tour of bridge in Medellín, Colombia

Anyway, what do you do with this in class? While I was doing the interpersonal conversation with individual students, the others had to work in pairs to find a tour in a Spanish-speaking country and answer the following questions:

1. What is it?

2. Where is it?

3. Do you like it?

4. Why or why not?

They did this for at least two places.

The students really enjoyed the app, of course, but more importantly, they were using their recent targets (expressing reasons for opinions) to talk about places I could never take them to. I did have one pair choose random places in the Caribbean or someplace. I told them later that if they were doing something that didn't have much to do with Spanish or places where people speak Spanish, they probably had the directions wrong.

So- it would be nice if there were more tours available in the places we were looking, but it's a stylish, user-friendly, free app for all iOS devices, lots of fun for all involved.

What ideas do you have for Tour Wrist in the world language class?

Myth #6: Memorizing vocabulary

2011-09-01T11:18:00.003-04:00

For my original post about the myths, look here.

foto por Micheo

Myth #6 is this:

Students learn vocabulary in long lists of isolated words (or, we just went over bosque, why can't they remember it and remember it's masculine?).

What a mistake I used to make, and textbooks make. To think that we can give students a list of vocabulary, tell them there's a quiz on Friday, and somehow think they'll be able to use it next month, or next week for that matter.

Here's the truth: students learn words they need to do what they want to do. Think about the words you know - they are words you need to accomplish something. I don't know how to talk in Spanish about nuclear power plants. I barely know how to talk in English about nuclear power plants, and what I do know I know because my father worked at one for thirty years. Our brains are efficient - most of us just don't bother remembering terminology we never need to communicate something.

If you've interacted with me for very long, you know that my students do free-topic blogging. I once had a student who wrote nearly every week about hunting. It was his passion. The verb cazar was not in our vocabulary for Spanish 3. But you can bet that before long he knew that and the words for all the different animals he hunted. Why? Because he wanted to. In Spanish 3 every year, we read the novels Cajas de cartón and Esperanza renace. Both deal with immigrant children. Though the words are not in our vocabulary list, by the end of the year they are completely familiar with words like migra, campesino, pizcar, and frontera. Why? Because they need them to talk about the issues in the books.

It's one of the most freeing things that has ever happened to me in my professional life to come to the realization that students will naturally acquire the vocabulary that interests and helps them without me drilling or quizzing it.

As a few resources for you, check out the archive of last year's #Langchat on rethinking how we teach vocabulary. I also have done several blog posts on this topic, including how I do vocabulary (surprise! I do give out vocab lists!), why you should kick the vocab quiz, and what you might do instead of the vocab quiz. Also check out cybraryman's page on teaching vocabulary, as well as Edutopia's insightful post on the topic.

If you're into research, read up on what it has to tell us about teaching vocabulary, including that shallow processing memorization doesn't work. For a tempering opinion, if it's worth a book purchase to you, you could read Vocabulary Myths by Keith Folse, who warns that throwing out vocab lists and stopping teaching it explicitly is too dramatic and not actually an answer to the vocab question.

However you decide to present and teach and review your vocabulary, my advice is to seek more ways to focus on these five keys:

1) motivation - make it vocabulary students find interesting.

2) useful - students see value in vocabulary when they can see themselves using it.

3) frequency - in every way you can think of, integrate the vocabulary that everyone uses.

4) phrasal - fool with words and phrases to encourage chunking of words commonly used together

5) less is more - concede that students can only acquire so much at a time, and give up on the rest (at least until later).

Got the rubric!

2011-08-21T22:29:00.003-04:00

After making my first new assessment description, I've finished the performance assessment rubric. It took a long time to make but hopefully it will be adopted for every assessment from 6-12 grades at my school. Again, I stole most of it from the great people at @JCPSWorldLang (with a special shout-out to @tmsaue1 for all the sharing they do over there). They got it all on one page, but I wasn't willing to put my text that small, or my document-creating abilities just aren't up to par. ;-) Thoughts?

New year, new units, new assessments

2011-08-18T12:49:00.002-04:00

At last I've turned to working on my own classes (after looking at Spanish 1 all summer for our new teacher) and I'm (once again) re-doing my Spanish 3 units. This year I'm trying to make them more realistic. I've been heavily influenced on this by a particular #langchat last year on making assessments authentic. My assessments were fun, and used a lot of language, but didn't have a whole lot to do with what students really would do with language.

So, back to the drawing board. I've come up with the assessments for Unit 1 (titled "El esparcimiento") and just did the assessment description for interpersonal writing. What do you think?

(Of course I have to give a shout-out to @JCPSWorldLang, from whom I stole almost completely the format for this.)

Jumping on the Animoto bandwagon

2011-08-16T12:03:00.004-04:00

I've heard a lot about Animoto but it's always been filed away in that "I'm sure it's great, but I'm on technology overload here" part of my brain. This week I decided to finally jump in and make on.

If you stick with the basic account, it's more than mildly annoying that you can't do anything past 30 seconds without a paid account. But thanks to @ckendall for the heads-up that you can apply for a free educator account. Mine came through immediately (no 2-week wait like they cautiously say). That gives you unlimited videos for you and up to 50 students.

Yesterday, our first day of school, I was in the new position of actually not knowing my Spanish 3 students. This is the first class I've had that I didn't already have in a previous class. So, we talked about why each one of them elected the class. I took some of their ideas, grabbed some photos from Flickr Creative Commons, and made a quick Animoto. Today I did the same thing with some vocab from AP's first unit.

What will you make?

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Rethinking "late" work

2011-08-13T12:04:00.003-04:00

foto por George Hatcher

After a busy but fun month of traveling here and there on vacation, it's back to school and back to the blog! We teachers have been at school this past week, and the kids come back Monday. Where did that summer go?

One goal I accomplished this summer was reading The Homework Myth by Alfie Kohn. While I do not share Kohn's apparent view that kids are generally angels who are being failed by everyone and if they were just in the right environment they'd all do the right thing and achieve all the right things (a biased summary, you can tell), I applaud and stand with him on so many aspects of traditional educational models that just make no sense. And this is from someone trained and drilled in "if the one-room schoolhouse was good enough for them...".

As I read this book, and discussed related topics on #langchat, I have become increasingly frustrated with late work policies and other issues that invalidate grades. I've had students turn in exemplary work, but I have to give them an F because it's a week late. To me, that is academically punishing a student for something that is not an academic problem.

As I thought about this, it occurred to me that very few times in my life have I had a deadline that, if not met exactly, was a disaster. Even the water company gives me up to 2 days late to pay my bill. Now, I understand that it's a life skill to learn to budget time, plan for when things are due, etc. But also, what about when life happens? When Grandma's sick and everyone's at the ER until 2 AM? When the alarm didn't go off and I wake up five minutes before school? When because my teachers don't talk to each other I have a book review, research paper, chem test, and Spanish presentation all on the same day?

At my school, we used to have a late work policy. Everyone had to use it.

1 day late : -25%

2 days late : -50%

3rd day: Zero

If you use zeroes, you know how they kill a student's average and quickly make it impossible to bring up the grade.

Last year they let us set our own late work policy, and this was mine:

1 day late : -25%

2 days late : -50%

after 2 days until the end of the quarter : -75%

At the end of the quarter, I was forced to finalize grades and thus, to give a zero.

This is my new late work policy. Let me know what you think.

Students can turn in up to 2 assignments up to 2 days late per quarter with no penalty.

After 2 days late, the student will be dismissed to the library to complete the assignment for 60% credit and cannot return to class until it is finished, but will be responsible for all missed work.

I'm trying so hard to find a balance between grace, training, and trust. I'll let you know how it works.

A song made for early Spanish 1

2011-07-06T16:02:00.002-04:00

photo by Bogdan Tociacu

Last week Luis Fonsi's new album Tierra Firme came out - and it's good. It's worth the whole download, I promise. The Deluxe version came with the video for Gritar, as well as acoustic and ranchero versions of that fabulous song.

As I was listening, this song called "Me gustas tú" came on. The more I listened the more I thought, Seriously, did Fonsi write this song for the beginning units for Spanish 1? It's a gem for any unit on expressing likes/dislikes. Here's hoping a good video comes out for it, too.

Proficiency & tacos

2011-06-28T17:04:00.002-04:00

photo by Steven de Polo

So, about informing our students on proficiency.

One of the great ideas that came from that PD I went to was this 'taco' activity. It's designed to be done in the first days of school, preferable on the first day unless your first day is taken up with 'administrivia.'

Divide students into four groups, or tell them to divide themselves into four groups.

Tell students that you want them to tell you what a taco is, in English. You can choose any other common object or activity, such as the circus. For the first group, tell them that they can only use individual words to talk about the taco. In the second group, they can use phrases. In the third group, they can use simple sentences. In the fourth, they can use descriptive language in compound sentences joined by transition words like 'next' and 'also.'

When students use their 'proficiency level' to describe the taco, assign the proficiency labels to what they have done. Talk about which description gives the best idea of what the object/activity really is and why that level should be a goal. We also discussed having students write on large chart paper their descriptions, so that you can put them up on the wall. Then you can post on the chart 'novice low' and 'approaches expectations' and 'C' or whatever your assessment feedback language will be, and the students can have a visual reminder all semester or year of what exactly your expectations are.

Several teachers mentioned that this activity gives students a real idea of how accessible language is and gives everyone in the room a realistic view of where they could be at the end of the level. For the group of teachers I was with, their expectation is Novice High at the end of level 1 and Intermediate Low at the end of level 2 (they haven't done level 3 yet).

I thought this was a great way for students to be introduced to proficiency levels and get away from the vague 'here's a list of units we may or may not finish this year'-type goals I've done before. What do you think?

Proficiency levels shouldn't be a secret

2011-06-27T15:55:00.003-04:00

photo by SamikRC

I had a wonderful PD opportunity last week to sit in with the truly vanguard Jefferson County Public School world languages department. They have spent at least the last two years developing communicative, proficiency-based, performance based units, assessments, and rubrics at levels 1 and 2 for Spanish and French. I have been so inspired by them that even though I put in a lot of work mapping out our Spanish 1 and 2 last summer (which I don't even teach-I was doing it for a new teacher), I have realized how disorganized, unstructured, and not-proficiency-based it was and I'm doing it all over again, even more deeply, for our (third in three years) new teacher.

One of the big questions of the week was this: How do we inform our students about proficiency levels, and keep them informed?
What, you mean my students are supposed to know what these are? Before about a year or two ago, I didn't know what they were. But it makes perfect sense. Proficiency levels shouldn't be a secret; they should be incredibly clear to everyone: students, parents, teachers, administration. So how do we inform them? My answer is fairly basic - I pushed my students to try to sustain the past tense in order to cross the barrier from Intermediate to Advanced, because that's what the ACTFL (past) president Eileen Gliesen said to do in a workshop I went to. And I made proficiency-based very detailed rubrics. That's about it. And you? How do you inform them?

Flipbook illustration

2011-06-23T09:00:00.002-04:00

This post is part of my project to get rid of old (but useful) papers that have been sitting on my bookshelf.

This is another literacy idea I got from a grad school class on teaching literacy to ELLs.

Materials:

3 sheets of 8 1/2 by 11 blank paper
stapler
drawing tools

Directions:

Place the three sheets of paper on top ofeachother, and overlap leaving a small margin at the bottom of the paper.
Hold the pages securely so that they remain overlapped, and fold the top sheet so that its top edge folds to a small margin above its bottom. There should now be six "pages" now in the flipbook.
Staple through all layers at the fold. On the top page, write the title of the book, the author, and your name.
Illustrate and write about an important event (ones you find significant) on each of the following five pages.

This project teaches students to look at literature more critically because they have to identify and illustrate significant events. Also, you can add a variety of activities, including retelling the story with the activities, explaining symbolism, writing new endings, collaboration, etc. I've also had students do this about a story told in class.

Keep reading!

Ethics in the language class - we aren't their parents

2011-06-20T09:09:00.002-04:00

I have a question for you - where do you draw the line in your language class as far as ethics?

photo by Simon Q

Here's my bias: I teach at a private faith-based (Christian) school, and I have to be very careful about what I show to my students and expose them to. More than that, I have personal convictions (actually much higher those of most of my students) that prevent me from showing many things I could show them without really getting in trouble with my school. I won't show commercials or news clips that show women in very revealing clothing. I won't show videos with suggestive dancing or themes, even in our favorite songs like Espacio sideral and No te pido flores and Sigo con ella (a song I love to use in class because of its actual positive depiction of faithful love- hard to find in almost any genre).

Aside from my personal convictions, and my school's guidelines, my perspective on the field in general is that we are not their parents. Parents have a special responsibility to filter our child's world, which is why we set rules, disallow certain clothing, prevent them from buying certain music or video games, and don't expose them to too much too soon. I don't know what the filter is that my students' parents have set for them, but I do know that it is not my place to violate that filter.

Here are some items I've come across in my teaching experience with music and film that I would choose not to allow in my classroom.

Now, I'm not against rated R movies just because they are rated R. I show my senior class Pan's Labyrinth every year as part of a series of activities to expose them to the truth about the Spanish Civil War and contrasting fantasy and reality. But when I was in the AP Spanish workshop a few years ago, the leader showed us a film that she used in her classes, even lower-level classes. The film was De eso no se habla, and the plot basically goes like this, if I remember correctly - an older, well-traveled man settles in an Argentinian village where he falls in love with a talented, 15-year-old midget. He fights his attraction for her in several ways, including traveling and regular visits to the local brothel, where he also runs into the [married] town mayor. He is able to marry her, but then she is for some reason unhappy, and in the end he watches as she runs away on the circus train to be with people who are like her. Sounds great, eh? I mentioned in the workshop that if I showed the movie I'd be fired. Another teacher said she taught at a public school but because of her personal convictions she'd never show it. I thought to myself, exactly what principles and life lessons are in this movie that I want to expose to my students? Because everyone knows that we aren't just there to teach them language, and that's certainly not all they learn from us.

I think of Ricardo Arjona as the Shakira of Guatemala. His music is very well done and mostly trashy. I actually used to use at least part of two of his songs, Quién (excellent for listening comprehension of numbers) and Pingüinos en la cama (which has the rare feature of using almost every option for continuous present in the space of about three sentences). I thought, hey, I'll just play certain parts and leave out the rest, or the language is too advanced and they won't get it, or surely they won't look up the video. Yeah, right. The first year I tried this, I had a student, we'll call him Enrique, who decided he loved Arjona, looked up the songs and their videos and their lyrics, and you can imagine how that went. I put the songs away and never used them again.

So there's me; I just can't in good conscience let myself take the place of my students' parents in the name of 'exposing them to other cultures' and 'well, they're getting worse at home anyway.' What about you? What's your ethical standard?

Activity #5: Gira la botella

2011-06-17T15:24:00.002-04:00

Fun activity #4 is 'Gira la botella,' or 'spin the bottle.'

foto por Mickey Del Favero

I forget what the original purpose of this game was (in language class, I mean, haha), but I tweaked it to be a game to practice idioms. I find that one of the hardest parts of vocabulary acquisition is getting students to really use idioms in their speech and writing. Part of the problem is a lack of practice in seeing and using them repetitively in a meaningful context. Imagine my dismay when I found out one of my fourth-year students who had practically memorized Luis Fonsi's song No me doy por vencido still had no idea what the expression meant. Doh! (on me, not her) I guess songs don't cure all ills. (Did I just write that?)

Anyway, back to the game...

In a document, make a list of common idiomatic expressions for your language, expressions you want your students to be able to use in appropriate contexts spontaneously.
When this game is chosen as a class activity, copy and paste your list into the random chooser. Run the chooser so it selects an expression. (Be sure to use the fruit machine, not typewriter, so you can remove the option after it's used.)
Get your students into a circle. It's always good to have an opportunity to change things up, and get them up and moving, eh?
Spin a bottle in the middle of a circle. You can use any bottle but for cultural effect we use a Manzanita bottle (my favorite Mexican beverage).
When the bottle stops, the person at whom it's pointing begins a sentence with the idiom. For example, "No me doy por vencido en la clase de matemáticas."
Going clockwise, the next person has to remember exactly the sentence and add a detail: "No me doy por vencido en la clase de matemáticas por la mañana."
The first person to forget any of the sentence is out and has to sit down. Spin the bottle again, choose a different idiom, and keep going until you're done (or we time our game for 10 minutes).

I imagine you could use this for any vocabulary you're targeting and it would work the same way. I particularly like idiomatic expressions because it's such a real way to push real communicative proficiency at every level.

Have fun, and no kissing! ;-)

Symbol Illustration

2011-06-13T08:45:00.004-04:00

This post is part of my project to get rid of papers I haven't looked at in forever (but still contain good ideas) by making them 'digital' here.

The symbol illustration idea is from a course I took in graduate school on teaching literacy to (mostly elementary) English-language learners. It seemed to me an idea easily adapted to various situations, content, and levels.

Materials:

colored paper
scissors
markers

Directions:

After reading and discussing some type of literature together (in my course it was Esperanza Rising),

Decide what you think is the most important object in the book.
Cut a large sheet of colored paper into the shape of that object.
In the middle of the object, write a sentence describing why you think that was the most important object.
In the rest of the space, draw other important objects, with a sentence under each that describes its importance.

My symbol illustration of Esperanza Rising:
Some variations:

Ask for an oral presentation of the symbol illustration when it is finished.

Make the illustration a timeline instead - on a long sheet of paper, draw a line horizontally in the middle. Above, put positive symbols. Below, put negative symbols. All should be sequential and should be used to retell the story emphasizing mood changes.

Ask students to choose a symbol that may also symbolize something in their life and describe this.

Use VoiceThread or other storyboarding or digital storytelling tools to make this project digital/paperless.

Connecting your classroom

2011-06-10T12:02:00.003-04:00

photo by kmevans

Often during #Langchat, a question will come up about how those of us who have collaborating schools in target-language countries found these schools. I found two of ours through Twitter and the other through my school's accrediting agency's website.

This week on #Langchat, we devoted the entire hour to discussing how we can best collaborate with teachers and classrooms locally, globally, and internationally. The summary of the chat is full of great resources and tips for getting ourselves and our students outside the classroom (many times without leaving the classroom!)

Here are three websites I've recently come across (through Twitter, of course) that may help you give your students one of the best, most motivating things you can offer: an authentic audience.

Skype recently launched Skype in the Classroom to connect schools all over the world.

Connect All Schools may also help you find a collaborating school.

My colleague @mundaysa has had great success using The Mixxer.

Good luck and have fun!

Myth #5: The textbook is all I need

2011-06-08T14:30:00.004-04:00

For my original post about the myths, look here.

photo by NomadicLass

Textbook companies make a lot of money off of telling us that they've done all the work and they're all we need. Audio? They've got it. Video? That too. Activities? Structure? Assessments? It's an all-in-one package, for a price. And out-of-date as soon as it's printed.

It's no secret I'm not a fan of most textbooks. There must be some magic textbook out there that I haven't seen that is so communicative and fabulous, but the ones I've used before leave me wondering, who wrote this? I know they say they're aligned with standards, but what are my students actually supposed to be able to do after this activity? The activities are stale and forced, the vocabulary is endless, and the assessments are designed for easy grading instead of actually assessing language ability.

There's something to be said for having a structure. I don't think I've met a teacher who has just jumped into textbook-free teaching. For me, it was about a two-year process, and it wasn't even on purpose. At some point I just realized that we weren't taking the textbook off the shelf anymore. I realized that using online resources and storytelling and my own activities turned out to be so much more freeing, motivating, authentic, and up-to-date (after all, language is constantly changing). Not to mention it costs less.

Tying ourselves to a textbook and its cheesy, fake, tedious accessories because 'it's all we need' is a myth that is preventing our students from acquiring the real language it takes to communicate with real people. Even if you use a textbook you love, look beyond it to the world of resources that will enrich and inspire your students more than your textbook ever will. Take a look at what the Twitter PLN is talking about. Explore the resources others have shared with me. Look at some of my blog tags like internet activities, YouTube, and assessment. And soon, I'll be posting my summer project: units with activities, standards-based "I Can" statements, and assessment ideas for Spanish 1 - AP Spanish. Steal, thieve, borrow. Collaboration makes the PLN go 'round.

Taking paperless to the blog

2011-06-02T13:23:00.003-04:00

photo by NoHoDamon

I love to teach as paperless as possible. My students read more off a projector than off of paper. I wish we had the technology available to be much more paperless at my school- something to strive for.

Then I think, well, if I want to be paperless in my classroom, I should be paperless personally. Share all that info from the paper on the blog and get rid of the paper altogether, right? It's not like I actually look at all that paper ever anyway. I just did what we all (should) do at the end of the school year- I cleaned my classroom. I say 'should' because I don't. The last few years I've left my notebooks either on my bookshelf or in a closet and then put them back in the same place when school is back in, not to be looked at all year.

This year I was told I had to move all the books off my bookshelf for the summer so the floor-waxing crew didn't have to box them up when they remove the bookcase. So as I moved the books to a storage room on a different floor, I looked at all of them with a critical eye, and a *lot* of paper went in the trash. I went through my notebooks I made in college for my teaching methods courses and the bad pedagogy astounded me. Really beautiful, thematic, well-presented notebooks -I'm telling you, you would have been impressed- full of information that shouldn't even have been written and hasn't affected my life (thankfully) since.

Also on the shelf were programs and notes and handouts from conferences and vendor booths, things I swore I was going to look at, review, and share later, and never did. So I've brought them home, and I've told myself that before I throw them out, they must become digital. The pile is the source of a lot of hopefully helpful blog posts, so stay tuned.

What about you? What jewels are sitting on your bookshelf that could become your own paperless way of sharing with your professional learning network via a blog?

Combat the 'este tiempo' monster

2011-05-23T10:29:00.001-04:00

photo by Xiang Xi

I don't know about you, but my students even in their third and fourth years will slip into phases where they keep saying or writing 'este tiempo' instead of 'esta vez.' Or, un otro tiempo or más tiempos or el último tiempo. Here are a couple of songs to combat that monster.

The first is "Por esta vez" by Belanova, which obviously has it in the title, and so twice in the chorus, and so many repetitions throughout the song.

Another is Irreemplazable by Beyonce with 3 repetitions of 'esta vez.'

Also you have Noviembre sin ti by Reik with 4 repetitions of 'otra vez' and Fotografía por Juanes ft. Nelly Furtado with quite a bit of 'cada vez.'

Enjoy!

Children's DVD giveaway!

2011-05-05T11:10:00.003-04:00

I've been a follower of Tati's blog for a long time - maybe before I even had my own, but at least since the very beginning. Certainly since before I had Zoe and began the adventures involved with a bilingual baby.

Do you have a child learning Spanish or do you teach elementary? Enter here on her blog for the DVD giveaway from Whistlefritz.

Activity #4: Drama Inmóvil

2011-04-26T12:03:00.004-04:00

Fun activity #4 is "Drama Inmóvil," idea courtesy of Paulino Brener.

My students LOVE this. They beg for it- even the ones who will never talk in class. You must try it, and if you're anywhere around a unit building on present progressive, you should do this every day for the first five minutes at least.

I copy/paste my class roster into the fruit machine picker and it chooses a random student. That student stays seated and all the others come to the front (you may have to do this in groups - my largest class is 8 so we can do it as whole-class). The chosen student gives a place and/or situation, e.g. in a park, or at an amusement park, or at the movies. I say 'lights, camera, action' (in Spanish) and all the 'players' adopt a frozen pose of what they are doing in the situation. Then I go around with a pretend microphone and interview them with rapid question/answer style - "Where are you? Why? With whom? Who's winning?" etc. Then the chosen student selects who was the most creative (they just get cheers for it; there's no prize, but they don't care), I remove the chosen student's name from the fruit picker and do it again.

It's a winner. My dramatic students get crazy with it. My shy students do something expected but are eager to talk about what they're doing, especially because the q&a style doesn't involve me standing at the front of the class saying, "Now, remember to answer with a complete sentence" (who says that in real life anyway?).

I made a video of my students doing this and posted it as a private video on YouTube for Paulino. I don't have permission to show my students on my blog or on YouTube publicly, but if you are a teacher and you'd like to see how it worked for us, send me your email and I'll add you as a viewer.

Myth #4: The Time Whine

2011-04-25T10:30:00.000-04:00

If you don't know what I'm talking about when I say this post is about dismantling myths, go back and read this post.

photo by TonyVC

Only the very young or students who have high aptitude are going to succeed anyway (otherwise known as the 'time whine').

I don't know if you've heard or said this before, but I've heard it primarily as a cause of teachers not working with other teachers, or concerning students who won't elect levels of language beyond the 2 years required to get into most colleges. I call it the 'time whine' because that's where the complaint is rooted: "They can't gain any real level of proficiency in the time I have them, so why try?"

Another way this argument has been presented to me is that the primary responsibility of language teachers is to motivate students to continue past the 2 years required to enter most colleges.

Here's an idea - how about we forget about the time we have them or how smart we think they are and focus on what they should be able to do with the language after whatever time they're with us? Ask @tmsaue1 and his teachers at @JCPSWorldLang - ask anyone who teaches lower levels communicatively and stops teaching language the way only analytic learners can learn it. Ask anyone who focuses on standards and proficiency levels and real-life tasks instead of verb charts and vocabulary drills. We can give our students the tools to do something with the language no matter what amount of time we have them.

I've posted before about my preschoolers - I have them 10-15 minutes per week. Even then they can do something. They rarely ask me if I speak 'normal' anymore. They can answer questions like ¿de qué color? and ¿quién vive aquí? and ¿está triste o feliz? - not always in Spanish, but they can answer.

I went to the Central States conference last month and went to a session by John De Mado about unity within the language department. One of the points he made was that the entire department needs to agree that language is accessible to all students and to teach like they believe that.

How about we teach like we believe that anyone can learn to do something realistically practical in the amount of time we have them?

Have you used PhotoPeach?

2011-04-21T16:13:00.006-04:00

I have to thank @vivianagabi for giving me the idea to use PhotoPeach to do a project called "25 things about me." Her (Brazilian) students are at lower levels than mine, and take Spanish for less time per week, but it was a brilliant way for her students to connect with my students (by posting them on our blog) on an interesting level (dare I say interpersonal mode?). Here's how I plan to incorporate a variety of modes of communication:

We're in a unit on future tense. (I love how tech tools can be adapted for whatever you're studying at the moment.) We're going to start by giving a few ideas per person, orally and without preparation, of what we want to do in the future. We'll go deeper semantically by making each item really contain something that reveals a look into who we are as a person. We'll go deeper linguistically by including several idiomatic expressions, as well as irregular future and subjunctive after expressions of time indicating a future action. We'll prepare questions based on her students' projects to ask when we Skype with them. And we'll discuss what digital citizenship is and how to use the creative commons.

Here's mine- only 21 things though. In trying to make it an example of the deep, transparent, idiomatic, multi-time narration I want from my students, I found it an emotionally satisfying journey to reveal some deep parts of myself in pictures and phrases. I hope you enjoy.

21 cosas sobre mí on PhotoPeach

Update (June):
Here are a couple of examples from my students. Really they blew me away with their depth of thought, and all of them enjoyed the project immensely - especially the senior AP students who got to do it in lieu of a final paper. :)

21 cosas. (Karson) on PhotoPeach

Vida de Felipe en 21 cosas on PhotoPeach

The myths aren't going to ACTFL

2011-04-19T13:18:00.005-04:00

photo by azmichelle

I meant to post this two weeks ago when I got the news but forgot. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages did not accept my proposal for "Dismantling the Myths that Prevent Proficiency."

I'll still continue to blog about them, though-- I'll probably reach a wider audience that way anyway. Besides, I also didn't get invited to score AP exams, which is how I was intending to pay for the ACTFL trip.

Silver linings, eh?

Fun activity #3: ¡Arriésgate!

2011-04-13T15:06:00.003-04:00

Fun activity #3 is Jeopardy (¡Arriésgate!) courtesy of the great web 2.0 tool Jeopardy Labs (free and no account required!).

photo by Justin Levy

I've known about this tool for a long time but never just sat down and used it. It's easy to make and easy to use (except there's not really a function for no one to get the answer right--it keeps the question on the board until you give someone points for it).

I recommend that you stay away from categories like "conjugations" and "fill in the definite article." You can easily make it fun and more communicative by looking at your vocabulary and asking yourself, "What actual questions can I ask with these?" So you could have 'ropa' (clothing) 'comida' (food) 'opuestos' (opposites) 'en la casa' (at home) and then make all your "answers" target-language clues. So for 'closet' put 'where you put your clothes in your room' - avoid students getting confused by making all the "questions" start with the same letter.

Try mine (in Spanish, of course). My students are advanced so you can see some of it would be way over level 1.

And remember - answer in the form of a question. :)

Fun activity #2: A conversar

2011-04-02T11:02:00.001-04:00

I blogged a few days ago about coming back from CSC11 with some good ideas to make my class more fun (along with some suggestions via Diego Ojeda of #langchat "fame" ;-) and putting them together into a 10-minute class starter.

photo by Rohit Rath

The second one is "a conversar." For this one, students pull a conversation card (that I made) out of a card box and talk to anyone about question on the card. When they're done, they go back and choose another. The first time my AP class did it, I sat back amazed. I cannot get this class to speak in the TL for the life of me, and there was *loud* Spanish chatter for a solid ten minutes. Adjust questions for your level, and make them interesting - e.g. "¿cuál es mejor, un abrigo azul o un abrigo café, y por qué? instead of ¿qué es tu color favorito?

Here are some of the conversation starters I found on the internet and wrote on my own:

What's the craziest thing you've done?
What is the most serious mistake of your life?
Describe the happiest day of your life.
What's your best friend like?
Describe your favorite movie.
What is your favorite free-time activity? With whom? Why?
Who are your heroes? Why?
What did you do yesterday? With whom?
What books have you read recently? Describe them.
What do you want to be and do five years from now?
What has been an important experience in your life and why?
Describe your favorite restaurant.
What is your opinion about the problems in Libya?
What are your plans for tomorrow?
Describe an interesting trip you took.
If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?
Why did you choose to take advanced Spanish?
What is your first memory?
What do you want to do during vacation (Spring Break, summer, Christmas, etc.)?
Do you like your neighborhood? Why or why not?
What would be the title of your biography? Why?

Enjoy and let me know if you have more good questions I can add.

Dismantling Myths 2 and 3: Learning about language and its cousin, Grammatical Terms

2011-03-31T10:13:00.001-04:00

If you don't know what I'm talking about when I say this post is about dismantling myths, go back and read this post.

Photo by T. Hart

Myths 2 & 3:

2. Learning about language is enough (Or, "I don't have to speak the TL in the classroom").

and its cousin

3. Grammatical terms are actually helpful in language acquisition (or, "How will they know what it is if I don't call it subjunctive by reason of indefinite antecedent?????")

Here I have to put in a plug for a post I wrote called A Case for Avoiding Pet Grammar.

We language teachers are good at learning about language. Most of us thrive on dissecting and diagramming and explaining. I wrote a syntax paper in grad school on why Spanish prefers the inverted verb-subject order in clauses that are syntactically not questions but semantically imply questions, and thus why we have those pesky accent marks on question words that are part of a declarative sentence. Do you understand that? It doesn't matter. Because what matters is you know how to ask a question. And you can say "I don't know where my book is." I loved writing the paper and felt like it answered a question no one else had addressed, that had plagued my grammar-loving mind since college, but my paper floated off into the abyss of Dr. Stan's desk and hasn't affected anyone since.

If we're really going to foster proficiency, we've got to dispel this myth. I think it may be the one that stifles the classroom most of all. It stifled my classroom for three years, and I didn't know why, until I went and read all the research that says that communication and meaning are what fosters learning and memory (insert plug for Brain Rules and Cathy Doughty and Mike Longhere).

But we don't believe this and we don't practice it. Elementary teachers know it. We know that it's useless to drill second-graders in conjugations. To use phrases like 'present progressive.' We think that just because middle- and high-schoolers (and adults) have attained a certain level of linguistic and meta-cognitive awareness that explaining grammar to them will produce proficiency. It makes sense, right? I tell you present-tense first-person verbs end in -o. Now you're going to be able to speak them all, right?

But this isn't what happens and if you've been teaching long you know it. You know that except for the ones with the most aptitude in linguistic intelligence, your students will still write and say "yo comer."

Guess what? If you teach language for communication, your students might still say "yo comer." My bilingual two-year-old says "yo comer." She also says "wanna hold you" when she wants me to pick her up. Why? Because she's heard "Do you want me to hold you?" and this results in someone picking her up, and she's parroting the language. Her brain hasn't reset the parameter to change the sentence yet. And when they're two, it's cute. But when they're 12, it's a disaster, points off, failed quiz, why aren't they getting this?!

Because this is our mistake- Look at this comment I found on Madame Techie's (@bselden)great post on a project with VoiceThread:

"There are certain basic skills that have to be aquired [sic] first by drill-and-practice (which the kids claim is "soooo boring")."

Based on many textbooks (who is writing these things?!), it seems that their authors and publishers have the same philosophy.

No. No. No. Unless that comment is about math or something that is so not language, it's based on a series of mistaken assumptions. Language is not stored the way math and history facts are. It's not retrieved in the same way. It's not processed the same way. So why do we think it'slearned the same way?

Want to push students toward higher proficiency? I'm tempted to just say "start speaking the TL in the classroom, require students to do the same, and involve them in communicative activities instead of textbook drills." But I have to remember that this is a journey that can fall completely flat if you just jump into it. If you don't know how to speak TL in the classroom with high levels of comprehension, you will frustrate everyone involved. Instead, here's what I recommend:

1. Read everything you can find, books, blogs, news, whatever, on TPR Storytelling and other communicative methods that can help you rethink how to speak TL in the classroom so that students comprehend and demonstrate comprehension (I have some links on the sidebar that will help you get started). Come up with an "I don't understand" signal for your students (like making an X with their index fingers or arms) and test the waters of speaking more TL.

2. Ease yourself away from your textbook by asking students to do motivating activities involving cultural questions, authentic sources, and technology. For example, investigate what high school is like in Argentina, watch some clips of Patito Feo, put relevant photos from Tag Galaxy into a VoiceThread, and then video students giving a 2-minute comparison of your school and Argentinian schools. Even better, try to contact an Argentinian school to set up an email communication and even Skype (we are very excited about Skype-ing with our Honduran counterparts today for the first time).

3. Reevaluate your vocabulary lists. Are you giving students real language? As in, can they use 'me hace falta' instead of read hacerle falta a uno in a vocab list? As frequent, interesting words come up in authentic sources, why not replace words?

4. Rethink your assessment. What are you assessing? Student recall of translated, discrete words? Does your assessment really test communication? How can you adapt it to do so? What is performance-based assessment and how could you incorporate it?

Most of all, remember that any journey toward more communicative teaching is a journey toward proficiency being accessible for all students, not just for the ones who, like us, are "good at language."

Activity 1: Cuento poco a poco

2011-03-29T11:35:00.000-04:00

Telling a story by categories

photo by flamingoo

This idea came from a session at CSC on theater that was generally so awful that I left halfway through. Really, it was so bad it was painful. But, I came away with this activity that I thought I could make work in my classroom.

In "Cuento poco a poco," I use the fruit machine chooser to randomly choose a student to start. Then, the student has to begin a story with something from the first category. So, if it is 'things that are blue,' the student may say, 'En un planeta azul vivía un mónstruo' or something else according to his/her ability. Then the next student picks up the story by adding a detail from the next category. Make sense? These are the categories I started with:

• Cosas que son verdes

• Un sonido extraño
• Cosas que son cuadrados
• Cosas que son altos
• Una acción inesperada
• Un pariente
• Un hábito curioso
• Una persona en un show de televisión
• Un fin triste

The first time we did this, I found an unexpected benefit: the first time around, some students added a random detail that seemed disjointed and didn't actually further the story, like "the monkey had a grandfather who was a giraffe." So I explained that students should incorporate all the details together to make a coherent story. It made them listen to each other more and use other students' details to come up with a logical continuity. Sounds like subtle AP practice to me. :) We changed random words to whatever they wanted (green to red, tall to fat, sad to tragic, etc.) and began again, with a different student starting.

Thoughts?

(Trying to) Make learning fun

2011-03-23T08:19:00.005-04:00

What happens when all the fun goes out of learning language?

The students disengage. Learning doesn't have to be entertainment for entertainment's sake, but I'm learning that if students aren't engaged in learning, they see it as hard and not just boring--the opposite of fun.

Hi, my name is Sra. Cottrell and I am not a fun teacher.

Whew, feels good to get that admission out there. I am not one of those teachers that relates so well to teenagers (I didn't relate well to teenagers when I was a teenager), that's super-approachable, that always makes the learning relevant and fun and feel effortless. I am boring, busy, distant, and sometimes burned out on creativity.

Never did I feel this more than in the past couple of months, particularly in a LangChat about games and at the Central States Conference in early March. I came away from both of those with my head spinning with ideas of what to do to up the engagement in the classroom in fun ways.

Now, some of these ideas were very bad. Particularly as I read through Brain Rules, it stuns me that in spite of continuing research that says that attaching meaning to information is what makes it stick in long-term memory, and the first few moments of learning are the most crucial for how the information will be remembered, and meaningful repetition is what cements information, we still break language learned for the first time into discrete parts and drill it incessantly separate from any meaning. Some of the most successful (in the eyes of the field) teachers I know, who would claim to be very communicative, still advocate 'games' that drill verb conjugations or drill vocabulary connected only to translation and to no meaning at all.

But... even good games based on bad theory can be tweaked, or so I've found. I took some of the ideas and tweaked them to try to keep them communicative. Keep me accountable and let me know if you can make them more so.

When I got back from CSC, I had a week without my AP class because they were on their senior trip. I took advantage of the time to put my ideas into a cohesive plan and make a poster listing all of the options for our new activity:

I've added two since I took this picture: Descríbemelo and Trabajos.

I told the students that we would do one of these for the first ten minutes of every class. This is one of the things I love about teaching without a textbook and with performance-based unit-end assessments. It gives the flexibility that we have been able to implement this for two weeks without hurting our progress in the curriculum. Also, it forces me to do something in every class that I think a majority will find engaging, without spending too much time on it beforehand.

As students are coming into the room, I copy/paste the options into this random option picker:

Click here for larger version

So the fruit machine picker chooses what activity we will do. If the activity requires a person to start, I copy/paste a roster and choose that person. If it requires a word or phrase, I copy/paste the options and choose that. Then I set the timer at 10 minutes and we begin.

Look for more posts in the next few days to explain the options. Maybe something will sound like a fun activity for your class.

Two new options for out-of-class fluency

2011-02-25T09:18:00.002-05:00

In the past week I added two new options to my AP class's out-of-class fluency homework options. One is from personal experience and the other came as a result of tech recommendations from @usamimi74 on Twitter.

photo by Israel Avila

The first is to post-it 10 items in your house that you don't know the word for and leave it there for a week, then report to me from memory what all the items were.
I have been speaking and learning Spanish for twenty years. But over the last two years I have been on a different journey--raising a bilingual child by speaking only Spanish to her. It's struck me how many words I don't know because I never needed them before. Burp. Stroller. Hiccups. And words even around the house as I talk to her about things. Zipper. Knob. Eggplant. Believe me, I've learned a lot. So if I don't know what so many things around my house are called, I can be sure my students don't either. So I think this option is a good one. I'm hoping it will inspire them to keep learning in the future, because that has been so valuable to me.

The second option is to complete a song on lyricstraining.com. If they know the song, they have to do intermediate. If they don't know the song, they can do easy. I set it that way even at their advanced level because the activity seemed difficult to me. But the first day I showed it to them in class, at least one student went and did it right away-- two songs. One of my least motivated students lately, even. Thanks @usamimi74. :)

Great resource from la Sra. Birch

2011-02-23T11:20:00.003-05:00

photo by Jorge Mejía Peralta

Sra. Birch commented on this post adding my lyrics file to Google docs, offering a link to her awesome wiki that has a link to her spreadsheet of music. It's an amazing store of music categorized by singer, title, grammar focus, and other info, including YouTube links. It's cool enough to merit its own post, for sure. Enjoy! (And mil gracias Sra. Birch!)

Dismantling Myth #1: What's a qualified teacher?

2011-02-17T09:10:00.007-05:00

If you didn't catch my post about my ACTFL proposal, Dismantling the Myths that Prevent Proficiency, you'll need to back up a bit and read this.

Myth #1: A speaker who isn't proficient can be a language teacher (or, "I have a degree in this; of course I'm qualified.")

Photo by Susheela Willis

I remember when I went to interview for my first teaching job. I went into the administrator's office and he introduced me to a woman from Mexico who had been doing some cleaning for them. She barely spoke English. So I spoke to her in Spanish for a bit.
Here's the twist--this woman had had some sort of cancer in her head and had had a surgery to remove it that involved removing the palate from her mouth, and she then had a prosthetic palate, which she was not wearing that day. Try speaking a language that isn't your native tongue to someone without a palate. That was tough.
I later found out that the admin had been testing me, so to speak, to make sure that I was proficient. Whew. Glad I got some communication across--I'm sure he can't fathom how difficult that was.
My second interview wasn't like that. There was not a word of Spanish spoken at any time. No, that's not true--the principal did take me and my husband to a Mexican restaurant and I voluntarily spoke Spanish to the waiter. But it wasn't part of the interview.

In each of the last two years we have had to hire a Spanish 1 and 2 teacher at my school. I could not believe how many applicants we got for the job who could not communicate in Spanish. I took one applicant out to lunch on the premise (she knew this) that the lunch would be conducted in Spanish, because everything else about her seemed right and I needed to check her proficiency. Her listening proficiency was fine; she could understand nearly everything I said. But speaking--oh my. I finally told her she could switch to English when she wanted to tell me something involving frustration and opinions that pushed her language too far. She was making mistakes we work on in Spanish 1 - gender and number agreement and the like, without noticing or self-correcting.

A few years ago at the annual fall conference of the Kentucky World Language Association (our awesome state language teachers' association) I went on their 'immersion dinner' with a lot of other Spanish teachers. The concept was to go and speak only Spanish with all our colleagues. I sat at dinner with three other teachers, two native speakers and one other American woman, a teacher here in my city. We ended up switching to English or translating quite a bit for her because as she said, she "couldn't speak Spanish" as well as we could. Really, she couldn't carry on a conversation. This Spanish teacher couldn't speak above a survival level of the language. What must her classroom be like?

Why do people who cannot speak a language proficiently think they can teach it?
Because we've led them to believe that. Because they grew up taking language classes in which the teacher doesn't speak the language. Because we think language teaching doesn't work anyway and so the most important thing a teacher does is motivate students to study abroad, because that's the only thing that works. Because apparently they got through college only listening and doing pre-planned speaking projects. And that's how they think it's taught.
So my question is this - if the way they learned and plan to teach didn't make them a proficient speaker - why do we think it will for anyone else?

I truly apologize if this sounds harsh, but for the sake of the integrity of our profession, if you can't speak the language well enough to proficiently negotiate your way through a conversation beyond "where's the bathroom" and "I have three black dogs," get out of language teaching. If you are an administrator looking to hire a new world language teacher, find a proficient speaker to interact with applicants before they're hired. Otherwise you'll just be digging our hole deeper.

Keep singing: 189 pages of Spanish lyrics

2011-02-15T11:26:00.003-05:00

photo by Holger Lükerath

Callie and Krista recently commented on a song post, asking for my lyrics file. So, here's another Google document for you - my lyrics file updated as of today, all 189 pages of it. Thanks Callie and Krista for getting me to put it in the cloud - that's an awful lot of file to lose if my computer crashes. :)

Broken record: Remember I teach at a private Christian school and so you'll see a lot of Alex Campos and Jesús Adrián Romero and the like. If you're a Christian teacher you'll enjoy them, and if not, you can appreciate their music and do what you like with those pages. Enjoy!

#Charlando para aprender

2011-02-14T13:07:00.004-05:00

¡Hola!

Soy profesora de español en el estado de Kentucky en los Estados Unidos. Unos cuantos otros profesores y yo hemos decidido pedirles a nuestros estudiantes que se involucren en Twitter - twitteando en español, con otros hispanohablantes, para que aprendan comunicarse mejor en la comunicación interpersonal.

¿Es usted un hispanohablante que quiera twittear con nosotros y nuestros estudiantes para ayudarles y formar cyber-amistades? Conéctese ahora a Twitter y siga nuestra conversación usando el hashtag #charlando. Cuando quiera entrar en la conversación, añada #charlando a cada tweet- y ¡bienvenido!

Vote for this week's #langchat topic

2011-02-14T10:29:00.000-05:00

It's time for them to use their time

2011-02-11T11:30:00.001-05:00

There are a lot of problems with current world language teaching in the U.S. I think the biggest problem is that we're trying to teach it the way we teach everything else, when language used for communication is not learned or stored the way other subjects are, and the answer is to look back at the way this happened the first time. Don't agree? That's okay. But I'm looking back at 100 years of failed language teaching in the U.S. and at a profession full of teachers who don't believe in what they do - because if you ask a language teacher where to learn to speak a language, they won't tell you to take a class. They'll tell you to put yourself in an immersion situation. We know that immersion is the only thing that works, but we won't do it in class. Why? Lots of reasons. We're not trained. Students are conditioned to think school should happen a certain way and when it doesn't, they revolt. Our expectations are too high. Our assessments are completely invalid.

And the biggest complaint I hear is this: we don't have the time. Young children are flooded with massive amounts of input from the moment they're born, and we have them for mere minutes a day. What about that?

One answer is that the minutes we have them add up over years to a whole lot of time, so one solution is to figure out how to motivate students to continue into advanced levels of language learning. Another solution is to impress upon students that if they're really going to succeed, they can't rely on language class to keep this up. At some point, they have to take ownership of this language journey in their own lives and not let it be just something a teacher is making them do, because if that's all it is, they won't keep learning after they leave us, and it will be a waste of time. One way I've tried to do this is to assign my students to do a "fluency activity." Once a week, my fourth-year students have to do something outside of class to show me that they can find ways to interact in the language. They have to tell me on a card 1) what they did 2) one thing they learned and 3) what they need to improve on. @SraSpanglish asked me to publish the options I give them, so here they are. Keep in mind that I teach in a private faith-based school, so several of these options are faith-related. One premise there is that the vocabulary used will be very familiar to my students, which primes their brains for higher comprehension. You might have other ideas for how to do that also - please share them in comments!

Listen to Spanish-language radio for one hour (music) or 30 minutes (talk).
Watch television in Spanish for 30 minutes.
Change your facebook language to Spanish and play on Facebook for an hour.
Read a Spanish-language newspaper for 30 minutes (may be online).
Play on one or more corporate Spanish-language websites for 45 minutes.
Read a book in Spanish for 30 minutes (may get one from Sra. Cottrell, may not be Ciudad de las bestias)
Read 3 familiar chapters of the Bible in Spanish.
Change your cell phone or mp3 player’s language to Spanish for an entire week.
Read the directions in Spanish of four items in your house (e.g. detergent).
Read the last 50 tweets using a Twitter hashtag for a Latin-American country or city.
Read the last 30 Spanish-language tweets by one or more Spanish-speaking artists or politicians on Twitter
Read an article about a famous Latino musician or politician in Spanish on Wikipedia.
Watch 3 videoclips on sports and 3 videoclips on current news on Univision.com.
Compile a list of 30 words involving the profession you hope to have, on 3x5 cards for your review.
Explore the Spanish-language section of a bookstore (music, kids’ books, and/or adult books) for 30 minutes and find two things you would like to own.
Listen to a sermon (at least 20 minutes) in Spanish (see oneplace.com).
Conversar (o ‘chatear’) en español con alguien por 30 minutos
Asistir a un Spanish Group
Asistir el servicio de una iglesia

Added recently:

Find a recipe on a site like Mi Cocina Latina or Qué Rica Vida and prepare it.
Listen to at least 5 clips at least B1 or higher on Audio Lingua.
Watch at least 5 clips Intermediate B or higher from UT proficiency site.
Play around on the iTunes Latino store and find 2 albums or 5 songs you would like to own.

For tonight's #langchat: A game for description

2011-02-10T19:53:00.005-05:00

Tonight's #Langchat topic is using games to support instruction. I have no idea how to describe a game in 140 characters so I thought I'd post it here.

This is a game good for low levels. It works great to reinforce describing people. It's useful for students to have the verbs 'have' 'wear' and 'is.' The game is called "¿Quién tiene la moneda?" (In Spanish, "who has the coin?")

One student leaves the room and the teacher gives a coin to someone in the room. All students should know who has the coin. The excluded student comes in and can ask anyone a yes or no question. Everyone except the student who actually has the coin must tell the truth. The student who has the coin can lie--this throws a twist of strategy into it.

So the student who is asking should ask questions like
--is it a boy?
--is he wearing blue?
--does he have blue eyes?
--is he blond?
--is he wearing glasses?
You can make things interesting like limiting the number of questions, and then forcing a guess. If the student guesses correctly, he chooses someone to go out next. If not, the student with the coin goes out next.

You can also substitute items for the coin -- pencil and other early vocab, for example.

Have fun!

Short listening activity tailor-made for beginners

2011-02-04T13:33:00.004-05:00

I'm going to an unconference tomorrow - my first full one. I managed to attend part of one before and enjoyed it. It's being put on by @tmsaue1 with the public school district and they're kind enough to invite private school teachers to tag along. This post is for the unconference (and you).

Last year when Camila hit it big (again) with their single "Mientes", they had a YouTube contest- sing the song, upload your video, see who gets on Camila's channel. (There might have been a bigger prize but I'm not aware of it.)

The part that struck me was that all of the finalists begin by introducing themselves. They say where they are from. A few say how old they are. What does that sound like to you? Chapter 1 of Spanish 1, ¿no?

I'm aware that this audio is difficult, but this audio is authentic. This is how real people who speak real Spanish sound like when they introduce themselves and tell their age. My mantra again - if all we ever feed them is learner Spanish, it's all they'll ever understand. Be prepared for students to freak out the 2nd or 5th time they listen to the 15 seconds each introduction takes. But keep at it. Help them find the numbers. Help them find the countries. If no one can get it, give it to them, but then listen through it again once everyone knows what they're hearing. We've got to train their ears, and we'll never do it by saying "that's too hard for them." Telling myself "nah, that's too hard for them" is how I ended up with fourth-year students with unnecessarily low listening proficiency for authentic audio.

And then - have some fun with it. Which version of "Mientes" do they like best (me gusta...)? Describe the people in the contest. Which guy do the girls vote el más guapo? Which girl do the guys think is la más bella?

Here's the playlist for Concurso Camila - Mientes (look on the right).

Ciudad de las bestias: Guides public & streamlined

2011-02-04T12:58:00.004-05:00

I wrote here about what I've done with the book Ciudad de las bestias by Isabel Allende in my AP class. I recently put all of the chapter guides with their "palabras claves" in one streamlined Google doc, public on the web. It should be easier to use and as always happens with time, more accurate as my students find mistakes (like incorrect page numbers) and I fix them. If you have any suggestions or comments, as always those are welcome.

A few notes about the guides/words:
- The guides get longer because 1) the students become more capable and less in shock and 2) the chapters get more complicated in regards to the plot
- I use a "did you read" question at the end of every guide, worth at least 10 points, more according to the length of the chapter
- sometimes there's a ¿? instead of a definition of a "palabra nueva" because while the phrase itself is new, it's related to words the students know, and so I think they should be able to figure it out (e.g. desangrar).
- at this level my students read mostly on their own but we try to make time for it in class, and the day it's due they come in with questions and we read through tough sections together - this lessens their frustration

Have you thought about writing guides to literature for your own class-- and sharing them for other teachers? Collaboration is the 21st-century skill. :)

Instead of the vocab quiz

2011-01-27T14:11:00.001-05:00

@SraSpanglish commented on my post "Kick the vocab quiz":
"I feel like I can't do this with Spanish I, and it's hard with Spanish II. Also, what are students graded on instead?"

At this point, I only teach very early elementary, who only receive a grade of "excellent/satisfactory/needs improvement" once a quarter, and advanced students. I realize that's quite an uncommon setup. But when I was teaching 5 periods of Spanish 1 and 2 (along with Spanish 3) I also never gave vocab quizzes. I'm a bigger fan of @alfiekohn than I am of grades, but at my school we have to give them (as, I'm sure, do you) so here's an outline of where my assessment comes from.

In Spanish 3 and 4 (AP), both classes receive grades for:
Completing the chapter guides for our books
Writing a free-topic blog post once a week
Doing listening cloze quizzes on things such as commercials
Doing a regular vocabulary review (see #1)

In Spanish 3, students also:
do intermittent writing/speaking assignments related to recent target features (in class)
do an end-of-unit assessment, profiency- and task-based, as in a how-to demonstration (to elicit commands) or telling an interesting true story about themselves (to elicit combined past tenses)

In AP, students also:
do a weekly "fluency" activity on their own
write AP-style essays & interpersonal writing pieces
do AP-style oral presentations

When I was teaching Spanish 1 & 2, students did:
-the same regular vocabulary review
-also a weekly blog post, beginning with question prompts in 1st semester of Spanish 1 and changing to free-topic word count requirements starting in the 2nd semester of Spanish 1
-also listening cloze quizzes (the difficulty is in the words you drop- for beginners, you drop numbers and greetings, for example)
-also prompted writing/speaking with target features (i.e. 5 phrases describing your family using person + es + adjective from vocabulary)

Different from advanced students, however, were:
Yes, vocab quizzes. Well, I suppose you could call them vocab quizzes because they were assessment designed to elicit vocabulary. But my format of low-level quizzes were always unannounced (to avoid short-term memory cramming) and took three forms:
1) Ask random questions to elicit vocab, and the answer just has to make sense or be true. (¿De qué color son los 'arches' de McDonalds?)
2) Ask questions about stories we've been doing in class. (¿Quién es el amigo del pingüino?) Students were required to draw/label stories in their composition notebooks and were allowed to use them for quizzes.
3) Describe a drawing for students to draw and grade on how the drawing turns out. ("Hay una niña. La niña tiene una banana verde.") Colored pencils were a supply requirement.

Hope this helps clarify how I did some of my lower-level assessment.

Best songs for stem changing irreg. present

2011-01-26T13:03:00.002-05:00

@lisajmch asked on Twitter this week about good activities for stem-changing verbs and my mind immediately went to a blog post I thought I'd made about a song with repetitions of 'puedo,' and again, it turned out it was in the dashboard and not written or published. So here goes.

I feel like a broken record, but to start off,
-only students who go on to major in Spanish will benefit from calling them "stem-changing" verbs. I've found it more useful to say things like "repite is a verb that acts like pide, so you have pido, repito, but rePETimos, PEDimos" - you're pointing out the difference without giving it a useless grammatical label and it gets you more accurate input in their ears.
-only accurate comprehensible input will cause them to spontaneously (read: without having to think & self-edit all the time) and consistently produce accurate forms. If all they ever hear is "puedo" and "poder," they won't produce "podo" or "pueder" unless they're overgeneralizing, and then that's just a creative, natural process of language that corrects itself with more input.

Anyway, for fun, here are two excellent songs to deal with that messy irregular present tense.

The Bacilos hit Pasos de gigantes is a gold mine with 9 repetitions of puedo just in the first verse. Have them count them. Have them touch their nose whenever they hear one. Something that lets you replay the accurate input into their ears. Also, you have a 'puedes' elsewhere and other stem-changers 'siento' & 'pienso' in the chorus which means they're also repeated. There used to be a good music video available for it on YouTube but it must have had copyright issues because I can't find it anywhere.

One of the all-time hits in my classroom is Fonseca's Hace tiempo, which does have a fabulous music video widely available too. Along with some really interesting cultural content, you've got a vast array of present tense to have fun with here, including present progressive and the 'g' verbs 'digo' and 'tengo' (another reason teaching "stem-changing" verbs doesn't work--what about when they're in both categories?). You'll also find the stem changers 'quiero,' 'siento,' and reflexive 'muero.' Incidentally, I have never had success "teaching" the hace + period of time concept and seeing students actually produce it until this song got into some of them.

Music works!

Do something drastic - kick the vocab quiz

2011-01-25T10:11:00.003-05:00

Ah, the vocab quiz, I remember them well. I used to have all my students do what I had to do in college- put all the new vocab on spiral-bound 3x5 cards, English on front, Spanish on back. I would drill myself and drill myself for that dreaded weekly (or whenever) vocab quiz, the one where you had to match the right words, or fill in the translation.

Why? Because I'm motivated (read: driven) by grades.

I remember the first time I had a B on my midterm report in college. I cried. (Here you go, more insight into me.) Intro to Spanish Literature. I was so annoyed at it that I worked hard enough to get a 100 on the final and bring the grade to a solid A. I never saw the letter B again.

My point is that vocab quizzes are a colossal failure. They are based on several false assumptions:
1) Quizzes produce long-term memory.
2) Short-term memory is desirable in any way in the language class.
3) Motivation by grades will draw the language learners to acquire more words.

When you give a vocab quiz, you're asking students to cram discrete words into their short-term memory for a grade. Think: what could be more useless? What about the students who aren't motivated by grades? I've heard this rant so many times by vocab-quizzing teachers. "So-and-so just won't study the vocab and fails every quiz! Doesn't he care?" No, no he doesn't. Because grades aren't motivating to him and so you have to find something that is.

And short-term memory? Why not reach for ways that actually create long-term memory of vocab--motivating popular music? reading for pleasure? Articles that use recent vocab? Finding them just takes a quick search on Google News. I just came across an article through a Tweet from a Mexican news source that uses a rich variety of vocab from Spanish 3--you can bet we will be looking at it soon.

Need more reasoning? Here is a list of words and phrases my fourth-year students identified yesterday as we previewed their next chapter in Ciudad de las Bestias:

ardiendo de fiebre
vena
veneno
se arrodilló
se despidieron
al amanecer
apenas
cansancio
tejer
fogata
asar
cueva/gruta
la suya
lanzarse
no quedaba más remedio que
zorros
angosto
fósforos
navaja
chillidos
hermosura
mezcla
tamaño
alcanzó
cascadas
ardillas

They haven't had a vocab quiz or test in two years.

Topic for #LangChat 1/27

2011-01-21T10:20:00.001-05:00

You can vote here for the topic for this week's #LangChat on Twitter, Thursday 1/27 at 8 pm EST.

Also, feel free to suggest topics through this suggestion form.

Topic for the first #LangChat 1/20

2011-01-20T14:40:00.003-05:00

The topic is chosen and we're on tonight on Twitter at 8pm EST/7CST!

What are the differences between communicative competence and accuracy, and what weight or importance do each of these carry in the world language classroom?

Choose your medium (Twitter.com, Twitterfall, Tweetdeck-my favorite) and we'll "see" you there!

Low-level learners can't understand authentic media, what?

2011-01-19T12:50:00.003-05:00

Low-level vocabulary, motivating subject matter, absolutely up-to-date...

tell me again why we aren't using authentic materials in the low levels?

They can't speak, and it's our fault: Dismantling the myths

2011-01-18T15:20:00.004-05:00

Earlier this month was the deadline for proposals to be submitted for the 2011 conference of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. I have never been to their conference--indeed, I've only ever attended one national conference (TESOL 2007)--but one of my new year's resolutions was to at least attempt to go, and part of that was to submit a proposal to present.

Before proposing anything, I polled several of my colleagues on Twitter to see what they thought about what might have been lacking at the 2010 conference. I got a wide variety of answers, ranging from "how could anything be lacking when there were 600 sessions?" to "oh there was so much lacking, where do I start?". One comment in particular stuck in my mind: @tmsaue1 said that almost no one seemed to want to talk about the elephant in the room- that after all this push for CLT for all these years, we still aren't producing students with any useful level of proficiency. So I made a quip on Twitter about needing a better title for my proposal than "They can't speak, and it's our fault." Something must have resonated because several people told me that either I should stick with that title, or if I changed it, that should still be the topic, because it's true.

In any case, the title I settled on was "Dismantling the Myths that Prevent Proficiency," and before I realized that you only had to come up with an outline if you were proposing a 3-hour workshop, I had outlined several myths that in my opinion are holding back the average U.S. world language teacher from pushing students to real proficiency in the classroom. Since then I have thought of a few more and gotten input from more comments. At this rate I'll have to poll everyone to see which ones to include if the proposal is accepted so I can get them within the time limit!

Over the next few months I'll be blogging about these myths individually. I'll find out in April if I'll be presenting at ACTFL (and if I am, here's hoping I also get accepted to score AP Spanish exams so I can pay for the conference!) but either way, I can reach more people through my blog anyway, with what I think about what's holding us all back.

Here goes. The ones in bold are the ones I think are hurting us the worst--keeping students from interacting with native & authentic input. Please offer feedback and help me add or subtract to/from these as necessary!

Myths

1. A person who is not proficient can be a language teacher (Or, "I have a degree in this; of course I'm qualified").

2. Learning about language is enough (Or, "I don't have to speak the TL in the classroom").

and its cousin

3. Grammatical terms are actually helpful in language acquisition (or, "How will they know what it is if I don't call it subjunctive by reason of indefinite antecedent?????")

4. Only the very young or students who have high aptitude are going to succeed anyway (otherwise known as the 'time whine').

5. The textbook and accessories are all I need (or, "my district spent $20,000 on this stuff, I have make it worth their while").

6. Students can learn vocabulary in isolation and in lists of 150 words per chapter (or, "why don't they know what bosque means and that it's masculine? we just studied this!").

7. Media produced for language learners counts as authentic materials (or, "The 'First Semester of Spanish Love Song' is the best video ever!")

8. Low-level learners can't understand authentic materials.

and its cousin

9. Students have to understand everything they hear.

10. Communication among learners is somehow going to equip them to communicate with native speakers.

11. A multiple-choice question counts as a valid assessment of proficiency (or, "I can tell how well students communicate without actually asking them to communicate).

12. Translation helps language acquisition and counts as a valid assessment of communicative ability (or, "I knew she was trying to say 'my nose is running'- how creative!").

13. Finding/creating materials takes too much time (or, "I have to do all this on my own").

14. Tech tool + any amount of language = classroom magic (or, "I'm the 21st-century teacher! Look at that amazing project with almost no communication that my students put together!").

15. Assessment is an end-of-unit activity. (or "I understand it. Surely they must. Moving on.")

Thoughts?

Stay tuned!

Don't teach a health unit without this song

2011-01-15T15:49:00.002-05:00

Somewhere in Spanish 1 or 2 there usually comes up a unit that has something to do with health. I even have a unit in my AP course (with units I wrote myself) called "Cuidándo a mí" with health-related issues. In your Spanish health-related unit you really ought to include the song "Bilirrubina" por Juan Luis Guerra.

The song includes a lot of present tense and a lot of wonderful health-related vocabulary like fiebre and aspirina with super-useful verbs like quita with object pronouns.

If you want to delve further, there's an interesting discussion on Word Reference about the use of the word bilirrubina. I love the WR forums-that's how I found out that in this collaboration by Juan Luis with Diego Torres, Torres makes a reference to the Bilirrubina song in the end (I'd heard the song but hadn't noticed that!) and when I listened for it, I heard him reference another of Guerra's big hits, Ojalá que llueva café. Amazing what you'll learn on the yellow brick road.

New: A language teachers' weekly chat on Twitter - choose our first topic!

2011-01-13T22:02:00.004-05:00

A group of language teachers on Twitter has gotten together to start a weekly chat on issues related to world language teaching. We're going to do this on Thursday evenings at 8 Eastern/7 Central (NOTE: this is a correction from the earlier posted incorrect time). The hashtag is #langchat. So add a #langchat column to your Tweetdeck, or add it to Twitterfall or Twubs, however you'd like to keep track of it, and come eavesdrop or join in the conversation. Vote on the poll for our first topic, and see you there!

Since I stopped teaching to the [AP] test

2011-01-13T20:50:00.000-05:00

Last year my AP class was a bit happy-go-lucky. They had a sort of attitude that went like this:

"Well, I understood that pretty well, that was awesome!"
"I didn't get that at all. Oh well! What's next?"

This year, not so much. This year's class is more like:

"I understood that, cool!"
"I didn't understand that at all. I'm dropping this class at Christmas. My life is over."
"We don't do anything fun anymore."

So I feel like I couldn't possibly say "back to the drawing board" one more time, but here I went anyway. I took a good hard look and determined that what we were lacking was focus. One of my students said something to the tune of "We should do a unit on dating." I pointed up at the title of Unit 2: "La red interpersonal." We did an entire unit on interpersonal relationships and they didn't even get the focus. So I thought, where do the students think this is going wrong? Where do I think this is going wrong? What can we do that might improve it while still preparing them for the exam (and more importantly, to communicate better with the Spanish-speaking world)?

1- They hated Triángulo. They groaned every time we pulled it off the shelf. I mean despised. So I decided to move to (almost) entirely web-based sources for assignments and my own topics and questions. I still can't find anything else that has as much and as good of a replication of the AP's interpersonal speaking (simulated conversation) as Triángulo, and that whole 20-second- talk til the beep thing just freaks them out.

2- They didn't understand the sources on their own in enough time to put together a good oral or written synthesis or argument. We were doing too many oral presentations and essays within a unit. So it started to feel like "here's a source, here's a source, here's a source, bam, good luck, say something, go." Their heads were spinning and often a few of them were still confused on what exactly the question was after 2 or 3 had already given their presentation, or well into writing their essay.

So, we focused. And I mean really focused. I took the same unit themes I have in my AP syllabus, and the same general idea, but we focused it completely so that all the assessments use the same idea, and the oral presentation and essay use the same sources, and we all discuss and walk through the sources together, and then they do their presentations and essays.

Take the unit on ecoturismo. The focus was that they were trying to convince either their classmates or the school administration to take them on an ecotourism trip to Costa Rica instead of their regular trip to Disney World, or write a letter to the director of an ecotourism-focused resort, etc., depending on the assessment, but all about the senior trip, ecotourism, Costa Rica, and issues involving indigenous peoples in Latin America. And you can bet at the end of the unit, no one even thought about wondering if we'd done a unit on the environment.

So, some of them are still frustrated, because they wish it were easy, and they wish they didn't have to do anything, and well, they all have senioritis. But the class has focus, and it's not about the AP test anymore--I hope I've finally convinced them of that--and things are looking up. And in the spirit of doing something fun, they've written so many essays that in this current unit I'm suspending the essays in favor of a video using our Flip camera.

I've never been a fan of teaching to the test. I should have lectured myself about this a long time ago.

Faith and Culture: help me decide our AP topic

2011-01-10T12:43:00.003-05:00

(Keep in mind I teach at a private faith-based school and this isn't an invitation for a debate.) I'm in a dilemma between two potential topics for our next AP focus. Will you help me decide and/or make suggestions?

Our current unit in AP Spanish is called "La verdad es que..." and it's about how faith relates to culture in Spanish-speaking countries. In the first part of the unit, the assignments are related to informing students on the Spanish conquest of Latin America and getting them to weigh in on the controversy surrounding the "genocide" of the indigenous peoples and whether or not, or how, the Spanish conquistadores imposed their faith on the indígenas and how this affected today's faith/culture mix in the region and whether or not, or how, it had a negative effect on their culture.

For the second half of the unit, I'm having trouble deciding between two topics.
The one is more closely related to our first topic and so I'm leaning towards it, but the other is more current and relevant to Latinos in the U.S.

1) What ethics are involved in current Christian mission work in Latin America? Can this work continue and the indigenous cultures still be preserved? Should organizations be allowed to operate freely, or be tightly controlled, or be excluded from indigenous tribes entirely?

Sources:
El impacto fundamental de las nuevas tribus ha sido el etnocidio (Print)

El domingo vence plazo para salida de misiones Nuevas Tribus de Venezuela (Print)

Foro: Nuevas Tribus, ¿misión de Dios? (very nice audio source)

2) Evaluate the motives people have for loyalty for a particular denomination over another. What cultural shifts are enough to push a change in philosophy? How does a culture decide what philosophies or principles are "hills to die on" and what can be given up? What does a group do when a respected spiritual leader leaves their denomination, but remains in the spotlight?

Sources:

Fuertes críticas de padre Alberto a la Iglesia, en libro. (Print)

El padre Alberto lloró por su bebita (Print)

Padre Alberto Cutié via La W Radio (audio)

9 ways to increase students' TL use

2010-12-29T09:20:00.000-05:00

This summer I wrote a post on increasing your own TL use and am just now getting around to this follow-up post.

Students need to practice speaking the TL in order to develop the skill of speaking it; that goes without saying. But because of the affective filter more than anything, and a host of other factors including pure lack of knowledge, it's a constant battle to get them to do so. Here are some tips that have worked in my classroom to get students speaking more.

1. Vocabulary practice.
This is a tedious task in which my students spend 5 minutes (timed) three days a week going over their vocabulary. They look at the English and say the Spanish in a low but audible voice, except in AP where they use Spanish definitions. (This is one area where I have just not been able to eradicate translation from my classroom.) The fact that no one can hear them means that they're not self-conscious, but they're training their mouths to speak the Spanish words. It's a task they hate, but it's been an incredible tool in my class for many reasons:
a) students ask how to pronounce words when they don't know how to pronounce them
b) students latch on to phrases that are their favorites and use them to joke and interact with those around them
c) students "bargain" (or think they're bargaining) with me by doing it in exchange for never doing vocabulary quizzes, which I find an entirely useless exercise in creating short-term memory for invalid grades
d) students don't mind doing it because every 6 times counts for an easy 50-point participation grade as long as they're keeping up with their own pace (they give themselves a tally mark for every 10 words they get through)
e) it gives me a chance at the beginning of class to take attendance and collect my thoughts and such without giving them useless busy work

2. Tell stories.
If you hang around "me" (my blog/twitter/etc) for long you'll soon find out that music and storytelling rival in my mind as the teacher's most powerful tools in the classroom. Storytelling is so powerful (and is as children acquire their first language) because it offers an ideal forum for incessant questioning. Which leads me to...

3. Ask questions incessantly.
I ask questions so nonstop that I do not "teach" the question words. They're in the vocabulary but we don't spend even a day on them. Questions keep students listening and offer you a continual source of formative assessment. Ask questions about stories. Ask questions about your students' lives. About school. About what you're doing in class. Everything. Someone knocks at the door. Who's at the door? Why? How tall? How old? Someone wants to go to the bathroom. TL, please. When? Where? Also, don't say a student's name until after the question. It keeps them listening to the question because they don't know whom you're calling on.

4. [Almost] never answer your own questions.
So you've asked a question and you get blank stares. Resist the temptation to answer it yourself until you've exhausted all possibilities to get students to understand. The best way is to offer options. At the lowest level, your best friends are proper nouns and cognates. Where did the girl go? La tienda--Walmart? El restaurante? If students have to answer in English, at least they comprehended the question, but give a valid TL answer and then ask them to do the same.

5. Ask a student to diagram your question & response patterns in class.
One day, give a class roster to a responsible student who's really on top of things. Ask him or her to put a check mark next to each student you call on. It will surprise you to see what the patterns are and will help you make sure you're calling on a variety of students (if you're in the habit of calling on students). Also, it's good to diagram who answers without being called on so you can see who really never talks and who really always talks, as opposed to just what our impressions are.

6. Get a stuffed animal to throw.
I love doing this and it's always been successful for me, but my colleague in her first year this year is having some resistance to it in her class. However she's having resistance to a lot of things so I'm taking that with a grain of salt. For some reason this has worked with me all the way to 12th grade because it helps control the turn-taking in the classroom to make sure everyone says something. Plus, boys just love to throw things and girls just love stuffed animals. I ask a question or give a sentence starter. I throw the animal. They answer, or if they're taking too long, I ask for it back and throw it to someone else, or they throw it to someone else. Anyway, everyone has to answer or say something relevant. It keeps the pace up, everyone looking up, and again, we don't leave anyone out.

7. Start every class with a patterned question.
This has to do with that stuffed animal thing. It doesn't have to be every class, but I love patterned questions. It helps us practice recent vocabulary, it gets the TL out of their mouth, and it gets umpteen repetitions of the target feature without rote repetition and without it being from me. So I say, "Me encanta Taco Bell porque me gustan las chalupas." (Sometimes I write it on the board with blanks.) I keep going with the pattern with my own opinions until someone asks for the stuffed animal and is willing to do it on their own. The same couple of students are always first and the same couple of students are always last, but that's okay, because everyone says something, and everyone learns at their own pace, right?

8. Make students 'pay' to speak English.
I have a stack of fake money and each student in lower levels receives 5 bills at the beginning of class. They can speak English 5 times during the class but they have to pay me a bill in order to do it. After that, they start losing academic credit (on a participation grade). So they know that they're not "forbidden" from speaking English so they're more comfortable doing both. I almost never have students lose all their bills. Students in upper levels receive 3 bills.
Incidentally, they can also receive more bills by "catching" me saying something in English that they know how to say in Spanish.

9. Vary your seating.
By this I don't mean have a seating chart and I don't mean let them sit wherever they want to. I got this tip from a professor in a TESOL program in grad school. At the beginning of the year I use 5x8 cards to make name "tents." They fold them in half, write their English name on one side and their Spanish name on the other. (Also this helps me learn their names.) My students in larger classes sit at tables, 4 to a table, for collaborative learning and scaffolding. Then every day, right before class, I take about a minute and set the names out completely at random. As the school year goes on I learn that there are a few students who cannot sit together, but generally it's random. If they don't like it one day, I tell them to suck it up because it will be different tomorrow. The principle is that they will usually be sitting at a table with someone who's better than they are and someone who's struggling more than they are, so there's always a new form of collaborative scaffolding going on. Thanks Alexandra--this is the most brilliant approach to language teaching seating I have seen!

Hope these tips help in your classroom as much as they have helped in mine.

I love collaboration

2010-12-27T22:15:00.002-05:00

Ever since someone said something about not reinventing the wheel it seems we've all been in a search to see how much of our work other people have already done. Right?

Not really. Actually we still have a tendency to shut ourselves in our classrooms and overwork ourselves and burn out doing things that hundreds or thousands of other teachers have actually done and some have shared if we just knew where to look.

I'd love for my blog to be an opportunity for me to share places to look. I just joined this wiki, Language Teachers Collaborate, and today I added a page called Authentic Audio. Click. Explore. Request access. Collaborate. It's what makes the teaching world go 'round.

The problem with translation (from a student)

2010-12-24T15:02:00.004-05:00

It doesn't take a teacher to realize that training students to translate doesn't produce proficiency. If you want to look into the SLA research behind why translation slows language processing so much (and if you are a teacher, you owe it to yourself to get this and let it revolutionize your methodology), start with this post. But for some lighter, shorter reading just look at what my student wrote for his evaluation of a listening proficiency exercise he did a couple of weeks ago.

My AP students have to interact in some way with Spanish outside of class once a week. They choose one of 19 options. It's a way for them to show me that, at this point, they have the self-motivation to find something they like to do with their Spanish outside of class (with as much freedom as I can allow and still get them to do a beneficial assignment). Then they report to me what they did, what they think they did well, and then what they need to work on. So "Teodosio" watched some videos on the internet about a theme park. He writes, "I need to work on listening instead of trying to translate. =("

Did you notice that he basically equates translating with not listening? At the very least he's revealing what all of us--and even our students--know: translating slows down language processing too much for listening comprehension to be significant. Listening comprehension reaches a significant level when the L2 word starts triggering the concept without having to route through the L1 to do so.

So why do we waste so much time asking our students to translate? Actually training them to do it?

Good question.

Why music is more powerful than anything (& how to use it)

2010-12-20T16:50:00.000-05:00

I got a question via @espanolsrs about how I "teach" songs and whether my students understand what they're singing. I thought I'd written a post about this before but when I browsed through my song label I didn't see anything about it. Probably I just thought about it and didn't actually write it (that happens a lot--I have probably 15 posts in the "edit" stage in my dashboard right now!).

It did remind me what I consider one of the greatest myths of language teaching: that students have to understand everything they hear. This is one area where I think that TPRS goes very wrong (and if you spend much time on my blog you'll know that I love TPRS). But TPRS and I part ways mostly on two very fundamental philosophical principles, one being using so much English translation, and the other being this idea that students have to understand every word they hear.

The thing that got me started on using music was an AP Spanish workshop led by a woman who handed out two songs (the songs were 19 de noviembre by Carlos Vives and Olvídame y Pega la Vuelta by Pimpinela) and asked us how these songs could be used in class. As we started brainstorming through what target features and cultural themes were present in the songs, using them piqued my interest. When I actually used them in class, and then used videos related to them, the songs themselves piqued my students' interest. The whole thing became a snowball effect that I never dreamed of. So my music journey hasn't really been something I read about or something I set out to do--it's something my students and the pop music industry have shown me, and happened to use my classroom as a venue to do it.

If you ask students all over the world what the best ways to learn English are, they will tell you that they learned the most English through watching our television shows and listening to our music. On any given Top Latino podcast, several of the songs will be in English by stars like Katy Perry and Justin Bieber. Do these English language learners understand everything they hear? Of course not. I don't even understand these songs. So why are they so effective? From using Spanish pop songs in my classroom, I have several theories, and tips.

1) Music is fun & motivating. This is why the industry makes so much money off of the adolescent market. It's why teenagers walk around with earbuds in their ears. Accordingly, you should usually choose songs that are widely popular. (Sometimes I make an exception and just ask my students to forgive me if there is a feature that's just too good to pass up--and then I'll often have one or two students who absolutely love it anyway, as is the case with Alexander Acha's Te Amo. I have a student who has memorized this song.)

2) Music offers a variety to appeal to lots of students. As teachers this is often a dilemma to us, particularly if you use a textbook. Students have a wide variety of likes and dislikes in every area of their life. If we can appeal to those tastes with music from Alexander Acha to Wisin y Yandel (appropriately for class), all the better. Choose a wide variety of artists. I have to remember that not all my students like the same kind of music I do. And I encourage my students to put up with some music and then let them choose other times. Trevor needs to tolerate Estrella for Ashley, and later she'll put up with Cuando me enamoro. (Okay, so who doesn't like that song.)

3) Songs offer an excellent opportunity for chunking. This is one of the main reasons why students don't always have to understand what they're saying. Any teacher or parent knows that children (and people) memorize words that are set to music. So what happens is this: think of all those phrases in Spanish (or English) that are a verb or noun plus an odd preposition. Let me pull a few from songs my students know inside out: "estoy a punto de" + inf from Mientes by Camila; or "hace [tiempo] que"+ present tense from Hace Tiempo by Fonseca. These are the kinds of structures that we can grammatically explain like we always have, and the best students will be able to produce them in writing to pass a test but they'll move on and forget them past our class and never be able to make the connection fast enough to produce them in speaking or comprehend them in spoken Spanish. Unless--they've heard them in context so many times the brain connection is just there and always will be. That is the power of a song. We need to find these structures in songs and point them out to our students, and then give them opportunities to use them in different contexts while reminding them of their use in the song.

4) Songs are an inexpensive way for students to continue interacting with Spanish outside of class. I remember students who didn't even continue to Spanish 3 telling me, "Oh I remember that song--it's on my shower playlist." Okay, well, I'm not really interested in what's on his shower playlist, but the point is he's still interacting with Spanish outside of my classroom because something struck his fancy and he went and spent $1. (Side note: encourage your students to responsibly and legally buy their music and you do the same. I have been appalled at the Spanish teachers who have proudly told me they download music illegally.) Offer homework credit for students listening to music outside of class. In my AP class this is a "fluency credit" my students can do once a quarter (along with 18 other options; they have to do one once a week).

5) Music can spur lots of varied assignments. These are some things my students have done:
--presentation on favorite artist including interpretation of a song
--essay on musicians' social responsibility with examples
--compare and contrast of matters of faith and culture presented in songs by three different groups (I teach at a private Christian school)
--Google Earth investigation of places mentioned in songs (there's a post about this in my song label mentioned above).
--rewrite a song to make it appropriate to their culture/life (example, Ojalá que llueva café to apply to the current recession in the U.S. and the struggles specific to our city)
(Also, remember I teach advanced students exclusively now.)

6) Music helps students remember grammatical features. I have an AP student who never forgets that words that end in -dad are feminine because of the song Electricidad by Jesse y Joy.

Most of all, always have a reason for playing a song. Well, almost always. There isn't anything wrong with playing one just for fun once in a while. If you'll look through the song label you'll notice that songs frequently show a target feature you can point out or ask students to look for. At the advanced stage I teach we are often looking at vocabulary or culture issues.
Also, play them often. You never know when you'll hit on the one or two that will be the magic that Hace tiempo, La llave de mi corazón, Adiós, Electricidad, and Dímelo, Dame, and Creeré have been in my class.

iPad giveaway!

2010-11-15T12:50:00.002-05:00

Because what techy teacher couldn't use an iPad?

Here's all the info in the blog post at the Art of Random Willy-Nillyness. Good luck!

A collaborative project for our Spanish-teacher PLN

2010-11-11T14:34:00.003-05:00

This year I noticed that my AP Spanish (4th year at my school) class had a lower listening proficiency than my previous class. As I reflected on possible causes for this, I realized that since I'd moved classrooms into a room without a VCR and thus stopped moving slowly through tapes of prior years' Latin Grammy's, I had stopped doing listening cloze quizzes of Spanish-language commercials. I wondered if perhaps that could be a contributing factor. To hear the blank words, students would listen to the native Spanish in these commercials over and over and over, and so I wondered if the drop in focused native listening activities had decreased the proficiency.

I thought about how to bring this activity back and thought, of course, that these commercials must be on YouTube. As it turned out, I found almost none of the quizzes I had scripted before, but I did find many more. So, in my new spirit of open-source that my PLN has brought to my teaching life, I immediately thought, why not put the scripts and YouTube links in a Google Doc, get more teachers involved, and get us all scripting and using the quizzes together?

Let's see how many teachers and how many commercials we can get in this document. You can find the commercials I've found on my Delicious commercials tag here, and look at the cloze quizzes in the Google doc here. Comment on this post with your email, or DM me your email to @SECottrell, or shoot me an email at cottrellse @ gmail dot com and I'll add you to the list of teachers who can edit it.

Wouldn't it be amazing if we could make this a cloze quiz resource built by dozens of teachers with dozens of target-language commercials accessible by any of us at any time?

I love collaboration, in teaching and in learning.

And the winner is...

2010-10-29T10:48:00.002-04:00

This year I picked up some early childhood Spanish to free up some time for our K-8 teacher to increase his instruction in our grades 6-8. So I teach 3-year-olds through 1st grade. I get 10 minutes per week with 3-year-olds, 15 minutes with 4-year-olds, and 20 minutes with kindergarten and 1st grade.

The first reaction I get from language teachers at this is laughter. What can you do in 15 minutes per week? Nothing.

I laugh back. Not nothing. Something big, or so I have found. It's not earth-shattering, but it's a breakthrough for me.

A little more background--the private school where I teach is connected to a church with a very strong emphasis on adoption, and we have a lot of internationally adopted
students in our school. This year in my younger classes I have, for example, two four-year-old Russians and a 1st-grader also from Russia. I had a few questions at the beginning of the year, people asking me if I thought them taking Spanish would hinder their English acquisition. I told them, bah, absolutely not. Bring on the languages, right?

All--and I mean 100%--of my training is in secondary education. So I started this blind. I knew it needed to be immersion. I knew it needed to include stories and questions. Songs. I knew last year they learned a few words of vocabulary and did a color sheet and I knew that wasn't the route I wanted to take. But the format? Clueless. After my first day in preschool I sent a shout-out for help to @PreKlanguages who called me and gave me a 30-minute crash course in teaching preschool Spanish.

So, we're building a story. There's a red house on a green hill. The yellow chick lives in the red house (Los pollitos dicen pío pío pío). One day he takes a walk and finds a blue lake. He drinks the water. He sees his friend the brown frog. The brown frog jumps 10 times and sings "Cucú." And so on. It's crazy fun.

For 10 weeks I've been asking, ¿Quién vive en la casa? Providing options. Superman? No. ¿Tú? No. Your teacher (name)? No. ¡El pollito vive en la casa! Waiting for someone to answer. So far, nothing. Which doesn't bother me, it's natural acquisition and you just wait for it to take its course.

Until yesterday. I'm in one of my four-year-old classes and telling the story. Here's the red house. ¿Quién vive en la casa?

And there it is. One of the little boys pipes up in all seriousness, "Pollito." Like "pozhito" with a rasp on the ll and all. I jumped up and high-fived him and nearly went through the roof.

And the winner is...

One of the Russian adopted boys.

Oh and today? In a three-year-old class I asked, ¿De qué color es la casa? And a little girl answers,

Roja.

She flipped the vowel to feminine. They have never done that before.

That's what 15 minutes a week can give you.

In the spirit of open source: Ciudad de las bestias

2010-10-01T11:19:00.001-04:00

Want to guide your advanced students through a culturally-relevant novel by a Hispanic author, written specifically to adolescents? Good! Intensive reading for pleasure is the best way to acquire vocabulary in any language.

I've put an incredible amount of work into writing reading guides and vocabulary lists for all 20 chapters of Ciudad de las bestias by Isabel Allende.

In the story, Alex, a 15-year-old Californian, must spend some time with his eccentric grandmother while his mother receives cancer treatment in Texas. His grandmother is a nonfiction adventure writer, about to leave with a team from "International Geographic" for the Amazon, in search of the (mythical?) Bestia--the 'abominable jungleman.' Alex's presence can't throw a wrench in her plans so he must tag along. Suddenly the California boy finds himself in the middle of the Amazon, picking off leeches, swimming with dolphins, befriending a young Brasilian-Canadian girl with whom he gets kidnapped and must embark on a journey to answer tough questions about who gets to use what in the jungle and what the future holds for the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, as well as where his true riches are and where he can find purpose.

Sound like culture? communication? motivating subject matter for teenagers?

My reading guides aren't perfect--just the other day one of my students pointed out I hadn't put page numbers on a few questions-- but here they are, and I encourage you to see the power of reading come alive for your advanced students.

**UPDATE 3 FEB 2011** For new info on these guides, see this post.

I'll try to post some tips on class novel reading soon, but my first one would be to start reading together before assigning it outside of class, so students can get used to the big keys which are:

1-read the question first so you know the big idea you're looking for

2-read so you understand the gist, but not so you understand every word.

Books recommended as 'easy'

2010-09-23T21:14:00.003-04:00

I found a helpful post on Amazon.com where someone recommends easy novels to read while learning Spanish. I hope to order them and see whether they might be good for Spanish 2, since I'm all about feeding kids authentic rather than learner Spanish from the beginning.

One is La Tierra del Fuego, and the other is El Clan de la Loba/La Guerra de las Brujas.

For Bethanie, who asked a long time ago, and anyone else who cares.

**update**
Here are a couple of other options recommended to me via Twitter and Amazon:
A children's sensation in Spain, Manolito Gafotas (if you can find enough copies en español)
The last of the Manolito series, Manolito Tiene un Secreto
Adventure novel Limpieza de sangre
El pirata Garrapata (and sequels)

Pure present tense & at least 22 repetitions of 'ya no'

2010-09-23T11:26:00.002-04:00

This is an old song by Juanes but great for 'ya no'- a phrase used so frequently that doesn't have a good matchup as far as syntax with English. You could say "no longer" but we typically have the 'not' paired with do/does + 'anymore' after the main verb... yuck. 'Ya no' is much more user-friendly. ;-)

The YouTube video actually shows an execution by electric chair so it's a bit rough in that way.

For a conference attendee: resources in math

2010-09-18T14:14:00.002-04:00

Someone at my session asked for resources for math in Spanish. I promised I'd try to post some.

Look here for a list I found.

Also I forgot that I had this resource, education tools from the Department of Education in Venezuela.

Searching BBC Mundo

2010-09-18T14:06:00.003-04:00

I promised to add some information as I stumbled through searching on BBC Mundo during my presentation Prompts with Power. As it turns out, I was thinking of the Radio ONU website--theirs is easily searchable and programs are scripted.

To search BBC Mundo for print sources, go to Google, and on the right, click 'advanced search.' On the part that says "only search this site," type bbcmundo.com. Then type your term in the top and click 'search.'

For video and audio, on the bbcmundo.com site, type your search term in Spanish at the top. I typed "ambiente" as mine. Hit enter. On the right you'll see the first 3 video/audio results. Click "more audio/video results" and look through to see what you want. On the 2nd page of my results there was one about the chestnuts in the Amazon, a nice idea to include.

Prompts with Power: writing/speaking prompts

2010-09-17T22:59:00.004-04:00

These are the sample prompts we are doing in my presentation, Prompts with Power, with sources.

Unit theme: Interpersonal relationships
Prompt theme: Adamari Lopez and Luis Fonsi divorce

LEVEL 1
Target "should"
She is sick.
He "should..."
Extend: why?

LEVEL 2
Target: talking about the past
Compare their relationship to a time when an illness affected your relationships.

LEVEL 3
Target: Perfects, subjunctive
What has happened to their relationship?
Extended: How do you feel about Luis Fonsi now?

LEVEL 4
Target: None specific.
Write an essay for your Marriage and Family class on the following topic: How does stress affect relationships? Give a personal example. How do you think famous couples could deal with the stress of fame and separation to make their relationships last? What about when an illness adds to the challenges?

Potential audio sources:
Adamari Lopez no se dio por vencida
Confirman Luis Fonsi y Adamari Lopez su separacion

Print sources:
Luis Fonsi: "Miento si digo que estoy bien"
Siguen cuidando uno del otro

Prompts with Power: Prezi

2010-09-17T22:56:00.001-04:00

Here's the Prezi for Prompts with Power.

Prompts with Power: German & French resources

2010-09-15T22:34:00.004-04:00

These are the promised German and French resources from my presentation, "Prompts with Power."

Hausegemacht.tv

Radio on demand
Morganpost TV on YouTube
More radio on dradio

For both French and German, a print source I mentioned a few posts back, Ads of the World.
Also change your Google settings to show pages in German/French as well as English, and use news.google.com to find online news.
Surf thousands of online newspapers to find newspapers from Germany, France, China, Liechtenstein, Congo, you get the idea.

For French audio:
ARTE radio
RFI radio
Radio France
BFM radio
France 24's YouTube channel

Prompts with Power: Dating in high school

2010-09-15T22:27:00.004-04:00

This is a writing or speaking prompt I'm making available as a follow-up to my upcoming presentation called "Prompts with Power." Prezi coming soon.

The prompt is:
¿Deben los jóvenes salir con novios en el colegio?

My favorite audio source for this (you have to watch both to get the full drama):

And the print source is an article from EPA.

Another possible audio source (but I didn't want them both to be about pregnancy, etc. and the Patito Feo is a good glimpse of the manipulation that can come from immature relationships):

KWLA Presentation: PLN-ology

2010-09-15T22:22:00.004-04:00

Here's my Prezi for the three-hour workshop @jannachiang and I are doing at the annual fall conference of the Kentucky World Language Association, this weekend in Lexington. The title is "PLN-ology" and the topic is how to use online tools, specifically Twitter, the eduPLN on NING, and Delicious social bookmarking, to enhance professional development (and for fun too!)

Tweet with double objects

2010-09-14T21:17:00.001-04:00

This tweet from @Fonseca came through just now--why not use it to see how your students do with the double objects?

Plus his use of 'q' and 'super' are fun.

"En Bogota hay un restaurante q se llama "EL COMEDOR", se los super recomiendo! Buenisimo!"

Interactive comic creator using Maya & Miguel

2010-08-31T21:57:00.000-04:00

The Pbs Kids website's Maya & Miguel section not only has a nice selection of Spanish fun, but one of the features is an interactive comic creator, in which you select the background and then choose which words you want to use and which pictures match the words. Wait-- it's in Spanish, you choose the words, and then you choose the pictures that match the words? Does that sound like some seriously fun vocab acquisition and practice or what? I don't care if your students are nine years old or in ninth grade, you've got to try this out.

Ads of the World | Creative Advertising Archive & Community

2010-08-30T22:27:00.001-04:00

I'm always on the lookout for authentic print and audio sources. I'm convinced that we should be feeding our students authentic audio and print from the very beginning. I think there's something they can understand in just about anything. (My 1st graders today were "reading" the cuentos on Playhouse Disney Latino's website.) I think if we continually feed them learner language that's all they'll ever understand.

For simple, attention-grabbing language, you can't get any better than advertisements. Check out Ads of the World for a great resource of advertisements in target language from all over the world. (Careful, be sure to screen them first.)

Added some great new links

2010-08-15T21:26:00.003-04:00

I've tweaked some of my links on the right - added a couple of "communicative bloggers" and some "communicative tools" including a FANTASTIC YouTube channel for anyone who's raising bilingual kids or teaches Spanish to children. I also finally replaced the old Yahoo radio link with a new link to my Pandora station, so you can listen to the station I use to find almost all the pop music I use in my classroom.

There's so much great stuff out there. :)

First 14 days of Spanish 1

2010-08-12T12:48:00.001-04:00

A couple of posts down Jen asked if I had lessons to go along with the Spanish 1 scope and sequence and vocabulary list.

I do! A few, anyway, and at least you can see how I organize and move through Musicuentos. Here are the first 14 days of Spanish 1, in fairly good detail.

Enjoy.

My supply list

2010-08-12T12:40:00.003-04:00

I just made my supply list for this year. It's been whittled down a lot this year. The actual one has a clip-art face on it but I don't think that uploaded well to Google Docs.

:)

(Disclaimer: I should add that I teach advanced electives at a private school that doesn't have the faculty or facilities to accept students with special needs, so no offense is intended. Also, I personally know every student on my class rosters so I know they won't be offended.)

Scope & sequence, word list for Spanish 1

2010-08-07T13:58:00.003-04:00

About three years ago I finally obeyed the inner voice that was yelling at me that textbooks were terribly unmotivating and out-of-date as soon as they were printed and we closed our textbooks forever and haven't looked back, in Spanish 1 through 3 anyway (we do use a workbook some in AP to get students used to the format of the AP exam).

(Side note: for a good blog post on throwing out your textbooks by Shelly Blake-Plock a.k.a. @teachpaperless, look here.)

As Shelly mentions, one thing textbooks do for us as teachers is give us structure. We do have to have structure, after all. At my school we just hired a new Spanish 1 & 2 teacher (and by new I mean it's her first year teaching as well) and for the past several weeks I've been working on organizing and updating the Spanish 1 and 2 scope & sequence and word lists for her. One thing I've been doing is using Mark Davies' amazing Corpus del Español to edit verb forms for higher frequency (look here for a good explanation by Michel Baker on how to use the Corpus), as well as checking to be sure we have the most frequent words in the lists.

And as I'm a firm believer in sharing the work we do, here are the documents for Spanish 1.
Word list (sorry all the dates are from 2008)
Scope and sequence ("extended" in the spring is because our spring quarters are technically 10 weeks long)
Feel free to "steal" and use whatever you can. As you read, keep in mind I teach in a private Christian school in a textbookless, translation-less, technology-based, storytelling classroom full of pop music and communicative, performance-based assessments.

Spanish 2 coming soon.

5 tips for increasing (your own) target language use

2010-07-29T09:14:00.004-04:00

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in May passed a new policy statement on the use of the target language in the classroom - 90% or above at all levels. It's about time that we as language teachers realize that 1) language education in the US doesn't work because we don't speak it to them and 2) speaking target language doesn't have to mean the students don't understand (it's how we acquired it the first time around, ¿no?).

Here are five tips to help you increase your use of the TL in the classroom.

1- Ask, ask, ask.
Get into the habit of asking short questions continually. I don't ever actually teach question words. It's in their vocab, but we spend 0 instruction or practice time on it because we just do it so much. Who are you sitting with? Who's at the door? What's in your backpack? When's lunch? Why are you leaving? What color is that? Where's your sister?

2- offer an immediate (false) answer to your question
Don't translate yourself and don't give anyone a chance to translate for someone who didn't hear or wasn't listening or never listens because the smart guy next to him always translates. Offering an immediate false answer gives students immediate context to target comprehension and increase concept ties, which are much stronger than L1-L2 ties (see my presentation here and it's worth your time to read this book chapter).
So, where did your Mom go? Walmart? Disney World? Where? Where did she go? Who's at the door? Lady Gaga? President Obama? Who? Who's there?

3- start describing drawings
I incorporate a lot of stories into my teaching and so I draw a lot. I am not an artist by any means, and that just makes it more fun. My students know I draw the worst-looking horses. Instead of just talking about something, try drawing through it. How about for an introductory activity one day, take your recent vocabulary and describe a drawing that your students have to draw. Use colors, sizes, and location words. "The sun is green and it's far away from the small blue banana." Take it for a listening comprehension grade. Drawing is my favorite version of vocab quizzing. Beats translation any day.

4- come up with an "I don't understand" sign
We often switch into English because we think our students may not understand. Another thing I took from TPRS is the "X" symbol for when students don't understand. That way, I know and can repeat, draw, act, rework my phrases to help them understand, and all the while I'm feeding them more TL. Timid students don't mind doing a little X with their index fingers. Then I've had rambunctious boys do a full-table X (my students sit 4 to a table sideways to me for communicative/scaffolding purposes) where each boy put an arm to the center and this was a "this entire table is completely lost here" X. LOL.

5- offer students a reward for "catching" you saying something in English they know in TL
Sometimes you'll find the right students motivated by the right things (chocolate) who will help you police yourself. I offered students a bean every time they caught me saying something in English that they knew in Spanish - even a word - and 2 beans earned them a Snickers Mini.

Get talking. Use strategies to continually assess comprehension and TALK TALK TALK! :)l

A warm-up from @samocamila: por vs. para

2010-07-15T14:58:00.000-04:00

A tweet from @samocamila, he's just full of fun stuff these days:
A todos los fans les mando un besote!!!, tengo mucha emoción por cantar para ustedes esta noche en premios juventud, los amo!.

Úsalo para practicar la diferencia entre por y para, y no te pierdas la oportunidad de enfocarse a los estudiantes en esa palabrita muy chévere 'besote'. :-)

Camila's all on board! (well, on Twitter)

2010-07-13T14:16:00.000-04:00

In the post just below I mentioned that the guitarist Pablo and the vocalist/pianist Mario @dragondomm are on Twitter, as well as the official Twitter feed @CamilaMX. Today @pablocamila retweeted a YouTube video that Samo put up and so I learned that he has one as well- @samocamila.

¡Síguelos todos!

Getting vocabulary from a tweet

2010-07-10T18:55:00.036-04:00

You never know what you're going to pick up from following tweets from pop culture icons like @jesseyjoy or @juanes, or from news sources like Venezuela's version of Fox News @globovision or Honduran @diariolaprensa. A great tweet came through today as an example.

One of my favorite groups, the Mexican trio Camila, tweets mainly through two accounts, @pablocamila (the guitarist) and CamilaMX, the official twitter. Mario Domm has an account @dragondomm but he doesn't tweet terribly frequently.

Today this tweet came from @pablocamila:
Quién irá a ganar este partido? Cuál fue la predicción de mi tocayo el pulpo?

In less than 140 characters, you have the vocabulary word 'tocayo' (I don't know when I acquired that word but it's a fun one to have), future for the concept of "I wonder" (extra interesting in the ir + a construction), cuál instead of qué as the question word, and the whole phenomenon of this prognosticating octopus Pulpo Pablo, which is frankly, just flat weird, but hey--by the time you watch videos and read articles about him choosing Spain to win it all (as of this writing the game is tomorrow, so we'll see if he's right), and why not throw in some video of Spain searching for their own Pulpo Paul, not to mention the wealth of hilarious stuff there is to find out there about Argentinian chefs putting octopus paella on the menu ad nauseum, your students will never forget the word for octopus and get some really funny culture mixed in their language acquisition in the process.

Every Spanish teacher should be on Twitter. Start by following me, @secottrell, and looking at my lists of language teachers and music, and follow them. From there it's a yellow brick road.

Huge toy giveaway from SpanglishBaby

2010-04-26T11:35:00.000-04:00

Here's a shoutout to SpanglishBaby--run over there and be sure to enter their awesome giveaway of bilingual toys from Ingenio!

Oh, and don't forget to follow them on Twitter, @Spanglishbaby.

A case for avoiding "pet" grammar

2010-04-13T17:16:00.001-04:00

My baby's been occupying a whole lot of my time lately, draining the life from my blogging and twittering, but in the grand scheme of priorities, she's above my blog, sorry. ;-) But now that potty training is going more smoothly I'll make a concerted effort to get back into things.

Way too long ago I saw a few tweets from some Twitter friends, also Spanish teachers, retweeting and agreeing with this post about how students in U.S. Spanish classes should learn the vosotros. It caused a twinge of guilt in me, I'll admit, because I don't teach the vosotros. We call it "that y'all -ais isteis ending they use in Spain" every once in a while when it comes up in conversation, but I don't explicitly teach it, not even in AP Spanish. Why? Because I like to think I'm on a mission to get my students communicative in the comparatively tiny amount of time I have, and vosotros isn't part of it. But what if they're right? What if I'm cheating them out of something, just because never in my Spanish-speaking 20 years have I ever used or needed the vosotros form? So, I thought, I'll ask. I do have one student in my six years of teaching who did study abroad in Spain. Also, my colleague who teaches lower-level Spanish with me studied abroad in Spain. I'll ask them. My colleague told me that she thought it's a good idea to introduce it so they can recognize it when they see it, but other than that it's more or less a waste of time. As for my former student, here's what she told me via facebook message:
"Having spent time in Spain I think I would still agree with you that spending a lot of time teaching vosotros isn't really needed. I think as long as you told your students what it is and maybe went over some of the verbs like ir, comer, and hablar to give them an idea of how it works. I think the best explanation of it is to tell them it is the form the Spaniards use for y'all."

Whew, mental forehead wipe. So the two people I know who might have told me I'd been cheating my students reassured me that as long as they know what it is, it's not a big deal if they can't really use it.

What makes me think this even more is the Latin American use of vos. I had friends in Texas who regularly used the preterite conjugation of vosotros with me as a conjugation of vos, which isn't taught in any textbook. What about that?

This got me thinking more about pet grammar and about my own shortcomings. How much time do we as teachers spend teaching stuff that's just uncommunicative junk that doesn't matter? Take me, for instance. Would you believe that at the beginning of this year I actually spend a few days and a good part of a test teaching and evaluating the presence or absence of the definite article before a qualified or unqualified profession word? I mean, come on! (If you're as lost as you should be, what I mean is, 'él es abogado' vs. 'él es un buen abogado'.) Where in the grand scheme of communicative language teaching did I need to waste time on that?

Another example: I distinctly remember having to memorize in college a list of the country words in Spanish and which ones typically did or did not take the definite article. I remember memorizing that you have to use la Argentina instead of just Argentina. Fast forward to now when I regularly read news articles in Spanish on website and see en Argentina, de Argentina, desde Argentina. Wait, where, what? Why did I memorize that again?

Let me hit a little closer to home--verb conjugations. Oh how we love to drill them, practice them, mark them wrong, am I right? A few weeks ago Laura Pausini put on her twitter feed @officialpausini that she wanted people to donate to Haiti or Chile earthquake relief, can't remember which, and "yo también lo hizo." ¿Hizo? Sure, you say, but Laura is actually Italian. But she speaks Spanish quite fluently and makes more money singing in Spanish than in Italian.

But let's talk native Spanish speakers. My students and I were doing some class activities regarding the wave of violence in Ciudad Juárez and watched some videos, including one showing a protest sign that read "Señor Presidente, hasta que encuentremos el culpable..." What a minor detail, that stem change that shouldn't be there in an -ar subjunctive, but I remember how much we studied those little details.

Pet grammar. If it's your goal, fine, but I'd argue that's when you're really cheating your students--cheating them of the opportunity to be communicative. Grammatical accuracy comes with a whole lot of time and comprehensible input, and in the meantime, why not just have fun with communication? My most communicative students are the ones whose verb accuracy is all over the place, but their affective filters are low and they're willing to experiment and have fun and just lay it out there and try it and negotiate meaning. One of them just won first place in level 4 oral proficiency at the district language festival and I can assure you my college Spanish professor would be appalled at her verb accuracy. But when she goes to a restaurant and tries her best to chat about whatever she can think of, I can assure you the people there couldn't care less.

Authentic audio with future tense

2010-04-03T13:17:00.000-04:00

I found a recent broadcast from Radio ONU (incidentally a great source for AP Spanish audio) that uses several verbs in the future tense because it's about a future meeting of a group discussing what they want to do about the H1N1 virus. Current event + grammar = :o)

My favorite thing to do with these is to print the script (which is what the link will take you to), black out the target features (whether verbs or vocabulary or whatever) and copy the script, and then play the audio several times and use it as a type of cloze quiz. I combined this with a few other future activities (a song and 2 news articles) so they were finding a total of 22 verbs, but 2 of the verbs in this audio (reunir and evaluar) they're not terribly familiar with, so I made the quiz grade worth 20 pts. The highest grade I got was 20/20, and I only got 1 of those out of 13 students. My lowest was 17/20, just to give you an idea.

Interesting blog post about iPod as language lab

2010-03-30T11:46:00.000-04:00

I got a link to this blog post over my Twitter feed from @techforschools and had to share. It's called "iPod Touch as Language Lab."

A couple of years ago I saw a language lab rep at a conference and of course got all in a tizzy about language labs. He hasn't visited my school yet but I talked to my admins about having him in and I got an estimate - $27,000 for 14 stations. I was basically told to keep dreaming, but that was fine; I at least wanted them to know I wanted one in case someone designated a large gift to the school for foreign language (I teach at a private school).

Then I started thinking about how I could turn our laptop computer lab into a listening lab with microphones and software. But we have computer classes in there in the afternoon, and I can't take my classes there, which is a significant obstacle. Then we thought, well, what we really need is a mobile laptop lab, but because of our elevator/stairs situation, it would only be usable by part of our school. Not a great option either.

So now I'm nearly sold on the idea of having a set of iPods to use as sort of a mobile computer lab. I've decided I need to be really crazy about an idea and know enough about it to conduct training on it to really get serious about asking to allocate funds for it, but the more posts I see like this, the more crazy I become.

It's a good sort of loca though.

News article: appeal + subjunctive for influence

2010-03-29T11:37:00.001-04:00

Popping in quickly to share an article with a lot of youth appeal (I mean, it has juventud in the article) and some subjunctive for influence.

You'll find it here on univision.com.

A high-interest exercise for imperfect/pasado continuo

2010-01-28T10:56:00.002-05:00

In my class, my students know that I don't care if they know what imperfect or preterite means. Often we call them descriptive past and sudden past, because that's the best way in my opinion to contrast them. The trick with putting them together is to get students to use one when they're describing ongoing action and switch to the other when they want to say what happened. We do a story, where they fill in the details, in which our two characters were going somewhere (a birthday party for the horse's mother) in some way (on an airplane) doing something (eating chocolate straws) with someone else doing something (Miley Cyrus not wearing enough clothing) when something happens (the plane fell) and while that was happening other things happened (the people screamed, the horse pushed Miley Cyrus out of the plane).

I thought about using children's books as a follow-up exercise, having them describe what was happening on the page. I did that very quickly at the end of a class, as an oral activity, and I pushed them to make the exercise very rapid so they didn't have time to get bored, but I thought, if I do this again they're going to get bored with it as a writing exercise. But it's almost March Madness. We live in KY where basketball is king. I have 2 girls who will probably have a volleyball scholarship in college. I've been hyping up the upcoming World Cup. What if I find amazing sports videos, culturally relevant, in Spanish, to use instead?

So these are what we found. Manu Ginobli, the most accomplished Latin American basketball player ever, beats Serbia & Montenegro at the buzzer in the 2004 Olympics (make sure your students watch the clock & the score box). The USA scores on a fabulous corner kick in a World Cup qualifier vs. Mexico. Peru's volleyball team makes an amazing play in their bid for a spot in the 2010 World Championship games in Japan after their star actually kicks the ball--I didn't even know that was legal.

We watched the videos through, used sudden past to say what happened in the big moment of the game, and then paused the video in different areas. We named some random person on the screen, and each student had to use the continuous past (our focus of the week) to say qué estaba haciendo esa persona. We did this 3 or 4 times for each video and I took the writing as a daily grade. It worked beautifully. My students could have watched the videos a dozen times so they didn't even care that they were technically doing a grammar writing exercise.

Here are the videos:

A song with 17 verbs in past subjunctive

2010-01-19T10:48:00.002-05:00

Past subjunctive is not the easiest thing to find in a song, much less several repetitions of it. I blogged a bit about a couple of songs that do it, but I this song just crossed my radar and wow, what a gem for past subjunctive. It has 17 verbs in the past subjunctive, 8 of them unique. They're almost all part of unreal if clauses, and the cool thing is that you can see the use of the concept without the actual word 'if,' something that's not taught in textbooks. (Again, textbooks fail us.)

As an added benefit, you have 'quiera' as subjunctive by reason of indefinite antecedent (for a better song for that, see this post). Thanks Carlos Vives (@carlosylaprovin on Twitter) for injecting some fun in one of the hardest concepts in the Spanish language.

Como Tú

Carlos Vives

Tú no sabes lo que diera
si me vieras y dijeras tú,
que no sabes que yo quiero
que mi vida la quisieras tú,
si supieras que me gustan
son las cosas que prefieres tú,
que quisiera que los hijos
que tengamos fueran como tú.

Como tú, la primavera.
Como tú, la vez primera.
No haya nadie que me quiera.
Como tú, mi vida entera.

Tú, tú, tú, mi vida entera.
Tú, tú, tú, mi vida entera.

Me perdonas si yo insisto,
que mi vida la quisieras tú.
Que de todas las estrellas
que yo he visto, la más linda, tú.
Si supieras que me gustan
son las cosas que prefieres tú.
Que quisiera que los hijos
que tengamos fueran como tú.

(coro otra vez)

Si las noticias fueran como tú.
Y las ciudades fueran como tú.
Y si las calles fueran como tú.
Y si mi jefe fuera como tú.
Y si mi vida fuera como tú.
Y mis canciones fueran como tú.
Y si la guerra fuera como tú,

No habría problema todos como tú

(coro y tag otra vez)

My corporate Spanish links, all in one place

2010-01-18T17:20:00.000-05:00

I just tagged on my Delicious all the Spanish-language corporate websites that I've mentioned on my blog. It makes it a lot more convenient to find the sites that my students have found interesting. You can find it here:

http://delicious.com/wandermami/Corporate_Spanish_sites

"Adora la Exploradora"-the week we didn't feel like a boring past-tense review

2010-01-11T08:07:00.000-05:00

Last week it was time to start reviewing how the two past tenses work together, and I just didn't feel like the usual diagrams, writing exercises, prompted conversations, etc. So now that we have our Flip cameras, I told the students to write a movie script. They had to use both past tenses, and they had to use every subject at least once. We have a student whose name in my class is Adora, and they had the idea to make "Adora la exploradora." They started making this student Backpack, that student Grandma, and the ideas kept flying. I think it turned out super fun. We're going to be filming today and tomorrow and I'm looking forward to it! I wish I could post the video, but I don't post pictures or video of my students on public websites.

After the first day, the video was planned all in Spanish. Also, two separate classes did the planning and will be filming the same way. In Word the diacritical marks were all there and correct, but they didn't copy/paste here.

Enjoy!

GUIÓN

Narrador: Adora y Boots salieron de su casa, porque ellos querían ir a la casa de los abuelos de Adora y comer galletas. Antes de que salieran, buscaron al Mapa.

Adora y Boots: Hola Mapa!

Mapa: Soy el Mapa (10x)Bosque, puente, montaña, casa de abuelos. Díganlo conmigo. Bosque, puente, montaña, casa de abuelos. (2x)

Narrador: Adora y Boots lo dijeron.

Narrador: Cuando salieron de la casa, caminaron al bosque espantoso y entonces llegaron. Adora vio a Swiper! ¡Ay de nosotros!

Swiper(salta del bosque):

Adora y Boots: ¡Swiper no robes! ¡Swiper no robes!

Narrador: Pero Swiper le robó la chamarra a Boots.

Swiper: Demasiado tarde. JAJAJA.

Adora y Boots: ¡Ay de nosotros!

Narrador: La buscaron y no la encontraron. Así que corrieron al puente. Adora y Boots llegaron al puente y el trol les cerró el paso. y No pudieron pasar.

Adora y Boots: ¡Por favor! ¡Necesitamos pasar e ir a la casa de mis abuelos ahorita o las galletas estarán frías! ¡Trajimos la ardilla, Tico, en nuestra mochila para ayudar a comer las galletas!

Trol: No quiero que ustedes pasen, pero si resuelven la adivinanza pueden pasar. Este es la adivinanza: -Tengo frío y calor y no frío sin calor.-

Adora y Boots: Hmmmmmm.

Tico: ¡Yo sé! ¡Yo sé!

Adora y Boots: ¿Qué?

Tico: ¡Sartén!

Trol: Respondiste correctamente. Tristemente… Tristemente… Tuve hambre.

Adora y Boots: Eres muy inteligente, Tico. Te amamos.

Tico: No los amo. Lo siento.

Adora y Boots: ¡Grrrrr! ¡Sal! Pero gracias para la solución. Adiós.

Narrador: Adora y Boots caminaron sobre el puente muy rápido y subieron la Montaña Vegas donde se dieron con el toro.

Adora y Boots: ¡Hola Benny!

Benny: ¡Hola Adora! ¡Hola Boots! Estoy comiendo mi almuerzo. Me alegra verlos porque no los veo hace mucho tiempo.

Adora: Tenemos un problema. Necesitamos buscar a Swiper porque le robó la chamarra de Boots.

Boots: Estoy muy triste. Quiero mi chamarra. Mi amigo Tico me la dio para mi cumpleaños pasado. Es mi favorita.

Adora: ¿Has visto a Swiper o la chamarra de Boots?

Benny: Yo sé dónde está la chamarra.

Boots: ¿DÓNDE ESTA? Yo la quiero.

Benny: Swiper la tiró en el árbol. Porque la chamarra no le quedaba muy bien.

Boots y Adora: ¿Dónde está el árbol?

Benny: Pregúntenle al mapa.

Mochila: Yo lo tengo.

Mapa: ¡Aquí estoy!

Adora y Boots: Mapa, ¿Dónde está el árbol?

Mapa: Allí (Señala con el dedo)

Narrador: Adora y Boots se apresuraron al árbol y consiguieron la chamarra. Entonces, Adora y Boots fueron a la casa de abuelos.

Los Abuelos y Diego: ¡Adora y Boots! ¡Nos hicieron falta!

Adora y Boots: ¡Hola! ¿Como han estado?

Los Abuelos: Muy bien y muy cansado pero hicimos galletas para Uds.

Diego: ¿Qué de yo?

Los Abuelos: Ok. (a Adora y Boots)Compartan con Diego.

Adora y Boots y Diego: ¡Ñum Ñum Ñum DELICIOSAS!

Adora y Boots: (a audiencia) ¡Gracias por ayudarnos! ¡ADIOS!

EL FIN!!!!!!!!

My level 1 and 2 stories (for Bethanie, and whomever else)

2010-01-07T17:24:00.001-05:00

A little while ago I made a post about pleasure reading that elicited a few comments from Bethanie:

Bethanie said...: Could you elaborate on what you do with the reading guides/palabras claves? I would like to incorporate more long reading into my classes in addition to the shorter pieces I already use, but struggle with some of the same things you mentioned.

Also, if you could select books for levels 1 and 2, what would you pick?

Thanks!; 24 November, 2009 21:08
Sarita said...: Hi Bethanie! Now I just hand the students the guides/palabras claves and they turn them in on the due date. A couple of tips that are important, I think, are 1) to reduce frustration, read together at first to teach them how to find the important things without looking up every word (make sure you understand subject/verb, leave the sentence as soon as you have the gist of it, leave the paragraph as soon as you have the gist, understand every part of a sentence when you know the answer to a ? is there); 2) give them the page numbers of the answers to the questions and make sure they're chronological; 3) give a list of high-frequency words from the chapter that they're not likely to know; and 4) rehash the chapter in a TPRS/circling way when they turn in the guide to gauge who understood what.
As for books for lower levels, have you seen the TPRS books by Blaine Ray et al? You can start here. Good luck!; 25 November, 2009 16:07
Bethanie said...: Hi Sarita,
Thanks for your response. I have a few of the Blaine Ray novels, and I think they are a great idea to consider. I find teaching this type of reading to be a greater challenge at the lower levels (1-2) than at the upper levels (3+), so I appreciate the ideas that you've shared.; 01 December, 2009 22:47

When I first started giving my students stories with comprehension questions as assessment, I remember wishing there were more available for free on the internet, especially for lower-level students. I'm still not aware of anyone publishing or offering such stories on the internet, but at least I'd like to offer mine to Bethanie and anyone else who wants to use them. A few notes about them:
1-I believe that students pay more attention with a lower affective filter (and therefore acquire more) if the stories are interesting, funny, weird, or all of the above.
2-Long stories are frustrating so none is longer than 1 page.
3-Sorry for any mistakes/misprints. Feel free to make them your own.
4-They deliberately use vocabulary my students learned in that particular quarter. You may want to replace words to match your students' vocabulary.
5-The stories that are one page long with questions on the other page, I scored as tests.
6-There are a couple of stories I wrote for them to answer questions on (quiz grade) and then they filled in blanks with different details to make the story their own (daily grade) and exchanged with another student(s) who answered the questions based on the new story (quiz grade).

Level 1 stories
Level 2 stories

Hope you find them useful!

A song with 37 repetitions of "más que"

2009-12-11T16:21:00.004-05:00

The winner of the Latin Grammy for Mejor Nuevo Artista this year, and nominated in a similar category for Premio Lo Nuestro 2010, is a blond, dimpled native of D.F. named Alexander Acha. One of his most popular tunes is the song "Te Amo." I had to tell my students to give him a chance through the Josh Groban/Andrea Bocelli-sounding verse (which I love) and get to the chorus, and I actually had several of them vote for him for Premio Lo Nuestro. The most important feature of the song is that I count 37 repetitions of "más que" or "más aun que". Fabulous.

Switch to a communicative set-up

2009-12-07T20:23:00.000-05:00

How is your classroom laid out? Is it conducive to communicative teaching and acquisition?
Recently my principal came back from a visit to another school and showed me a picture (on his iPhone of course) of a classroom that made him think of me. The teacher had put several tables together and then cut a giant oval piece of wood and laid it on top to create a large oval table. All his students sat around this oval table and he and they loved the setup. And this was in a primarily lecture class.
I told my principal that the standard students-in-rows-of-desks is a legacy of 150 years of education, way back in one-room schoolhouses when all grades were in one room with one teacher learning all subjects. If our education system has changed so drastically, why hasn't the setup of the classroom?
Nowhere is this more true than in language classes. Students need to be in a situation that helps them scaffold and collaborate because language is not a one-person game. You can learn and do math on your own, you can read history and answer essay questions, but language is not a solitary activity by nature. In the article Classroom Layout Preference Reflects Teaching Style authors Fernando Doménech Betoret and Amparo Gómez Artiga write that "Teachers-in-training with a specialization in languages perceived a layout with students seated in forward-facing rows as suitable for individual work (e.g., grammar and writing activities), but perceived a layout with desks in a half-square configuration as more suitable for speaking activities." My question is, since when is language "individual work"? That's part of the problem plaguing American world language teaching.
The fact is that a layout involving students sitting in groups of four or five is most useful when you have small groups working because it "encourages talk within the small groups, and exchanges with the teacher." Does that not sound like a language class?
In this small-group setup it's most helpful to "have the students sit so they're side on to you and remember to move around the classroom when you need to give instructions or change activities."

Here's my system:
I arrange tables in my room so that students are 4 to a table and are sitting facing sideways to me. They can easily turn their chairs to face the front if necessary, but mostly they are facing each other.
The first day of class my students make a "name tent" (a 5X8 card folded in half lengthwise) with their English name on one side and a Spanish name on the other (this also helps me learn their names). Each day before each class, I take about 30 seconds to randomly set out the tents. I go one on this table, one on the next, and so on. Then at the end I collect them all by table so they'll go out in a different order next time.
This way, I ensure that students are sitting with different people all the time. At least most of the time, they'll be sitting with someone who's better than they are, and someone who struggles more than they do, so there's a lot of scaffolding going on amongst themselves. This also helps one of my classroom policies to not answer as many questions as possible, rather to let students answer each other's questions.
So I challenge you to evaluate how your classroom is set up and rework it to promote communicative teaching and acquisition. You'll be surprised at the results!

Print & audio sources for AP synthesis essay re: efficient energy

2009-11-30T17:50:00.000-05:00

In the world language classroom, we are not just teaching language. Language as a means of communication by its very nature enables us to touch our world in different ways. That's why I say all the time that a major part of our responsibility is to help our students become world citizens by keeping them informed on what's going on in the Latin world. Another aspect of this is to encourage "green" thinking in light of the Latin world. That's not hard to do, given that the world's largest rainforest and concentration of species is found on the South American continent.

The people who write the AP exam are aware of this as well. They want our students to be green citizens like we do, and chances are there's going to be something on the environment on the AP. This whole emphasis is clear if you open any advanced or AP Spanish textbook--there's usually an entire unit devoted to the topic. I know in the AP curriculum I've created for my classroom, my fourth unit is on the environment.

Because of this focus, in this unit my students wrote an essay about the importance of developing efficient sources of energy and hypothesizing on where energy technology will take us in the future (good use of future tense & subjunctive). My two print sources were a Wall Street Journal article entitled "Cinco tecnologías que podrían cambiarlo todo" and an article from Yahoo Autos about the features on the upcoming Chevrolet Volt.
The audio for the essay comes from a video taken at the recent Solar Decathlon in Washington. It's featured on the YouTube channel and website of Solar Decathlon Europe, who are looking forward to holding the competition in Spain next year--a golden opportunity for you to highlight this important event in the Spanish classroom.