Presentation: Target Language: Expect More, Say Less

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

My supply list

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.)

Switch to a communicative set-up

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!

I just made my first Yodio

I love professional conferences, particularly KWLA! What could be better than a bunch of awesome teachers getting together and sharing their best practices? That's how I found out about Yodio. My students in Spanish 3 today wandered the school taking pictures of teachers and staff "commanding" people to do things. They've written the commands and tomorrow we'll add the audio. I'd share it but I think I should keep photos of my students off this blog. But meanwhile I made my own, just with two pictures. Grab your kids, a camera, and a cell phone, and tell your own digital story!

KWLA Fall 09 Conference presentation

This is the presentation I did for the fall conference of the Kentucky World Language Association.



And here is the handout.

Relating everything to English

Cross-linguistic transfer, the problem of a learner's native language interfering with the one being learned, is a big enough issue without us as teachers compounding it by constantly relating things to English. For example, giving students ways to remember words by relating them to English is not always a smart idea, in my opinion. I just got a blog post from a student who wrote "Yo soy mirror television." This is a student in his 2nd semester of Spanish 2. Someone along the way has told him to remember mirar by relating it to the English mirror so what does he remember? Mirror. Communicatively speaking, it's very possible that a native speaker would understand him, but the error still irks me. Also, this is a student who is not very motivated and I imagine I'll never see him after this semester, so that's a factor too.

Still, I try to point out when things are not like English as much as possible to convince them that they cannot try to force Spanish to be that way. When we listened to Aleks Syntek perform Intocable on the 2007 Latin Grammys, we talked about how looking up the words 'move' and 'on' will never get you to 'debo seguir adelante,' which is what he sings in the song. Today in Spanish 1 when we watched Belinda and the Cheetah Girls sing A la Nanita Nana, we talked about the phrase tiene sueño and why we'd never say it that way in English but we're just focusing on that being the phrase (chunking it, if you will) so we can work on not writing things like estoy sueño and worse, soy sueño. Same thing with yesterday's clip of Los pollitos and the phrases tienen hambre and tienen frío.

Remember, we're supposed to be fighting cross-linguistic transfer, not encouraging it.

A project based on motivation

Here in Kentucky we're still digging out from last week's ice storm. Yesterday I was able to get online for the first time in a week, so today, it's back to blogging!

If you've taught from a textbook for very long, you've found that they're just not motivating to students who aren't already self-motivated, and motivation is absolutely the key to success. Anyone without a brain defect that inhibits language can acquire another language if motivated enough. I'm convinced that our biggest task is finding ways for our students to interact with the language in ways that are 1) meaningful to them and 2) meaningful in light of the world around them, because that's motivating.

A project I came across seems to be especially good for this, because they get to pick the topic of their interaction, in the highly visual and auditory format of the internet (and isn't this generation visual!). I talked about my Spanish 2 students completing last years' best internet worksheets in this post. You can read the entire project description and requirements in this document.

It amazes me the sites they come up with for this--usually something they're really in to that I wouldn't even think of. Some of the best ones I've seen are Coke Costa Rica and McDonald's Mexico. I also had students do Nestle's cooking site and Louis Vuitton handbags. Disney and Nike are always favorites. There are a million choices out there, anything from the Dominican Republic's official baseball league to Warner Bros to Pantene, the White House, the art museum El Prado (careful with that one, some of the art is, well, nude), and Nintendo Wii. The limit is only their imagination!

El carro de sus sueños

If you want to get teenage boys excited about talking about something en español (or any language), ask what their dream car is. Find a picture on Google images and put it in a powerpoint. Label the parts and ask how many there are, what kind, etc. Then brainstorm as a class in a Word document negative commands--we got "don't paint it brown" and "don't throw balogna on top of it." LOL.

Trevor had fun:

Best practices

At the KWLA conference, so many people mentioned cool things you can do with a computer... if you have a projector in your room, which I don't. I'd asked for one before, but the tech guy told me that no one was checking out the one in the library, so he didn't see a need to buy another. I told him it would be such a hassle to get it every morning and bring it back every afternoon, that it wasn't worth it.

After the conference, I decided it was worth it after all, and I was going to check it out every day unless someone else needed it. So I have, the past two days, and my students have LOVED it. This morning one of the students in my difficult period said, "I learned more than I ever have in any other Spanish lesson." YAY!

So I've arranged with my boss to have a "permanent checkout" of the projector in my room--after all, if no other teacher is using it, what's the sense in me getting a new one and the other one sitting in the library? He said if other teachers start requesting it, the library will have to requisition a new one.

:-) Good times, good times.