Free Ebook for WL educators

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.

Get Your Free Ebook Now

First Name:

Email:

We respect your email privacy

Enjoy!

Dear novice-learner teacher - love, an AP teacher

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.

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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.)
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
5. 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.
   
   
6. 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

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.)

Vote for this week's #langchat topic

For tonight's #langchat: A game for description

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!

Topic for #LangChat 1/27

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

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!

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

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!