Short listening activity tailor-made for beginners

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).

Faith and Culture: help me decide our AP topic

(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)

The problem with translation (from a student)

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.

A collaborative project for our Spanish-teacher PLN

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.

5 tips for increasing (your own) target language use

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

Authentic audio with future tense

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.