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 case for avoiding "pet" grammar

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.

A product I love

EMC Paradigm has a product out called SymTalk. The part I use is a set of 256 symbol cards that are magnetic. (I requested a magnetic board specifically to use this and my school got me both, thank you Whitefield!) The cards illustrate various concepts and words without translation. On mine, the word is there in Spanish, but it's very small at the top--you can't see it unless you're right next to it.

The cards come with a training DVD but the way EMC designed this to be taught, as a curriculum, is pretty forced in my opinion. I think for students it would get old very fast. However, as a support product it works great. For example, this morning I put up the illustrations of phrases with tiene, and also the illustrations of the phrases with está that my students learned much earlier this year. We went over what all of them meant, from tiene sed to está triste, and then my students had to look in a children's book (they each had one) to find an illustration of someone or something that showed that feeling/condition. It was a good review of está, and reinforcement of pairing tiene with concepts we use be for in English, and there was no textbook and no English involved.

Trust me--this one's worth a curriculum request!

Cause and effect

A few thoughts on what we shouldn't do, in my opinion:

If you don't want your students to translate in their heads when they speak...
DON'T include translation in your assessment. EVER. Real translation/interpretation is a very advanced skill and will come with time anyway.

If you don't want your students to run through a sequenced list of conjugations in order to come up with the "right" form...
DON'T drill conjugations. (My Spanish 1 students don't even know there is a chart of subject/verb sequences.)

If you don't want your students to be able to explain a 'g' stem-changing verb while still using "yo teno" or "ellos tenen" to communicate,
DON'T bother explaining 'g' stem-changing verbs.

If you don't want your students to think they're not "smart enough" for Spanish because they're not good at school in general,
DON'T teach or assess language as if it were history or math or science.

The bottom line is this: we're teachers and we like saying things like "past perfect subjunctive in an unreal if clause" but unless our students are going to be language teachers, such terminology will profit them nothing. There's a whole big world out there waiting to communicate with them, so let's teach them to communicate!

Grammar learning vs. acquisition

My 38 Spanish 1 darlings just turned in a stack of projects--they had to describe and illustrate five family members, at least one of them a plural set, at least one outside their immediate family. They had to tell me 1) what their name was, 2) ¿cómo es?, and 3) ¿cómo está?

We worked on it some in class and they turned it in before they did so marvelously on their test, and I think it had a lot to do with those good scores. Also, I was SO happy while I read it. Spanish 1 students are going to make mistakes, naturally, but not all mistakes are created equal. When they map English onto Spanish, la profesora Sarita is not so feliz. If they're overgeneralizing their Spanish, it's still counted points off, but la profesora Sarita is pretty feliz.

Check this out: Not one of my students wrote Su llama es.... Amazing. I don't know if you get that, but my Spanish 2 students incessantly put that in their writing and blogs. It's aggravating. They're taking their English structure and mapping it onto Spanish even though they "learned" this structure in week 2 of their Spanish 1 class (with a different teacher) last year. I did get a couple of Mi padre es llama... and I wonder if they were going for "My father is named...", but I just had one student do that for all 5 family members, and another for 2 out of 5.

So what about the overgeneralization? My biggest grammatical error was Mi padre se llamo but the same student would write Mi prima se llama. Wow! They know that o words are boy words and a words are girl words, and they're overgeneralizing that to verbs. They still lost 6-8 points for it, but there's a mistake I'll take any day over English mapping!

Trust me, a commitment to communication and "natural-ish" acquisition is SO worth it.

Forced to give grammar tests?

Diane from foreignlanguagefun.com left me this comment on my previous post:

"I teach using immersion, stories, TPR, music . . . but then I have to give common assessments. Although they are proficiency-based, there is a lot of isolated grammar, etc. I'm fascinated by the "no warning" tests. Of course, it makes perfect sense and is a much more valid assessment piece. Yet, it's still completely outside the "way things are done" --at least here in my public high school. When I taught at a private middle school, I had more freedom. How did you make the shift? School & parents supportive? I know your methods work, but how do you get others on board?"

I got a similar question when I gave a session called Assessing Comprehension without English and this fall's KWLA conference. For one thing, it makes me realize how fortunate I am to work with people who trust me to run the Spanish program the way I choose, so I was able to reject using the curriculum tests and workbooks last year, and this year rejected the textbook altogether. I didn't know quite what to answer, but what I said was this: Fight for it. I've never taught in a public school, so I don't know if you can even do this, but I'd call the administrator on the fact that he or she has no idea what language acquisition entails and therefore has no right to impose assessment judgments on you. Language isn't learned like any other subject, and you can't test it that way.
Other suggestions:
See if the department will let you use their test, but modify it to fit a more communicative approach. Can you change a question to elicit the same target feature (i.e. the form digo) by asking a communicative question instead of giving a multiple choice?
See if the department/administration will let you alter the weighting of the test. Can you weight the common tests lower and supplement with your own communicative tests?

To answer the other question, I shifted from announced tests to pop tests quite abruptly. I heard a couple of teachers mention it at a TPRS workshop at the 2007 KWLA conference, and I implemented it the very next week. I just told the kids that I wasn't going to tell them when tests were anymore. But I promised that I wouldn't put anything on a test that I hadn't asked several times in class in several different ways, and I always promise my students not to have unrealistic expectations of them. At first they threatened to mutiny, lol, but they got over it. Every once in a while they'll bring it up. This week one of my Spanish 3 cherubs was working on a test and said, "You know, in every other class, the teachers tend to let us know when tests are coming..." But he was joking and trailed off. They know it's not going to change. And parents have been nothing but supportive. Most of the students have also. Really, it's amazing how you can win people over when you have all the logic on your side!

My KWLA presentation

Here are the slides from the presentation I recently gave at the Kentucky World Language Association's fall conference in Lexington, KY.



The whole thing can be found here.

TPRS gone wrong

I was looking for other blogs to look at and add to my blog, and I stumbled upon this TPRS teacher's blog:

http://blogs.glnd.k12.va.us/teachers/jrooke/

It shows my major, major complaint with TPRS (which I mostly love and borrow from a lot, btw, as you can see in previous posts). Look at all the "we translated" "students translate" assessment! With all the research showing that translation isn't good for bilingual proficiency, why does TPRS look like this? Why, for a method that's so incredibly communicative and includes the brilliance of circling questions, do TPRS teachers insist on translation in their assessment?

This is my goal in my curriculum development journey: eradicate translation from my assessment, evaluate whether this works, and show other teachers how to do the same!

Another article that rocked my world

I read this article for a class called Issues in Bilingualism or something like that while I was in grad school. I remember exclaiming over and over as I read it, "That makes so much sense! That explains why..." My husband laughed at me getting so excited over a scholarly article. It has a lot of SLA terminology in it, but if you can wade through that, it's well worth your time/money. If you have access to a university library, you can probably get it free. Here's a link to the abstract.
Author: Norbert Francis
Source: International Journal of Bilingualism, Volume 8, Number 2, June 2004 , pp. 167-189(23)
Publisher: Kingston Press Ltd

I'll be referencing Francis's ideas and model quite a bit when I do my conference presentation next week on Assessing Comprehension without English. This is the article that convinced me, along with Krashen, to throw English translation out of my teaching as much as possible.