I've come up with a story that in both Spanish 1 and 2 has worked really well with teaching demonstratives. We've worked with those quite a bit for the past couple of weeks, and I've been amazed at how fast my students have become consistent and proficient at using them.
Side note: A couple of veteran Spanish teachers and I were talking recently, and they were remarking how 1/2 hour once per week (our middle school Spanish schedule) is a complete waste of time. I said I thought it was of some benefit, because I could see how my Spanish 1 students came in to my class after 3 years of that schedule and were advanced in their ability to use verbs like soy and estoy. One of the teachers said, "Oh, you can teach that in two days."
Yes, you can teach it in two days. But the students will not use it consistently accurately after that. They just flat won't. This is what's wrong with us--we care more about moving through material than we do about whether our students can use the material. I had a Spanish 3 student with very high aptitude write yo tiene on his blog last week and I could have smacked him. What is our goal here, finishing a book? Assigning a grade? Or enabling them to communicate with hundreds of millions of people who have something to teach them about life and the world?
Okay, so the story:
There is a girl, her name is Goldilocks, she has blond hair and she's however old the students decide (reviewing beginner phrases). She's wearing a (color) dress. Is she sad? No, she's happy. She has a friend, her friend is an animal, he's a little bear, and his name is Charlie.
(I draw these two on the left side of the board, and then draw three long arcs at about equal widths across the board to indicate space close to them, a bit farther, and farthest away.)
Goldilocks wants lots of things. Charlie has lots of things in his house. Charlie offers her these things. Goldilocks wants soup. Charlie says, 'Do you want this soup'? Does Goldilocks want this soup? No, this soup is too hot. (repeat for that soup, which is too cold) (repeat for that soup over there, which is perfect)
(repeat for spoons--we say one for each hand just so we have it plural--two are too red, two are too green, and two are perfectly yellow, the color of her hair)
(repeat for bread--one is too big, another too small, the third just right)
We just did this in Spanish 1 because we're working on kitchen/food vocabulary, but you can use anything. In Spanish 2 we were working on dropping the noun to get esto, ésos, etc, and we used gorra, pantuflas, and something else that escapes me at the moment.
Believe it or not, once you've gotten high-schoolers to accept the fact that where a second language is concerned, they're like kindergarteners, they'll tolerate just about anything--including nursery rhymes!
Showing posts with label assumptions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label assumptions. Show all posts
09 February 2009
02 September 2008
Some assumptions
To understand why I do what I do, you first need to hear the assumptions I'm working from, I think.
1) Motivation is one of the top (if not the number one) factors in success in language acquisition.
2) I've never seen a textbook that U.S. high school students found motivating.
3) Not all students are motivated by grades.
4) It is extraordinarily difficult to obtain a grade that accurately reflects language acquisition.
5) Most students are motivated by media.
6) Most students are motivated by past and present success.
7) It's the teacher's job to make language acquisition as stress-free as possible.
8) Especially at the beginning, students' language production needs to be very low-risk for them (cf Krashen's affective filter theory, silent period).
9) Students need to interact with the language on many levels, in many situations, over a long period of time in order to acquire it.
10) Input should be systematized and repetitive (think TPRS) but authentic at the same time.
11) If we always feed students slow learner Spanish, we're cheating them.
12) Translation in the acquisition process is very nearly useless, particularly in assessment.
13) Studying for tests doesn't produce long-term memory in anyone except the extraordinarily brilliant. Therefore, telling students when tests are going to occur is useless.
14) Homework is busywork performed outside of the help and supervision of someone who can monitor the acquisition process and is therefore mostly useless.
That's almost enough for now, but I think the most important discovery I've made, the one that I think makes what I do different from what I've seen anywhere else is this:
High school language students are basically 4-year-olds with a lot of metacognitive awareness, and until we start treating them like that, they're going to keep learning what they need to know for the test, and graduating saying "I took two years of Spanish and I can say hola and taco." The trick is to treat them like high schoolers in every other area besides where their language acquisition is concerned, throw in some Ricky Martin and Maná, and they'll forgive you for reading them Froggy se viste.
1) Motivation is one of the top (if not the number one) factors in success in language acquisition.
2) I've never seen a textbook that U.S. high school students found motivating.
3) Not all students are motivated by grades.
4) It is extraordinarily difficult to obtain a grade that accurately reflects language acquisition.
5) Most students are motivated by media.
6) Most students are motivated by past and present success.
7) It's the teacher's job to make language acquisition as stress-free as possible.
8) Especially at the beginning, students' language production needs to be very low-risk for them (cf Krashen's affective filter theory, silent period).
9) Students need to interact with the language on many levels, in many situations, over a long period of time in order to acquire it.
10) Input should be systematized and repetitive (think TPRS) but authentic at the same time.
11) If we always feed students slow learner Spanish, we're cheating them.
12) Translation in the acquisition process is very nearly useless, particularly in assessment.
13) Studying for tests doesn't produce long-term memory in anyone except the extraordinarily brilliant. Therefore, telling students when tests are going to occur is useless.
14) Homework is busywork performed outside of the help and supervision of someone who can monitor the acquisition process and is therefore mostly useless.
That's almost enough for now, but I think the most important discovery I've made, the one that I think makes what I do different from what I've seen anywhere else is this:
High school language students are basically 4-year-olds with a lot of metacognitive awareness, and until we start treating them like that, they're going to keep learning what they need to know for the test, and graduating saying "I took two years of Spanish and I can say hola and taco." The trick is to treat them like high schoolers in every other area besides where their language acquisition is concerned, throw in some Ricky Martin and Maná, and they'll forgive you for reading them Froggy se viste.
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