Instead of the vocab quiz

@SraSpanglish commented on my post "Kick the vocab quiz":
"I feel like I can't do this with Spanish I, and it's hard with Spanish II. Also, what are students graded on instead?"

At this point, I only teach very early elementary, who only receive a grade of "excellent/satisfactory/needs improvement" once a quarter, and advanced students. I realize that's quite an uncommon setup. But when I was teaching 5 periods of Spanish 1 and 2 (along with Spanish 3) I also never gave vocab quizzes. I'm a bigger fan of @alfiekohn than I am of grades, but at my school we have to give them (as, I'm sure, do you) so here's an outline of where my assessment comes from.

In Spanish 3 and 4 (AP), both classes receive grades for:
Completing the chapter guides for our books
Writing a free-topic blog post once a week
Doing listening cloze quizzes on things such as commercials
Doing a regular vocabulary review (see #1)

In Spanish 3, students also:
do intermittent writing/speaking assignments related to recent target features (in class)
do an end-of-unit assessment, profiency- and task-based, as in a how-to demonstration (to elicit commands) or telling an interesting true story about themselves (to elicit combined past tenses)

In AP, students also:
do a weekly "fluency" activity on their own
write AP-style essays & interpersonal writing pieces
do AP-style oral presentations

When I was teaching Spanish 1 & 2, students did:
-the same regular vocabulary review
-also a weekly blog post, beginning with question prompts in 1st semester of Spanish 1 and changing to free-topic word count requirements starting in the 2nd semester of Spanish 1
-also listening cloze quizzes (the difficulty is in the words you drop- for beginners, you drop numbers and greetings, for example)
-also prompted writing/speaking with target features (i.e. 5 phrases describing your family using person + es + adjective from vocabulary)

Different from advanced students, however, were:
Yes, vocab quizzes. Well, I suppose you could call them vocab quizzes because they were assessment designed to elicit vocabulary. But my format of low-level quizzes were always unannounced (to avoid short-term memory cramming) and took three forms:
1) Ask random questions to elicit vocab, and the answer just has to make sense or be true. (¿De qué color son los 'arches' de McDonalds?)
2) Ask questions about stories we've been doing in class. (¿Quién es el amigo del pingüino?) Students were required to draw/label stories in their composition notebooks and were allowed to use them for quizzes.
3) Describe a drawing for students to draw and grade on how the drawing turns out. ("Hay una niña. La niña tiene una banana verde.") Colored pencils were a supply requirement.

Hope this helps clarify how I did some of my lower-level assessment.

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.

Zachary Jones's "Clozeline"

Don't re-invent the wheel-often there are magically appealing and effective activities out there on the web if you just know where to look. I just got a link over Twitter to Zachary Jones's post about his activity called "Clozeline." He's got cloze quizzes to a whole bunch of songs, with grammatical topics. Enjoy!

Overgeneralizing, again

A few posts back I commented on how my Spanish 3 students are overgeneralizing and I'm getting "Yo es" all over the place. Since I made lots of comments about it I've seen less. But I noticed something today--my Spanish 1 cherubs are doing it. I haven't taught Spanish 1 in three years and never communicatively, so I don't know if this is normal, but it seems awfully fast for such a process to happen and actually makes me happy! :)

On another note, they're slowly distinguishing between es and está. I'm eager for next semester when I let them loose on their own on the blog posts, so I can see what they can write. So far I'm really liking how communicative this class is. They blow me away.

Incidentally, this is the quiz they took today, for working on es/está.

1. Es Raúl un chico o una chica?
2. ¿Es Nicolía rubia o morena?
3. ¿Está Paco en la escuela o en casa?
4. ¿Está Jorge feliz o triste?
5. ¿Es Laura alta o baja?
6. ¿Quién es el estudiante más guapo en esta clase?