Activity #4: Drama Inmóvil

Fun activity #4 is "Drama Inmóvil," idea courtesy of Paulino Brener.

My students LOVE this. They beg for it- even the ones who will never talk in class. You must try it, and if you're anywhere around a unit building on present progressive, you should do this every day for the first five minutes at least.

I copy/paste my class roster into the fruit machine picker and it chooses a random student. That student stays seated and all the others come to the front (you may have to do this in groups - my largest class is 8 so we can do it as whole-class). The chosen student gives a place and/or situation, e.g. in a park, or at an amusement park, or at the movies. I say 'lights, camera, action' (in Spanish) and all the 'players' adopt a frozen pose of what they are doing in the situation. Then I go around with a pretend microphone and interview them with rapid question/answer style - "Where are you? Why? With whom? Who's winning?" etc. Then the chosen student selects who was the most creative (they just get cheers for it; there's no prize, but they don't care), I remove the chosen student's name from the fruit picker and do it again.

It's a winner. My dramatic students get crazy with it. My shy students do something expected but are eager to talk about what they're doing, especially because the q&a style doesn't involve me standing at the front of the class saying, "Now, remember to answer with a complete sentence" (who says that in real life anyway?).

I made a video of my students doing this and posted it as a private video on YouTube for Paulino. I don't have permission to show my students on my blog or on YouTube publicly, but if you are a teacher and you'd like to see how it worked for us, send me your email and I'll add you as a viewer.

Myth #4: The Time Whine

If you don't know what I'm talking about when I say this post is about dismantling myths, go back and read this post.

photo by TonyVC

Only the very young or students who have high aptitude are going to succeed anyway (otherwise known as the 'time whine').

I don't know if you've heard or said this before, but I've heard it primarily as a cause of teachers not working with other teachers, or concerning students who won't elect levels of language beyond the 2 years required to get into most colleges. I call it the 'time whine' because that's where the complaint is rooted: "They can't gain any real level of proficiency in the time I have them, so why try?"

Another way this argument has been presented to me is that the primary responsibility of language teachers is to motivate students to continue past the 2 years required to enter most colleges.

Here's an idea - how about we forget about the time we have them or how smart we think they are and focus on what they should be able to do with the language after whatever time they're with us? Ask @tmsaue1 and his teachers at @JCPSWorldLang - ask anyone who teaches lower levels communicatively and stops teaching language the way only analytic learners can learn it. Ask anyone who focuses on standards and proficiency levels and real-life tasks instead of verb charts and vocabulary drills. We can give our students the tools to do something with the language no matter what amount of time we have them.

I've posted before about my preschoolers - I have them 10-15 minutes per week. Even then they can do something. They rarely ask me if I speak 'normal' anymore. They can answer questions like ¿de qué color? and ¿quién vive aquí? and ¿está triste o feliz? - not always in Spanish, but they can answer.

I went to the Central States conference last month and went to a session by John De Mado about unity within the language department. One of the points he made was that the entire department needs to agree that language is accessible to all students and to teach like they believe that.

How about we teach like we believe that anyone can learn to do something realistically practical in the amount of time we have them?

Have you used PhotoPeach?

I have to thank @vivianagabi for giving me the idea to use PhotoPeach to do a project called "25 things about me." Her (Brazilian) students are at lower levels than mine, and take Spanish for less time per week, but it was a brilliant way for her students to connect with my students (by posting them on our blog) on an interesting level (dare I say interpersonal mode?). Here's how I plan to incorporate a variety of modes of communication:

We're in a unit on future tense. (I love how tech tools can be adapted for whatever you're studying at the moment.) We're going to start by giving a few ideas per person, orally and without preparation, of what we want to do in the future. We'll go deeper semantically by making each item really contain something that reveals a look into who we are as a person. We'll go deeper linguistically by including several idiomatic expressions, as well as irregular future and subjunctive after expressions of time indicating a future action. We'll prepare questions based on her students' projects to ask when we Skype with them. And we'll discuss what digital citizenship is and how to use the creative commons.

Here's mine- only 21 things though. In trying to make it an example of the deep, transparent, idiomatic, multi-time narration I want from my students, I found it an emotionally satisfying journey to reveal some deep parts of myself in pictures and phrases. I hope you enjoy.

21 cosas sobre mí on PhotoPeach

Update (June):
Here are a couple of examples from my students. Really they blew me away with their depth of thought, and all of them enjoyed the project immensely - especially the senior AP students who got to do it in lieu of a final paper. :)

21 cosas. (Karson) on PhotoPeach



Vida de Felipe en 21 cosas on PhotoPeach

The myths aren't going to ACTFL

photo by azmichelle

I meant to post this two weeks ago when I got the news but forgot. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages did not accept my proposal for "Dismantling the Myths that Prevent Proficiency."

I'll still continue to blog about them, though-- I'll probably reach a wider audience that way anyway. Besides, I also didn't get invited to score AP exams, which is how I was intending to pay for the ACTFL trip.

Silver linings, eh?

Fun activity #3: ¡Arriésgate!

Fun activity #3 is Jeopardy (¡Arriésgate!) courtesy of the great web 2.0 tool Jeopardy Labs (free and no account required!).

photo by Justin Levy

I've known about this tool for a long time but never just sat down and used it. It's easy to make and easy to use (except there's not really a function for no one to get the answer right--it keeps the question on the board until you give someone points for it).

I recommend that you stay away from categories like "conjugations" and "fill in the definite article." You can easily make it fun and more communicative by looking at your vocabulary and asking yourself, "What actual questions can I ask with these?" So you could have 'ropa' (clothing) 'comida' (food) 'opuestos' (opposites) 'en la casa' (at home) and then make all your "answers" target-language clues. So for 'closet' put 'where you put your clothes in your room' - avoid students getting confused by making all the "questions" start with the same letter.

Try mine (in Spanish, of course). My students are advanced so you can see some of it would be way over level 1.

And remember - answer in the form of a question. :)

Fun activity #2: A conversar

I blogged a few days ago about coming back from CSC11 with some good ideas to make my class more fun (along with some suggestions via Diego Ojeda of #langchat "fame" ;-) and putting them together into a 10-minute class starter.

photo by Rohit Rath

The second one is "a conversar." For this one, students pull a conversation card (that I made) out of a card box and talk to anyone about question on the card. When they're done, they go back and choose another. The first time my AP class did it, I sat back amazed. I cannot get this class to speak in the TL for the life of me, and there was *loud* Spanish chatter for a solid ten minutes. Adjust questions for your level, and make them interesting - e.g. "¿cuál es mejor, un abrigo azul o un abrigo café, y por qué? instead of ¿qué es tu color favorito?

Here are some of the conversation starters I found on the internet and wrote on my own:

• What's the craziest thing you've done?
• What is the most serious mistake of your life?
• Describe the happiest day of your life.
• What's your best friend like?
• Describe your favorite movie.
• What is your favorite free-time activity? With whom? Why?
• Who are your heroes? Why?
• What did you do yesterday? With whom?
• What books have you read recently? Describe them.
• What do you want to be and do five years from now?
• What has been an important experience in your life and why?
• Describe your favorite restaurant.
• What is your opinion about the problems in Libya?
• What are your plans for tomorrow?
• Describe an interesting trip you took.
• If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?
• Why did you choose to take advanced Spanish?
• What is your first memory?
• What do you want to do during vacation (Spring Break, summer, Christmas, etc.)?
• Do you like your neighborhood? Why or why not?
• What would be the title of your biography? Why?

Enjoy and let me know if you have more good questions I can add.

Dismantling Myths 2 and 3: Learning about language and its cousin, Grammatical Terms

If you don't know what I'm talking about when I say this post is about dismantling myths, go back and read this post.

Photo by T. Hart

Myths 2 & 3:

2. Learning about language is enough (Or, "I don't have to speak the TL in the classroom").

and its cousin

3. Grammatical terms are actually helpful in language acquisition (or, "How will they know what it is if I don't call it subjunctive by reason of indefinite antecedent?????")

Here I have to put in a plug for a post I wrote called A Case for Avoiding Pet Grammar.

We language teachers are good at learning about language. Most of us thrive on dissecting and diagramming and explaining. I wrote a syntax paper in grad school on why Spanish prefers the inverted verb-subject order in clauses that are syntactically not questions but semantically imply questions, and thus why we have those pesky accent marks on question words that are part of a declarative sentence. Do you understand that? It doesn't matter. Because what matters is you know how to ask a question. And you can say "I don't know where my book is." I loved writing the paper and felt like it answered a question no one else had addressed, that had plagued my grammar-loving mind since college, but my paper floated off into the abyss of Dr. Stan's desk and hasn't affected anyone since.

If we're really going to foster proficiency, we've got to dispel this myth. I think it may be the one that stifles the classroom most of all. It stifled my classroom for three years, and I didn't know why, until I went and read all the research that says that communication and meaning are what fosters learning and memory (insert plug for Brain Rules and Cathy Doughty and Mike Longhere).

But we don't believe this and we don't practice it. Elementary teachers know it. We know that it's useless to drill second-graders in conjugations. To use phrases like 'present progressive.' We think that just because middle- and high-schoolers (and adults) have attained a certain level of linguistic and meta-cognitive awareness that explaining grammar to them will produce proficiency. It makes sense, right? I tell you present-tense first-person verbs end in -o. Now you're going to be able to speak them all, right?

But this isn't what happens and if you've been teaching long you know it. You know that except for the ones with the most aptitude in linguistic intelligence, your students will still write and say "yo comer."

Guess what? If you teach language for communication, your students might still say "yo comer." My bilingual two-year-old says "yo comer." She also says "wanna hold you" when she wants me to pick her up. Why? Because she's heard "Do you want me to hold you?" and this results in someone picking her up, and she's parroting the language. Her brain hasn't reset the parameter to change the sentence yet. And when they're two, it's cute. But when they're 12, it's a disaster, points off, failed quiz, why aren't they getting this?!

Because this is our mistake- Look at this comment I found on Madame Techie's (@bselden)great post on a project with VoiceThread:

"There are certain basic skills that have to be aquired [sic] first by drill-and-practice (which the kids claim is "soooo boring")."

Based on many textbooks (who is writing these things?!), it seems that their authors and publishers have the same philosophy.

No. No. No. Unless that comment is about math or something that is so not language, it's based on a series of mistaken assumptions. Language is not stored the way math and history facts are. It's not retrieved in the same way. It's not processed the same way. So why do we think it'slearned the same way?

Want to push students toward higher proficiency? I'm tempted to just say "start speaking the TL in the classroom, require students to do the same, and involve them in communicative activities instead of textbook drills." But I have to remember that this is a journey that can fall completely flat if you just jump into it. If you don't know how to speak TL in the classroom with high levels of comprehension, you will frustrate everyone involved. Instead, here's what I recommend:

1. Read everything you can find, books, blogs, news, whatever, on TPR Storytelling and other communicative methods that can help you rethink how to speak TL in the classroom so that students comprehend and demonstrate comprehension (I have some links on the sidebar that will help you get started). Come up with an "I don't understand" signal for your students (like making an X with their index fingers or arms) and test the waters of speaking more TL.

2. Ease yourself away from your textbook by asking students to do motivating activities involving cultural questions, authentic sources, and technology. For example, investigate what high school is like in Argentina, watch some clips of Patito Feo, put relevant photos from Tag Galaxy into a VoiceThread, and then video students giving a 2-minute comparison of your school and Argentinian schools. Even better, try to contact an Argentinian school to set up an email communication and even Skype (we are very excited about Skype-ing with our Honduran counterparts today for the first time).

3. Reevaluate your vocabulary lists. Are you giving students real language? As in, can they use 'me hace falta' instead of read hacerle falta a uno in a vocab list? As frequent, interesting words come up in authentic sources, why not replace words?

4. Rethink your assessment. What are you assessing? Student recall of translated, discrete words? Does your assessment really test communication? How can you adapt it to do so? What is performance-based assessment and how could you incorporate it?

Most of all, remember that any journey toward more communicative teaching is a journey toward proficiency being accessible for all students, not just for the ones who, like us, are "good at language."

Activity 1: Cuento poco a poco

Telling a story by categories

photo by flamingoo

This idea came from a session at CSC on theater that was generally so awful that I left halfway through. Really, it was so bad it was painful. But, I came away with this activity that I thought I could make work in my classroom.

In "Cuento poco a poco," I use the fruit machine chooser to randomly choose a student to start. Then, the student has to begin a story with something from the first category. So, if it is 'things that are blue,' the student may say, 'En un planeta azul vivía un mónstruo' or something else according to his/her ability. Then the next student picks up the story by adding a detail from the next category. Make sense? These are the categories I started with:

• Cosas que son verdes

• Un sonido extraño
• Cosas que son cuadrados
• Cosas que son altos
• Una acción inesperada
• Un pariente
• Un hábito curioso
• Una persona en un show de televisión
• Un fin triste

The first time we did this, I found an unexpected benefit: the first time around, some students added a random detail that seemed disjointed and didn't actually further the story, like "the monkey had a grandfather who was a giraffe." So I explained that students should incorporate all the details together to make a coherent story. It made them listen to each other more and use other students' details to come up with a logical continuity. Sounds like subtle AP practice to me. :) We changed random words to whatever they wanted (green to red, tall to fat, sad to tragic, etc.) and began again, with a different student starting.

Thoughts?

(Trying to) Make learning fun

What happens when all the fun goes out of learning language?

The students disengage. Learning doesn't have to be entertainment for entertainment's sake, but I'm learning that if students aren't engaged in learning, they see it as hard and not just boring--the opposite of fun.

Hi, my name is Sra. Cottrell and I am not a fun teacher.

Whew, feels good to get that admission out there. I am not one of those teachers that relates so well to teenagers (I didn't relate well to teenagers when I was a teenager), that's super-approachable, that always makes the learning relevant and fun and feel effortless. I am boring, busy, distant, and sometimes burned out on creativity.

Never did I feel this more than in the past couple of months, particularly in a LangChat about games and at the Central States Conference in early March. I came away from both of those with my head spinning with ideas of what to do to up the engagement in the classroom in fun ways.

Now, some of these ideas were very bad. Particularly as I read through Brain Rules, it stuns me that in spite of continuing research that says that attaching meaning to information is what makes it stick in long-term memory, and the first few moments of learning are the most crucial for how the information will be remembered, and meaningful repetition is what cements information, we still break language learned for the first time into discrete parts and drill it incessantly separate from any meaning. Some of the most successful (in the eyes of the field) teachers I know, who would claim to be very communicative, still advocate 'games' that drill verb conjugations or drill vocabulary connected only to translation and to no meaning at all.

But... even good games based on bad theory can be tweaked, or so I've found. I took some of the ideas and tweaked them to try to keep them communicative. Keep me accountable and let me know if you can make them more so.

When I got back from CSC, I had a week without my AP class because they were on their senior trip. I took advantage of the time to put my ideas into a cohesive plan and make a poster listing all of the options for our new activity:

I've added two since I took this picture: Descríbemelo and Trabajos.

I told the students that we would do one of these for the first ten minutes of every class. This is one of the things I love about teaching without a textbook and with performance-based unit-end assessments. It gives the flexibility that we have been able to implement this for two weeks without hurting our progress in the curriculum. Also, it forces me to do something in every class that I think a majority will find engaging, without spending too much time on it beforehand.

As students are coming into the room, I copy/paste the options into this random option picker:

Click here for larger version

So the fruit machine picker chooses what activity we will do. If the activity requires a person to start, I copy/paste a roster and choose that person. If it requires a word or phrase, I copy/paste the options and choose that. Then I set the timer at 10 minutes and we begin.

Look for more posts in the next few days to explain the options. Maybe something will sound like a fun activity for your class.

Two new options for out-of-class fluency

In the past week I added two new options to my AP class's out-of-class fluency homework options. One is from personal experience and the other came as a result of tech recommendations from @usamimi74 on Twitter.

photo by Israel Avila

The first is to post-it 10 items in your house that you don't know the word for and leave it there for a week, then report to me from memory what all the items were.
I have been speaking and learning Spanish for twenty years. But over the last two years I have been on a different journey--raising a bilingual child by speaking only Spanish to her. It's struck me how many words I don't know because I never needed them before. Burp. Stroller. Hiccups. And words even around the house as I talk to her about things. Zipper. Knob. Eggplant. Believe me, I've learned a lot. So if I don't know what so many things around my house are called, I can be sure my students don't either. So I think this option is a good one. I'm hoping it will inspire them to keep learning in the future, because that has been so valuable to me.

The second option is to complete a song on lyricstraining.com. If they know the song, they have to do intermediate. If they don't know the song, they can do easy. I set it that way even at their advanced level because the activity seemed difficult to me. But the first day I showed it to them in class, at least one student went and did it right away-- two songs. One of my least motivated students lately, even. Thanks @usamimi74. :)