Search Results for "novice"

August 27, 2019
Can novice Spanish learners understand authentic poems? That was the question asked, quite appropriately, through the Ñandutí listserv, an email list from the Center for Applied Linguistics that serves primarily educators working with elementary learners.  The answers were so helpful that I wanted to share them here. First, check out the very rich list of poems […]
January 29, 2019
By now we’re all back into the language class swing, right?  I love my breaks and I love teaching and I confess I have a love-hate relationship with that first day back after a break.  I almost always have at least one dream sometime in the few days beforehand with one of the following scenarios: I can’t […]
September 4, 2018
Whether your Spanish class (Novice Mid to Intermediate Low) is exploring a novel, a particular country, or a travel theme, country-specific authentic resources can be a gold mine.  But given that comprehensible input is what it takes, what can our learners understand?  For one thing, highly visual resources like infographics and online travel brochures can be very comprehensible.  Another hack […]
November 18, 2017
I’m having a great time at the annual convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages!  My co-presenter and I thought we uploaded our handouts in enough time to have them available on the app, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  So, for our attendees and you there on your […]
April 19, 2016
Have you seen the movie Canela? This semester I’ve been so grateful that Kara Jacobs and Elena López introduced me – FINALLY – to an authentic Mexican family film that’s appropriate for any classroom and any student anywhere (a rare find in Spanish-language cinema available in the U.S., as I’m sure you know). So grateful, in fact, […]
February 10, 2016
Who doesn’t want to talk about cute kids in awesome clothes? I’m sure you’re aware yesterday was Carnaval.  Thanks to Allison Wienhold’s post on great Carnaval resources, I was able to give my students an Edmodo assignment that exposed them to some culture (cute culture at that!) and asked them to practice our current ongoing targets, description […]
December 13, 2015
After years of teaching students between Novice High and Intermediate Mid, I found myself teaching students with no measurable proficiency.  They did not know what loco meant (and had never heard of Zorro!?!) (and hated all heartthrob boy bands?!?!).  It was new territory for me.  And it was time to take a look at my homework choice […]
September 23, 2015
Who are the most beautiful of the beautiful? Let’s take a basic novice skill that we all have in all our curricula: I can describe someone using common adjectives. We’ve all seen and done a million activities to get students practicing description.  Today, let me offer another alternative, one that offers a deep, critical-thinking aspect […]
August 7, 2015
Easily one of the top five topics if you look at my most popular blog posts: Choice in homework. I won’t go to deeply into what I mean by homework choice because you can see a pretty good summary here in one of the most popular posts of 2014. After you look at that, you […]
May 11, 2015
  Every once in a while I come across an authentic resource so amazing I have to give it its own blog post to tell you USE THIS RESOURCE. And then there’s this one, which makes me shout #addthis and #bookmarkthis and THEN it leads me straight into an example of something I was just asking […]
March 2, 2015
If you’ve been through ACTFL’s Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) or Modified Oral Proficiency Interview (MOPI) training (I have not), perhaps you can help me clarify an issue when assessing novices. When talking to teachers about what a novice can and can’t do, I’ve heard teachers make this comment: But that’s a question, right? And novices […]
December 5, 2014
Before you read the ninth most popular Musicuentos post of 2014, in which I argue that Genius Hour (also known as 20 Time or 20% Time) is philosophically incompatible with teaching novice language learners, you have to promise me that you’ll click the links at the bottom to Laura Sexton’s blog, because if anyone could […]