January 30, 2013
Spot-checking conversations
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In order to learn how to converse with someone, students need to hear conversations, plan conversations, and participate in conversations. So, if we’re giving students a lot of opportunities for interpersonal communication in class, which we should, how do we grade these conversations? Don’t grade. My first bit of advice is to resist the temptation […]
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January 27, 2013
This is part 2 in a series of songs and activities chosen to improve student accuracy and proficiency in talking about the present. Hace tiempo – Fonseca This song has wide student appeal. Regardless of taste, it’s one of my students’ all-time favorites. The video is great fun also. Proficiency goals: talk about ongoing and […]
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January 25, 2013
A while ago this comment was left on the old Musicuentos site, on the post “Do something drastic – kick the vocab quiz“: “Can you give us some examples of what activities you do to ensure mastery of the vocabulary? And do you have any advice on how to promote this kind of teaching/learning in […]
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January 21, 2013
Paragraph form
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The rubric I use to score all performance assessments (which I almost completely stole from colleagues) has an entire section called “function/structure” that I use to identify how proficiently students communicate in “paragraph length.” Indeed, the AP rubric (from 2007, which will be changing for 2014) talks about “paragraphing,” and for speaking uses words like […]
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January 16, 2013
For the original myths post, click here. You can also view all of the myths posts. Because myths 8 and 9 are related, I want to address them together. The connection between them is that they both make us give up on giving novices authentic materials. When I wrote about myth 7, I compared Taco […]
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January 14, 2013
Assigning homework
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Are you still sold on the idea that homework is a necessary evil? Consider a few “worst” practices before you give students another assignment to be completed at home: “But doesn’t practice help?” Yes, practice helps. But only if you’re practicing the right things and doing it consistently. My problems with this argument: What happens […]
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January 10, 2013
Looking for a few songs to make talking about the present a little more engaging? Take a look at this post about stem-changing verbs. Or try the songs I’ve picked for this series, starting with this one. Note: I believe that students’ primary challenge is in speaking and so you’ll notice that these are primarily […]
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January 8, 2013
More choice every day
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One of my most popular posts ever – and most popular conference topics – is about giving students choice in their homework assignments. After a while I thought, well, if giving students more choice in homework is so motivating, why not in other assessments? Why not in their final exam? And so I moved my […]
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January 4, 2013
It’s no secret that I advocate using almost all authentic materials from the beginning. Using authentic materials with novices is both possible and critical. Here’s an example of an activity you could do with novice learners in a unit on entertainment or technology, with communicative goals like expressing likes or dislikes or talking about your […]
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