This summer I’m reposting some of the gems from the early days, partly because I’ve gotten a lot of readership since then and really, who has time to go back mulling over old blogs, and partly because my traffic is significantly slower and I’m working on other projects in the summer.
This topic is from a post in the fall of ’08 called “Overgeneralizing.”
My Spanish 3 students are overgeneralizing. It’s fine, it’s a normal part of language acquisition, but it’s driving me nuts. In case you aren’t familiar with the phenomenon, overgeneralizing is what happens when a child acquires the irregular past “went,” then discovers that we form past by adding -ed to verbs, and starts applying that grammar rule to all verbs and uses past verbs like “she goed” and “he singed.” Or, it’s what’s happening to irregular past participles like “broken” and “sung.” Speakers of English “know” that these are typically the same as past tense (I watched, I have watched) and so the irregular past is creeping into use as past participles too (I broke, I have broke). Keep listening – I promise it’s happening. Ah, language change.
But I digress. My Spanish 3 cherubs are overgeneralizing with the most elementary things–I’m getting tons of yo es and yo gusto. At least they don’t think me means “I,” which is what frequently happens after students learn me gusta.
When overgeneralization happens, you need to get the students repeating the target feature correctly, and it’s most helpful if you’re sneaking the repetitions in, so 1) they’re still motivated for it and 2) they’re not thinking about it so their thought process can get out of the way of acquisition. One way to get the repetition is to give a pop “quiz”- that is, ask questions that require the feature in the answer. I gave this quiz, not to test the difference between soy and estoy, but rather to make them write yo soy and yo estoy repeatedly, as well as me gusta and me gustan.
This is the quiz:
Yo soy / yo estoy…
1. estudiante
2. alto
3. en casa
4. listo (inteligente)
5. chico/chica
6. estadounidense
7. listo (preparado/a)
8. enfermo/a
(No) me gusta / me gustan…
9. los payasos
10. la escuela
11. la Internet
12. burritos de frijoles
13. uvas
14. los libros en español
Next time your students are stuck in overgeneralizing and you want to give them a boost out of it, consider upbeat ways you could increase repetitions of the target feature.
Foto: Hayden Pernia
