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A collaborative project for our Spanish-teacher PLN

Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell November 11, 2010 19 Comments

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.

Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell
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19 Comments

  1. I LOVE this idea! In my honors Spanish classes in high school, we used Spanish songs to do the same. Cloze tests that were missing lyrics. I first heard Shakira and the Gypsy Kings before many others had! Best of luck on your project!

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  2. Thanks so much! As much as I flood my classes with pop Latin music, I only occasionally do cloze quizzes on music; I prefer to use spoken audio because music lyrics do not often match authentic speech.

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  4. Hola! New to reading this blog,but loving the ideas already! I wonder if any of you have heard of PubliTV.com – a site that has a VAST array of commercials in Spanish. Saludos y gracias por sus ideas excelentes!

    Reply

  5. I would love to be included as one of the teachers to edit this document. I have several commercials for which I have created CLOZE activities. Gracias

    Reply

  11. Would like to collaborate on this if you still need help! Thanks for always sharing! Ready to start Ciudad de las Bestias when we get back, very excited!!

    Reply

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