Authentic Sources
May 23, 2013
Every once in a while in my class we took a few days to explore a particular grammar point, because let’s face it – sometimes it’s useful to sit down and examine something quickly so we can move on to the real communicative stuff and maybe put it into practice faster than we would have […]
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May 10, 2013
E-magazines with learner appeal
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In my quest to find and review online publishing tools (i.e. sites that will organize your students’ content like a magazine or newspaper) I’ve come across quite a few online magazines designed for our primary audience – middle and high school students. You can find anything I’ve found by looking at my Delicious tags under […]
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May 4, 2013
Every once in a while there comes along an authentic resource that’s the golden trifecta, the perfect mix of pop culture, TL culture, and usability for any level of language learning. The Pin Pon clip in Shrek is one of those. It’s so good that I feel inclined to repost it to give it to […]
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April 28, 2013
One of my students’ favorite songs the last couple of years has been “Tengo tu love” by Sie7e, a truly fabulous song with a great message. We actually use it in our current unit in Spanish 3 on talking about goals and dreams as we explore where David (the singer) came from and how his […]
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April 22, 2013
Recently I blogged about using the proficiency target of talking about future goals and dreams to frame your use of future tense, and I mentioned three songs that are good for highlighting this particular tense. For your intermediate mid/high learners, here are some additional activities I have done with my students to work with future […]
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April 10, 2013
Songs for future tense
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If you’re working with future tense, I recommend doing so around the proficiency goal of talking about goals and dreams, one of our 3 major goals in Spanish 3. This is something high school students are asked to think about and talk about a lot, so it fits in naturally especially in junior and senior […]
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March 21, 2013
Cortometraje for narration
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One of our major goals for Spanish 3 is to refine narration. We believe this is a critical function of language. Teenagers do it all the time. They talk about what they did over the weekend, over the summer, yesterday in math class. They tell stories about the amazing shot at the basketball game or […]
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March 13, 2013
Authentic resource: trivia games
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¿Es verdad que Einstein ayudó a inventar la bomba atómica? ¿Cuánto sabes de true crime? ¿O el cerebro? Play these trivia games and more – or just explore other authentic content – on the Mexican branch of the Biography channel, Canal Bio, in their games section. Authentic resources like this are rich with contextualized meaningful […]
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March 5, 2013
This is part 3 in a short series on songs and activities that improve student accuracy and proficiency in talking about the present. Carmelina – Jorge Correa This is a fun song. If you’re interested in an identical use of no me hagas sufrir, no me hagas llorar, check out Manny Manuel’s No me hagas […]
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February 13, 2013
A while back, a hashtag hit the trending topics on Twitter in Mexico: #quierounnovioque. I used the program Archivist to save the tweets and export them to an Excel file. I often do this if the teaching value of a particular trending topic hits me. In this case, the tweets were full of subjunctive used because […]
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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 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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