Here’s my first Spanish 1 story, written using some of our vocab from the first quarter. This was right after we talked about colors and we hadn’t done much on verb conjugations. (I hate the word conjugate and we don’t spend much time memorizing or any time drilling conjugations.) My story Story with blanks so […]
I’ll be posting quite a bit in the days to come about all the things I learned at the fall KWLA conference. One of them is that for someone who’s a fan of TPRS, my students don’t do a lot of the R-reading. So I determined we were going to read more. I’m normally pretty […]
Kroll’s Revised Hierarchical Model and the Inhibitory Control model are other models I was introduced to in grad school, and they are an incredible help in explaining how students develop proficiency in their second language, why we shouldn’t use English translation in a world language class, and why back-translation (L2 to L1) is easier than […]
I’ve written about how I went to grad school and learned about second language acquisition (SLA) theory that revolutionized how I approached teaching. Then I attended an AP workshop where the facilitator used two Latin pop songs to illustrate how authentic Spanish media could be used in AP. I decided it was catchy and could […]
I put myself through grad school working with a group of graduate electrical engineers. Their supervisor spent thousands of dollars paying 100% of my tuition and a stipend for me to live off of, and in exchange, I helped them communicate their research. After spending 4 years in undergraduate engineering classes, they’d entered their master’s […]