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January 27, 2011
Instead of the vocab quiz
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@SraSpanglish commented on my post “Kick the vocab quiz“: “I feel like I can’t do this with Spanish I, and it’s hard with Spanish II. Also, what are students graded on instead?” At this point, I only teach very early elementary, who only receive a grade of “excellent/satisfactory/needs improvement” once a quarter, and advanced students. […]
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January 26, 2011
@lisajmch asked on Twitter this week about good activities for stem-changing verbs and my mind immediately went to a blog post I thought I’d made about a song with repetitions of ‘puedo,’ and again, it turned out it was in the dashboard and not written or published. So here goes. I feel like a broken […]
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January 21, 2011
Topic for #LangChat 1/27
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You can vote here for the topic for this week’s #LangChat on Twitter, Thursday 1/27 at 8 pm EST. Also, feel free to suggest topics through this suggestion form.
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January 20, 2011
The topic is chosen and we’re on tonight on Twitter at 8pm EST/7CST! What are the differences between communicative competence and accuracy, and what weight or importance do each of these carry in the world language classroom? Choose your medium (Twitter.com, Twitterfall, Tweetdeck-my favorite) and we’ll “see” you there!
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January 19, 2011
Low-level vocabulary, motivating subject matter, absolutely up-to-date… tell me again why we aren’t using authentic materials in the low levels?
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January 18, 2011
Earlier this month was the deadline for proposals to be submitted for the 2011 conference of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. I have never been to their conference–indeed, I’ve only ever attended one national conference (TESOL 2007)–but one of my new year’s resolutions was to at least attempt to go, and […]
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January 15, 2011
Somewhere in Spanish 1 or 2 there usually comes up a unit that has something to do with health. I even have a unit in my AP course (with units I wrote myself) called “Cuidándo a mí” with health-related issues. In your Spanish health-related unit you really ought to include the song “Bilirrubina” por Juan […]
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January 13, 2011
Last year my AP class was a bit happy-go-lucky. They had a sort of attitude that went like this: “Well, I understood that pretty well, that was awesome!” “I didn’t get that at all. Oh well! What’s next?” This year, not so much. This year’s class is more like: “I understood that, cool!” “I didn’t […]
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January 10, 2011
(Keep in mind I teach at a private faith-based school and this isn’t an invitation for a debate.) I’m in a dilemma between two potential topics for our next AP focus. Will you help me decide and/or make suggestions? Our current unit in AP Spanish is called “La verdad es que…” and it’s about how […]
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December 29, 2010
This summer I wrote a post on increasing your own TL use and am just now getting around to this follow-up post. Students need to practice speaking the TL in order to develop the skill of speaking it; that goes without saying. But because of the affective filter more than anything, and a host of […]
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December 27, 2010
I love collaboration
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Ever since someone said something about not reinventing the wheel it seems we’ve all been in a search to see how much of our work other people have already done. Right? Not really. Actually we still have a tendency to shut ourselves in our classrooms and overwork ourselves and burn out doing things that hundreds […]
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December 24, 2010
It doesn’t take a teacher to realize that training students to translate doesn’t produce proficiency. If you want to look into the SLA research behind why translation slows language processing so much (and if you are a teacher, you owe it to yourself to get this and let it revolutionize your methodology), start with this […]
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