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February 4, 2011
I wrote here about what I’ve done with the book Ciudad de las bestias by Isabel Allende in my AP class. I recently put all of the chapter guides with their “palabras claves” in one streamlined document, public on the web. They’re not perfect -my students and I often find mistakes (like incorrect page numbers)- […]
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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
A group of language teachers on Twitter has gotten together to start a weekly chat on issues related to world language teaching. We’re going to do this on Thursday evenings at 8 Eastern/7 Central (NOTE: this is a correction from the earlier posted incorrect time). The hashtag is #langchat. So add a #langchat column to […]
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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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