May 13, 2013
Novice high vs. intermediate low
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I got a question recently from a colleague who was having trouble pinpointing the difference between novice high and intermediate low with her students, especially in writing. When it comes to writing, here are some keys that I think mean a student is consistently performing at IL and not NH: Changing topics with relevance A few […]
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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 7, 2013
Once upon a time there was a teacher who knew that the textbook just wasn’t fostering proficiency in her students but she didn’t know what to do differently. One day, she attended a short workshop on storytelling that changed her life. Jeffrey the martian penguin and Garfield and Paco the cowboy who bought the horse […]
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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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May 1, 2013
Last year I had one of those ideas that was a game changer for me. I completely abandoned any type of testing a few years ago, but I was still trying to control an awful lot of my assessments. But student choice was working so well in other areas that I decided to extend it […]
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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 25, 2013
Can you control vocabulary?
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A few months ago, as part of the student choice homework activity, one of my best AP students chose to label ten items in her house she didn’t know the word for and keep the labels up for one week. She probably is the student with the most chance of success on the exam. Her […]
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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 19, 2013
Why I love mistakes
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I love mistakes. Not because they give me a chance to point out the grammar. Not because I get to circle something in red pen. Not because I can recast it and see if they notice the correction. No, I love mistakes because I’m a second language acquisition nerd and mistakes give me a change […]
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April 17, 2013
Maternity leave!
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In case you weren’t aware, I am expecting our third child around the first week of May. Yes, I did just have a baby last June – God’s plans for us seem to be a lot bigger than our plans for ourselves! This addition is changing our lives in many ways, including jobs. In the […]
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April 15, 2013
No, not the latest John Gresham to while away the class period. Whether it’s for field trips, ceremony practice, or just a widespread illness, sometimes I have a class where many of the students are gone. Inevitably this leads to the same request: a free day. For some reason, my students think that because their […]
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April 13, 2013
This post is a comment that will be published in an upcoming article on 21st century skills and assessment in The Language Educator, the bimonthly publication of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Multiple choice was the death of critical thinking. Multiple choice questions train students to look at problems in one […]
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