October 2, 2008
Awesome YouTube video
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So, even people who don’t like animated films love the “I want to move it, move it” song on Madagascar. Someone put it in Spanish on YouTube! You gotta check it out. “Quiero” was one of our Spanish 1 words of the week last week, so I’m going to show it this week. My students […]
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September 30, 2008
Think you can’t know if students understand without them giving you translations (or you providing them)? See if this presentation can change your mind. Tips on why and how we should be assessing comprehension without English in the world language classroom. This presentation was given at the Kentucky World Language Association’s fall 2008 conference in […]
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September 30, 2008
By far one of the most popular songs in any of my Spanish classes is La llave de mi corazón, by Juan Luis Guerra. No wonder he won so many Latin Grammys last year! Target features: Subjuctive for reason of influence, tiene, soy de/es de. Video: Available on YouTube. High interest, upbeat, great!! Questionable content: […]
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September 30, 2008
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 […]
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September 30, 2008
Finding stories
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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 […]
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September 23, 2008
Modeling the billingual lexicon
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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 […]
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September 6, 2008
Lest you think that I believe Musicuentos is the fix for every language acquisition issue, I don’t. Friday was a good example of holding on to the good ones and trying to let the other stuff slide off my back while learning from it. This year I’m teaching six periods of Spanish–two Spanish 1, three […]
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September 4, 2008
What on earth is going on here?
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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 […]
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September 1, 2008
Starting to share my journey
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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 […]
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