Last September Martin Lapworth wrote a blog post called “On CI, TPRS, Acquisition, etc. (I so want to believe…)“. As I read it and the comments on it (which, incidentally, include one authored by CI king Stephen Krashen), I found myself asking a question that I’ve felt for a long time is forefront in the […]
I’ve released the first resource through my new resource/activities page. It’s free and it’s a package of three verb charts: present tense, sudden past (preterit), and descriptive past (imperfect). Distribute as you wish to your students; I think you and they will find it a handy resource to check verb accuracy with entire tenses in […]
It occurs to me that putting resources in blog posts is all well and good, but then months pass and the blog post gets buried, and what if a teacher who just found Musicuentos needed that very resource? So, I’m about to begin releasing resources I’ve developed through a special section of the site. You’ll […]
If you’ve read me long, you’ve heard it before – no matter how good the textbook is, at least in my experience, it’s never motivated students past September, and it’s out of date as soon as it’s printed. Of course there are lots of other arguments – artificial order, ridiculously expensive supplements, faulty companion assessments, […]
I’ve been blogging for a long time, longer than most of you have been reading here, and it occurs to me someone might benefit from a repost once in a while. Here’s one from early 2009. I’ve come up with a story that in both Spanish 1 and 2 has worked really well with teaching […]
Oh, how I miss teaching novices! I teach next door to the Spanish 1, 2, and 3 teacher, with a divider separating our basement rooms, and every time I hear her with her Spanish 1 students I long to be in there – not because she’s really doing anything wrong, but because I love teaching […]
Back when I used to ask for translation at the end of every test, I’d comb through that chapter’s vocabulary list to come up with sentences that would test the maximum number of words and target features. Like this gem: I saw a turtle with two heads in the park with my tall friend and […]
This summer I’m reposting some of the gems from the early days, partly because I’ve gotten a lot of readership since then and really, who has time to go back mulling over old blogs, and partly because my traffic is significantly slower and I’m working on other projects in the summer. This topic is from […]
Let’s just get it right out there that we’re grammar nerds. That’s why we majored in language and teach language, because we love language. We love how it fits together and changes and how systematic and yet unpredictable it is. And we love the little labels. Words like pluscuamperfecto send little shivers up our spines. Do […]
Every once in a while in my class we took a few days to explore a particular grammar point, because let’s face it – sometimes it’s useful to sit down and examine something quickly so we can move on to the real communicative stuff and maybe put it into practice faster than we would have […]
This is part 3 in a short series on songs and activities that improve student accuracy and proficiency in talking about the present. Carmelina – Jorge Correa This is a fun song. If you’re interested in an identical use of no me hagas sufrir, no me hagas llorar, check out Manny Manuel’s No me hagas […]
In Spanish 3 we just wrapped up a unit I reworked to continue working on students’ narration in the past, framed within understanding and talking about the news. This activity we did combines culture, interest, interpretive (reading) skills, presentational (writing), and interpersonal (speaking) skills. First, using a newspaper website or a regional/international version of […]