grammar
January 27, 2013
This is part 2 in a series of songs and activities chosen to improve student accuracy and proficiency in talking about the present. Hace tiempo – Fonseca This song has wide student appeal. Regardless of taste, it’s one of my students’ all-time favorites. The video is great fun also. Proficiency goals: talk about ongoing and […]
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January 10, 2013
Looking for a few songs to make talking about the present a little more engaging? Take a look at this post about stem-changing verbs. Or try the songs I’ve picked for this series, starting with this one. Note: I believe that students’ primary challenge is in speaking and so you’ll notice that these are primarily […]
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September 4, 2012
A song for feelings
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One of my students actually brought to my attention this new Reggaetón sensation, Joey Montana. La melodía had become one of her favorite new songs. I ended up adding him to my Pandora station (linked at the page footer). So the other day one of his new songs came on: Sin ti. It strikes me as […]
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July 20, 2012
More uses for Amor de mi tierra
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I wrote about the Carlos Vives song “Amor de mi tierra” in this post about songs with repetitions of voy + a. Here are a few more things you can do with the song: There’s only one unique occurrence of this subjunctive for influence, but it’s a nice line and it’s repeated: Quiero que lleves en ti la […]
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July 13, 2012
Songs for ‘duele’
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Using the phrase me duele is an important part of any health unit, which usually consists of exercises intended to help students explain how they’re feeling. I’ve seen a lot of assessments that involve being able to go to a doctor and talk to him about what’s wrong. With that in mind, here are five great […]
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July 9, 2012
The Case for Commands
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Earlier this year when I went to the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, I attended some helpful, creative sessions by some very knowledgeable and effective language teachers and leaders. One of them was about proficiency goals and was given by the director of world languages of a large school district. I […]
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September 21, 2011
Accuracy refers to grammatical forms that match the standard form of the language. So, a student produces ‘yo pensé’ instead of ‘yo piense’ (something my 3’s have been doing recently). Proficiency includes an aspect of accuracy, but primarily refers to how well the speaker (or writer) is able to communicate and comprehend meaning. The contrast […]
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July 6, 2011
A song made for early Spanish 1
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Last week Luis Fonsi‘s new album Tierra Firme came out – and it’s good. It’s worth the whole download, I promise. The Deluxe version came with the video for Gritar, as well as acoustic and ranchero versions of that fabulous song. As I was listening, this song called “Me gustas tú” came on. The more […]
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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 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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September 23, 2010
This is an old song by Juanes but great for ‘ya no’- a phrase used so frequently that doesn’t have a good matchup as far as syntax with English. You could say “no longer” but we typically have the ‘not’ paired with do/does + ‘anymore’ after the main verb… yuck. ‘Ya no’ is much more […]
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September 14, 2010
Tweet with double objects
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This tweet from @Fonseca came through just now–why not use it to see how your students do with the double objects? Plus his use of ‘q’ and ‘super’ are fun. “En Bogota hay un restaurante q se llama “EL COMEDOR”, se los super recomiendo! Buenisimo!”
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