grammar
October 30, 2009
You can’t buy this in a textbook
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There are so many reasons to dislike conventional world language curriculum; my #1 is that the books are out of date before they go to press. So your students are reading about how there hasn’t been a successful coup d’etat in Latin America since the end of the Cold War, and meanwhile Micheletti and the […]
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October 23, 2009
If you’re going to explain to students the difference between que and lo que and expect that to do the trick, good luck. I don’t think I’ve ever taken the time to explain the difference in my class, but it’s interesting to see how students use it just with input. For a more focused approach, […]
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October 20, 2009
Subjunctive by reason of indefinite or negative antecedent… doesn’t that sound fun? This is my story for this reason of subjunctive. We do this in the spring semester of Spanish 2. Our principal wakes up in the morning and goes to school. He asks the woman at the front desk, “I’m looking for the student […]
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October 8, 2009
You just never know what you’ll find surfing through corporate websites. Yes, sometimes you end up getting a cow on a motorcycle through an obstacle-ridden farm on Mundonick.com, and that’s fun, but corporate websites often contain videoclips that are pure gold for Spanish teachers. They’re exactly what we need–short, high-impact, high-interest, and repetitive. Go check […]
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September 24, 2009
Certain things are super easy to find songs for. Reflexives. Present tense, particularly yo y tú. Preterite yo y tú. That’s about all love songs do, right? Talk about you and me in the past, lol. But the other day my colleague asked if I knew of any songs for 3rd-person preterite, and that was […]
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August 25, 2009
I love crossover songs
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I love crossover songs. That’s what I call those songs that have so much good material in them that they’re great from Spanish 1 to AP. Fanny Lu’s new hit Tú No Eres Para Mí is one of those. It’s especially good for uses and conjugations of ser. There’s the title, which is of course […]
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July 14, 2009
Fonseca is a fun singer, another Colombian (they can seriously turn out some people with rhythm, eh?) with some great songs for teaching. Of course our favorite in my class is the ‘dancing firemen song’ “Hace tiempo,” which I blogged about here, but another one I like to use is “Te mando flores”, with its […]
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April 6, 2009
In Spanish 3 these days we’re looking at the por/para contrasts and for this I like to use two songs that nicely illustrate this unique difference. The first is Solo por ti by Josh Groban. Yes, some students won’t like it because he is a classical singer, but it’s a beautiful song. Incidentally, also an […]
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April 6, 2009
Useless grammar I used to teach
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There are a couple of grammar issues I used to teach and I’ve since decided such explicit instruction on these points is a waste of time. By this, I mean that given the time we have with our students, and what they’re really capable of using in fluent speech/writing, explaining the grammatical terms and issues […]
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March 22, 2009
Negative commands + culture
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Here’s a short videoclip of Hugo Chávez continuing his usual rhetoric, now against President Obama, lest anyone think there would be any change in his behavior. It’s no secret in my classes that I’m no fan of Chávez (or Obama for that matter, but I digress). Fortunately he provides us with lots of fodder for […]
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March 12, 2009
I just did this with my Spanish 2 students and was surprised at how well it worked. I went to Google news and typed in a couple of our newsy vocab words from recent weeks–like choque and testigo–and also the helping verb ‘han.’ I printed out 3 articles (it was 2 pages front and back) […]
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February 19, 2009
A product I love
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EMC Paradigm has a product out called SymTalk. The part I use is a set of 256 symbol cards that are magnetic. (I requested a magnetic board specifically to use this and my school got me both, thank you Whitefield!) The cards illustrate various concepts and words without translation. On mine, the word is there […]
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