listening
March 14, 2017
You want to include more authentic videos in your class. The question becomes, what do you do with a TL video? Now, there have been several great posts offering options of activities to use with authentic video, like this one from Spanish Playground or this one from Bryan Kandel. My post, in particular, along with my […]
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April 26, 2016
They couldn’t hear the word “no”
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The school year is almost over for my students and me- really, this Friday is our last day. You may know by now that we’ve been working through the movie Canela as the entire foundation of our curriculum this semester, and it’s been fabulous. It’s been a gold mine of authentic language and culture for my Novice […]
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May 11, 2015
Every once in a while I come across an authentic resource so amazing I have to give it its own blog post to tell you USE THIS RESOURCE. And then there’s this one, which makes me shout #addthis and #bookmarkthis and THEN it leads me straight into an example of something I was just asking […]
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September 24, 2013
At a conference a few years ago -I can’t even remember which, I think it was Central States in Indianapolis- I attended a workshop by an AP teacher who gave out a worksheet she used to help students through reading authentic materials. I liked the basis of what she’d done so I took it and […]
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September 20, 2013
Using audio-lingua
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I’m betting you’ve probably already discovered this resource, but if you haven’t, you are going to love this. I don’t know who started Audio Lingua or why, but it’s basically a repository of people, well, talking. About, well, stuff. All kinds of stuff. It seems people record themselves talking about something and upload it. But […]
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February 1, 2013
If someone asked me what motivated my students the most -to continue learning on their own, to more vocabulary, to greater accuracy- my answer would certainly be music. Just this week one of my Spanish 3 students who is struggling the most with any level of verb accuracy identified forms of conseguir and what they […]
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August 10, 2012
I say this often: textbooks are unmotivating, often based on bad pedagogy, and out-of-date as soon as they’re printed. If you want to see your students motivated to work with language that interests them, you have to create your own material – or “steal” the great stuff that fantastic teachers like @SraSpanglish and @ZJonesSpanish and […]
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February 4, 2011
I’m going to an unconference tomorrow – my first full one. I managed to attend part of one before and enjoyed it. It’s being put on by @tmsaue1 with the public school district and they’re kind enough to invite private school teachers to tag along. This post is for the unconference (and you). Last year […]
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January 10, 2011
(Keep in mind I teach at a private faith-based school and this isn’t an invitation for a debate.) I’m in a dilemma between two potential topics for our next AP focus. Will you help me decide and/or make suggestions? Our current unit in AP Spanish is called “La verdad es que…” and it’s about how […]
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December 24, 2010
It doesn’t take a teacher to realize that training students to translate doesn’t produce proficiency. If you want to look into the SLA research behind why translation slows language processing so much (and if you are a teacher, you owe it to yourself to get this and let it revolutionize your methodology), start with this […]
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November 11, 2010
This year I noticed that my AP Spanish (4th year at my school) class had a lower listening proficiency than my previous class. As I reflected on possible causes for this, I realized that since I’d moved classrooms into a room without a VCR and thus stopped moving slowly through tapes of prior years’ Latin […]
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July 29, 2010
The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in May passed a new policy statement on the use of the target language in the classroom – 90% or above at all levels. It’s about time that we as language teachers realize that 1) language education in the US doesn’t work because we don’t speak […]
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